"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War

In short, the US government gave up Franklin D. Roosevelt’s declared opposition to European colonialism toward the end of World War II for a policy of what would be called the “containment” of Soviet expansionism.20 Note that this expansion was assumed to be directed by Moscow, even in Third World countries like Vietnam that were not controlled by it. Every US president in the half century from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan championed and implemented some form of this policy, most materially those who held office during the war—John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon.

In reply to speculation after the assassination of Kennedy (November 1963) that he would have called a halt to the war, Heydrick Smith, writing on the Kennedy years, concludes that in fact the president “transformed the ‘limited-risk gamble’ of the Eisenhower administration into a ‘broad commitment’ to prevent Communist domination of South Vietnam,” often by secret measures that concealed from the American public the extent of the US role there. The US had not signed the Geneva accords but had promised not to undermine them. The expansion of military personnel, the sending of 400 Special Forces troops to South Vietnam as military advisors, however, was only the first breach of the Geneva agreement. This force was run by the CIA rather than the regular military so that “it was possible to handle these troops covertly,” and the number of advisors soon rose to 16,000.21 Smith adds that specific measures that were not disclosed included the beginning of a “covert warfare campaign in North Vietnam.”22

In his “bear any burden in the defense of liberty” 1961 inaugural address, Kennedy reiterated presidential guarantees of the cause, and the speech had considerable influence on the nation’s idealistic youth. The president saw Vietnam as a “test case” of the nation’s determination to maintain its commitments.23 His civilian advisors, drawn from the country’s intellectual and corporate elite, “the best and the brightest” in David Halberstam’s ironic words, scorned the accumulated knowledge and experience of the academic and government experts on Asia, believing in the superiority of their own class and education to make the right decisions.

John Kenneth Galbraith has asserted, however, that this Harvard-educated power elite knew nothing about the world, “ours or theirs,” believing that it was enough to know the “difference between a Communist and an Anti-Communist” without regarding the changing nuances of history and by clinging to the ideology of the Cold War that was still the prevailing line of thinking in US foreign policy in the 1960s.24 The rabid anti-Communist McCarthyism of the early 1950s had not completely died and still had a major influence on the thought and policies of politicians of both parties, particularly the Democrats, who felt especially vulnerable to attacks on their patriotism for being (as the expression went) “soft on Communism.” On the other hand, most Vietnamese perceived the Viet Minh, their leader Ho Chi Minh, and later the NLF, as liberators from a series of foreign oppressors: first, the French, then the Japanese, again the French, and eventually the Americans.

After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, President Lyndon Johnson would give continuity to his policies by retaining the former administration’s key figures—Dean Rusk as Secretary of State, Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense, and McGeorge Bundy as National Security Council advisor—men who thought that the expanded global role of the US had increased the importance of holding the line in Indochina.25 If the containment of Communism had worked in Europe, where internationally recognized spheres of influence were established after World War II, it was mistaken to try to extend that policy to Asia, where the specter of Red China sent out more tremors. Besides, holding the line in Southeast Asia was based on the mistaken assumption that Communism—which was not only a political system, but also a set of practices, a creed, and an ideology—could be contained militarily. Even if that were possible without another world war, it would probably have been counter-productive at the time. The threat perceived as embodied in China was not so much military as political and cultural.26

The implementation of US policy was carried out with the arrival of civilian and military advisory and support personnel in southern Vietnam. The Saigon Military Mission (SMM) was to be led by Colonel Edward G. Landsdale, a notorious figure who will appear as a model for a character in several novels that will be discussed in these pages. The SMM was to enter Vietnam quietly and assist the Vietnamese, not the French, in unconventional warfare, with the French being retained as friendly allies.

