Embers of War (114 page)

Ultimately, Kennedy and Johnson found what their predecessors in the White House as well as a long line of leaders in the French Fourth Republic had found: that in Vietnam, the path of least immediate resistance, especially in domestic political terms, was to stand firm, to maintain the commitment, and to press on, in the hope that somehow things would turn out fine (or at least be bequeathed to a successor). As Democrats, JFK and LBJ felt the need to contend with the ghosts of McCarthy and the charge that they were “soft on Communism.” Truman too, as we have seen, acted partly with this concern in mind, as indeed did Eisenhower—his monumentally important decisions of 1953–54 cannot be understood apart from the charged domestic political atmosphere in which they were made. But the perceived power of this political imperative was even greater in the early 1960s, as the two presidents, feeling the vulnerability that all Democrats felt in the period, sought to avoid a repeat of the “Who lost China?” debate, this time over Vietnam. This concern was seldom discussed in the major magazine and newspaper articles that examined decision making on Vietnam, and it is hardly mentioned in the vast documentary record. It was so self-evident that it hardly, or rarely, needed to be voiced.
¹⁶

In North Vietnam as well, policy makers affirmed their determination to achieve victory in the conflict, through escalation if necessary. Already in December 1963, in the aftermath of the Diem coup, Hanoi leaders decided to step up the fighting in the south, in the hopes that further deterioration would either cause the Americans to give up the fight and go home or leave them insufficient time to embark on a major escalation of their own. Ho Chi Minh, whose role in the party hierarchy had shifted in recent years away from day-to-day policy maker to that of elder statesman, urged his colleagues to seize on the “disorder” in South Vietnam and expand military as well as political pressure on the Saigon regime. Even if the United States should step up her role tenfold, Ho asserted, “we shall still be victorious.”
¹⁷

Yet having made this decision, North Vietnamese officials moved warily. General Vo Nguyen Giap, mastermind of the bruising victory over France and a figure of immense prestige in the leadership, warned his colleagues that the United States represented a military test of monumental proportions; he urged caution until the People’s Army of Vietnam had been properly trained and equipped with modern weapons. Not everyone in the Politburo embraced this message, but they also had to contend with the counsels of restraint emanating from Moscow and, to a lesser extent, Beijing. Neither Communist patron was keen to see an Americanized war in Vietnam, one that could confront them with difficult choices and potentially bring them into direct contact with the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Their own bilateral relationship deeply fractious, each sought to keep the other from gaining too much influence in Hanoi. The Soviet Union in particular pressured North Vietnam to go slowly and to avoid provoking Washington. The North Vietnamese obliged, even as they used the final weeks of 1964 to step up the infiltration of men and matériel into the south. Said Premier Pham Van Dong, during a meeting with Mao Zedong in October 1964: “If the United States dares to start a [larger] war, we will fight it, and we will win it. But it would be better if it did not come to that.”
¹⁸

But come to that it did. In early December, after Johnson won a landslide election victory to become president in his own right (his refrain in the campaign: He sought no wider war and would not send American boys to fight a war that Asian boys should fight for themselves), he and his aides agreed on a two-phase escalation of the fighting. The first involved “armed reconnaissance strikes” against the Ho Chi Minh Trail infiltration routes in Laos, as well as retaliatory air strikes against North Vietnam in the event of a major Viet Cong attack. The second phase anticipated “graduated military pressure” against the north, in the form of aerial bombing, and almost certainly the dispatch of U.S. ground troops to the south. Phase one would begin as soon as possible; phase two would come later, after thirty days or more.

In February 1965, following Viet Cong attacks on American installations in South Vietnam that killed thirty-two Americans, Johnson ordered Operation Rolling Thunder, a bombing program planned the previous fall that continued, more or less uninterrupted, until October 1968. Then, on March 8, the first U.S. combat battalions came ashore near Da Nang. The North Vietnamese met the challenge. They hid in shelters and rebuilt roads and bridges with a tenaciousness that frustrated and awed American officials. They also increased infiltration into the south. Ho Chi Minh, convinced that Washington had committed too much prestige to Vietnam to back down, predicted to associates that Lyndon Johnson would come in with guns blazing but that it would not be enough. Like the French, the Americans would taste defeat in the end.
¹⁹

Perhaps, for Ho, it had to come to this. He had always seen the United States as a principal player in Vietnam’s drama, after all, ever since that June day in 1919 when he donned his rented morning coat and tried in vain to gain an audience with Woodrow Wilson at Versailles. Later, in the dizzying summer of 1945, Ho had again pleaded for U.S. backing, to no avail, a pattern that would repeat itself in 1946 and 1947, after the serious fighting began. Ultimately, his Democratic Republic of Vietnam had triumphed over France, but the price of victory had been immense, as Washington massively bolstered the enemy’s war-making machine, enhancing its destructive capacity exponentially (as did the Chinese aid for the DRV, though to a lesser degree). Then at the moment of glorious success in 1954, the Americans, determined to maintain a non-Communist bastion in southern Vietnam, helped deny the Viet Minh the full fruits of victory as they set about creating and building up the Republic of [South] Vietnam.

“It will be a war between an elephant and a tiger,” Ho had said back in 1946, of the war then about to commence. “If the tiger ever stands still the elephant will crush him with his mighty tusks. But the tiger does not stand still. He lurks in the jungle by day and emerges only at night. He will leap upon the back of the elephant, tearing huge chunks from his hide, and then he will leap back into the dark jungle. And slowly the elephant will bleed to death.”
²⁰

This time the elephant would be even bigger. But the outcome, Ho vowed, would be the same.

In Paris, leaders reacted to these developments with shudders of recognition and a sense of déjà vu. They knew this script by heart. On March 18, 1965, President Charles de Gaulle, whose unwavering determination to reclaim Indochina for France at the end of World War II had done so much to start the bloodshed, and who had been summoned back to power in 1958 as his country struggled to defeat another insurgency, this one in Algeria, told his cabinet that major war was now inevitable. The Americans had failed to learn from France’s example, he said, and the fighting “will last a long, long, long time.” The following month de Gaulle offered a more precise estimate: Unless the Johnson administration moved to halt the war immediately, the struggle would go on for ten years and would completely dishonor the United States. When U.S. ambassador Charles Bohlen called on de Gaulle in early May, he found the French leader in a philosophical mood, accepting the wholesale escalation of the fighting with “oriental fatalism.”
²¹

Another Frenchman, long since transplanted to the United States, felt a gripping sense of foreboding as 1965 progressed. Bernard Fall, over the previous decade, had become America’s most respected expert on the First Indochina War (as it was now called), the author of numerous books and articles notable for their informed and dispassionate analysis. (Many a U.S. officer got his first real appreciation of the complexity of the Vietnam struggle by reading Fall’s
Street Without Joy: Indochina at War 1946–1954
, published in 1961.) Fall was less categorical than de Gaulle about America’s prospects in Vietnam, and he rejected as “facile” (a favorite adjective) the casual way some critics of U.S. involvement invoked the French analogy. The United States in 1965, after all, was immensely more powerful than her Western ally had ever been, especially in the air. “Before Dien Bien Phu,” Fall wrote late that year, “the French Air Force had for
all
of Indochina (i.e., Cambodia, Laos, and