The following years saw Ngo Dinh Diem as the USA’s favorite anti-Communist, although his increasingly autocratic rule alienated American leaders, who tried to link US financial and military aid to governmental reforms on his part, which he resented and often ignored. When he and especially his powerful brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, who were Catholics, began to repress the protests of the Buddhist majority, which led to the self-immolations of Buddhist monks that shocked world opinion, the popularity of the government dropped to an all-time low. Popular discontent focused on Nhu and his outspoken wife, known as Madame Nhu (who notoriously referred to the Buddhist monks’ suicides as “barbecue”). Eventually, the Ngo brothers would be ousted by a coup of conspiring military commanders with the direct connivance of the CIA and its experienced operator Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, a veteran of the Indochina war.

The Pentagon’s secret study shows that “Kennedy knew and approved of plans for the military coup d’état that overthrew President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963.”27 The Ngo brothers were assassinated only a few weeks before Kennedy himself perished by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas (it is noteworthy that Kennedy had championed the Catholic anti-Communist Diem back in the 1950s, well before he became the US president). The Pentagon study points out that Diem’s ouster presented an excellent opportunity for the US to disengage from South Vietnam and the taint of propping up an oppressive and anti-democratic government, but the effect was that US officials discovered that the war against the NLF had been much worse than had been thought and decided that it therefore ought to do more, not less, for the South Vietnamese government. The Pentagon Papers concludes that “by supporting the anti-Diem coup the US had inadvertently deepened its involvement.”28

The argument for direct military intervention was based on the alleged aggression of North Vietnam, which continued to be cited as an example of Communist bad faith. US officials always claimed that the National Liberation Front, the so-called Viet Cong, was merely the southern arm of North Vietnam and was controlled by Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital. In fact, the NLF was founded and sustained as a southern organization of resistance to Diem—a CIA report of December 1964 confirmed the NLF’s indigenous origins at that late date.29 Butterfield, in his chapter on the origins of the insurgency in the Pentagon Papers account, confirms that “the war began largely as a rebellion in the South against the increasingly oppressive and corrupt regime of Ngo Dinh Diem.”30 He goes on to argue that North Vietnam was “concentrated on its internal development.” The cadre members who remained in the south after the division of the country were ordered to engage only in “political struggle.” They evidently believed that they would eventually wrest control of the country through elections or through the collapse of the Diem regime from its own internal weakness.31

In any case, the Pentagon study makes it clear that the provocation for war initiated with the Americans: “an elaborate program of covert military operations against the state of North Vietnam” began in February 1964.”32 Covert operations included U-2 spy plane reconnaissance, the kidnapping of people for intelligence information, parachuting psyche war and sabotage teams into North Vietnam, commando raids to blow up bridges, and the bombardment of coastal installations by PT boats.33 Bombing raids that began in Laos against North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao (Communist guerrilla) troops were a prelude to the bombing of North Vietnam by the Johnson administration “to bring more military pressure against North Vietnam.”34 The bombing of North Vietnam increased as the NLF rebellion was prosecuted successfully in the South.35 The inability of the post-coup Saigon government under General Khanh to compete politically with Hanoi negated the possibility of a political settlement between the Vietnamese themselves, because it was believed that “it would result in a Communist take-over and the destruction of the American position in South Vietnam.36 What American officials and politicians insisted was the North Vietnamese “aggression” that prevented a peaceful settlement must be seen in this context.37

The pretext for the hot war came with the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident (August 1964), in which two US Navy destroyers in North Vietnamese waters, on a spying mission for the NSA, were said to have been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. A top secret analysis of the incident completed in 2000, however, “concluded that the second attack, the one actually used to justify the war, never took place.” Instead, NSA officials withheld 90% of the information on the incident from the Johnson administration officials, except for what “supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers.” The alleged attack, based on this misinformation, led to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which justified President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on North Vietnam without a formal declaration of war from Congress, as required by the US Constitution.38

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed on August 7, 1964, unanimously in the House and with the only two dissenting votes in the Senate cast by Wayne Morse and Ernest Greuning, who would later become leading opponents of the war. The resolution gave the executive broad authority to act and had no time limit, but it gave misleading assurances that the US would not escalate its involvement. Senator Morse said the US had provoked the attacks on the ships in the Tonkin Gulf by escorting South Vietnamese boats too close to the shore, charged the government with a “snowjob” about the attacks on northern coastal installations, and correctly foresaw disastrous consequences. Historian Robert D. Schulzinger notes that between August 1964 and July 1965, the US passed the “point of no return” in Vietnam, with the role of troops changing from advisors to combatants and the number of troops doubling.”39

The shift from advisors to combatants is one way of officially dating the beginning of the American Vietnam War. In March 1965, General Westmoreland, in what Stanley Karnow calls “one of the crucial decisions of the war,” requested a detachment of 3,500 Marines to be based in Da Nang, purportedly to protect the air base, which was the beginning of his repeated requests for more men. The build-up would reach almost 200,000 men by the end of that year. This first contingent of American ground forces (i.e. not counting the Special Forces units and other personnel already acting as advisors to the South Vietnamese Army) stirred up no political opposition because President Johnson presented it as a temporary expedient.40 In accordance with Johnson’s newly aggressive posture, the era of the US advisors to South Vietnam in the first half of the 1960s therefore drew to a close, and with the arrival of these combat troops a new phase of the war began with optimistic but generally ineffective operations both in the air and on the ground, which lasted until the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive of 1968, when the earlier optimism began to be replaced by serious doubt.

General Maxwell Taylor, a commander in the Korean War, wanted these early combat troops to maintain merely a defensive role, authorizing patrols into a surrounding but limited area, but General William C. Westmoreland, an administrative commander with little experience in combat leadership, had no confidence in the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) and insisted that US forces actively seek out and engage the enemy—the notorious “Search and Destroy” strategy, which prevailed from 1965 forward. In one of few major battles of the war, the Army’s 1st Air Cavalry Division successfully fought the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) at the Ia Drang Valley, with heavy casualties on both sides. Thereafter, the NVA and NLF forces would avoid large battles with American forces, owing to the superiority of American firepower and air support in such confrontations, preferring to engage their enemy using hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, in which they were successful. On the American side, punitive excursions beyond the original perimeter soon escalated, accompanied by annual incremental increases in troop levels. The “Americanization” phase of the war had begun in earnest.

In the 1980s, conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan attempted to “rewrite” the history of the Vietnam War as a noble cause doomed by faint-hearted policies that ensured that the US would not prevail, a notion that many military men and civilians would claim thereafter, expressed in the popular phrase “they wouldn’t let us win.” What they evidently thought had been lacking was a policy that resembled Air Force General Curtis LeMay’s notorious advice to “bomb ‘em back to the stone age.” Given the international pressures of the period, however, of which Johnson and his advisors were well aware, unrestricted warfare waged on a civilian population was never an option. During the 1964 presidential campaign, the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater had talked about using nuclear weapons in Vietnam, making the incumbent Johnson appear so restrained by comparison that the latter was actually elected as the “peace candidate.”41 Johnson, however, soon gave into the pressures of the civilian advisors he had inherited from Kennedy and waged a more aggressive war to achieve the long desired but elusive military victory, including, one month before the landing of the first ground forces, a long-range bombing campaign, “Operation Rolling Thunder,” designed, in the expression of the period, “to bring North Vietnam to its knees.” In their persistence in the use of bombing to secure submission, however, the US leaders seriously underestimated Vietnamese endurance. Stanley Karnow wrote that President Johnson “eventually failed because he misjudged the enemy’s capacity to withstand pain, believing there was a threshold to their endurance.” 42

General LeMay, Defense Secretary McNamara, and presidential advisor Walt W. Rostow firmly believed in the effectiveness of long-range bombing to win the war. Significantly, all three men had participated directly in the long-range bombing campaign of Germany during World War II: McNamara had masterminded the campaign, LeMay had commanded it, and Rostow had selected targets. And yet, so-called “precision bombing” during that war had a poor record: the postwar U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey found that both civilian resistance and German industrial production actually seemed to increase after the bombing. It was the inaccuracy of this strategy that eventually led to “area bombing,” which increased civilian casualties, and, as Paul Fussell has suggested, led “inevitably, as intensification overrode scruples, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”43 The lone dissenter among Johnson’s civilian advisors was George Ball, who had apparently learned something from his participation in the bombing campaign of the earlier war. As a result of his dissension and persistent opposition to escalating the Vietnam War, however, Ball became increasingly isolated from Johnson’s “hawks” and from the president himself.

The other civilian advisors only disagreed with General LeMay’s call for the unrestricted nature of the bombing of the previous war. They supported bombing but insisted on selected targets to avoid population centers and the international censure that would surely follow. They mistakenly thought, however, that bombing would—again, in the face of evidence from the last war, which suggested that such attacks actually hardened the will of the enemy—weaken the morale of the civilian population and make Ho Chi Minh give in, or at least negotiate a settlement on favorable terms. The strategy of a limited bombing campaign would also have the advantage of being easier to control from Washington, where the targets were actually selected on a daily basis by Johnson and his civilian advisors.44

Air power would turn out to be militarily effective only toward the end of the US intervention, in the “Linebacker” campaign (1972) ordered by Nixon in response to the NVA’s major three-pronged offensive against South Vietnam after the withdrawal of nearly half a million US troops. Without the American presence on the ground, the NVA commander, General Giap (the victor of Dien Bien Phu), who had successfully waged the war for the north up to that time, finally adopted “the conventional, large-unit tactics that American air-forces are highly trained to counter.”45 This more unrestricted bombing campaign, however, which illegally extended the war into Cambodia, only temporarily saved South Vietnam from collapse. Despite earlier fears of losing prestige by abandoning the intervention in Vietnam, the bombing aroused, as critics had anticipated earlier, worldwide condemnation and accusations of genocide.

In 1967, a large operation involving thousands of American and South Vietnamese forces, called “Operation Cedar Falls,” was launched with the aim of finding the long suspected headquarters of the NVA.46 It failed in that elusive objective but it did uncover an extensive underground network of tunnels in the area called the Iron Triangle, which revealed the extent of the military resistance to Diem in the south. In the same year, McNamara testified to a Senate subcommittee that the bombing raids had not achieved the twin objectives of reducing the flow of supplies from north to south and undermining the morale of the North Vietnamese, which were their original justification.

The turning-point of the war has been seen by most commentators as the Tet Offensive of January 31, 1968, the all-out NVA and NLF surprise attack on South Vietnamese and American government installations in Saigon and other cities that was, according to historian David Schmitz, “arguably, the most important event of the Vietnam War,”47 for it changed the American public’s perception of the possibility for victory and forced the US government to reevaluate. At great human cost to the oppositional forces—more than 80,000 of their troops were killed or captured—units from both north and south drove into the seven largest cities of South Vietnam and thirty provincial capitals from the Delta to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) but were eventually repulsed after savage fighting. The Tet offensive was designed by the North Vietnamese planners to instigate a general insurrection among the South Vietnamese population, in which mission it failed. On the other side, the outcome was regarded by the US press as an American military victory but a psychological and political defeat.48 In the end, Halberstam insists, “it was not American arms and American bravery or even American determination that failed in Vietnam; it was American political estimates, both of this country and of the enemy.”49

The year of the Tet Offensive revealed that the war was tearing American society apart. In March, Lieutenant William Calley led Charlie Company of the Americal Division’s 11th Brigade into the group of villages known as My Lai and perpetrated the massacre of up to four-hundred civilians, an atrocity that shocked the American public. The general feeling was: how could our boys behave like Nazis? President Johnson, buffeted by a long series of setbacks, announced that he would not seek re-election. Violence escalated at home as protests against the war became ever more numerous and aggressive. In August, a group of antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic convention in Chicago was savagely set upon by Mayor Daly’s police as the nation watched on television. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke out against the war and encouraged a united effort by civil rights and antiwar organizations, was assassinated in April. And Robert Kennedy, who was expected to step in as the Democratic candidate to bring a halt to the war, was assassinated in June.

In November, Richard Nixon, with only 43% of the vote, was elected president, promising an “honorable” end to the war (as Eisenhower’s Vice-President back in 1954, Nixon had wanted to send American troops to bail out the French at Dien Bien Phu, an idea that was squelched by Eisenhower). Instead of withdrawing from the war, Nixon instead extended it for several more years, undermining the Paris peace talks by sending a secret emissary to reassure the South Vietnamese government and by ordering the covert bombing of Cambodia to destroy enemy supply routes and base camps, which set off nationwide student protests. During the Christmas season of 1972, he ordered the bombing of North Vietnam in the most intense campaign of its kind ever, again setting off protests all over the country. Nixon’s rhetoric of “peace with honor” could not conceal the continuing American goal of a non-Communist Vietnam, essential to his chief advisor Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik global strategy.50 It was, however, secret negotiations between Kissinger, who would become Nixon’s Secretary of State, and North Vietnam’s Le Duc, which began in 1970, that would eventually lead to the withdrawal of US troops in 1973.

With the implementation of Nixon’s policy of “Vietnamization,” in which military responsibility was handed back to South Vietnam, defeat was virtually inevitable, and in fact came two years later, with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, followed by the reunification of the country by the North Vietnamese military and civilian authorities. By that time, the war had claimed over 57,000 American, and an estimated one to two million Vietnamese and other Indochinese, lives. The first article of the Paris Agreement, which formalized the withdrawal, stated: “The United States and all other countries respect the independence, sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity of Vietnam as recognized by the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Vietnam.”51 That is to say, nearly twenty years later and all the attendant deaths, suffering, and costs, the United States was back to square one.

Ultimately, American policy in Southeast Asia was based on a misunderstanding of historical, political, and military realities. Despite the fears of American leaders, the press, and the public, there had never been a global Communist expansion controlled by Moscow. As Hobsbawm has argued, “there is no real evidence that [the U.S.S.R.] planned to push forward the frontiers of communism by revolution until the mid 1970s,” that is, by the time that the Vietnam War had ended.52

The war had far-reaching political, as well as economic and social, consequences. It divided the Democratic Party—with two presidents from that party leading the nation into Vietnam—to such an extent that it never recovered its reputation since the 1930s as the progressive party of working people. The economic boom after World War II ended in 1963 with the global oil crisis, but also owing to the immense cost of the Vietnam War, which resulted in part in the downward spiral of working people’s incomes that continues until today. The social and historical significance of the war continued to be felt long afterward.53 The American public’s confidence in its government had been dealt a mortal blow, which gave an impulse to the “New Right” in subsequent years and the candidacies of men like Ronald Reagan, who actually campaigned for government office on anti-government platforms.

ii. The Soldiers

In contrast to historical works, the imaginative literature of the war has focused on its soldiers, most of whom were ignorant of, or indifferent to, the momentous events that have been described in the previous section. More than two million Americans eventually went to Vietnam, only a small part of whom actually saw combat. Robert D. Shulzinger claims that the combatants made up no more than 20% of the US forces at any time, with 80% comprising supply and support personnel, but most of the fiction and memoirs written by ex-soldiers are, not surprisingly, by combat veterans. The number of women estimated to have served in Vietnam constitutes a small minority, between 8,000 and 15,000.54 The fighting men had an average age of nineteen, as opposed to that of twenty-six for the combatants of World War II, and over 60% of all the men killed were between seventeen and twenty-one.55 These youths came primarily (80%) from poor or working-class neighborhoods, with a proportionally greater number coming from rural or small-town environments.56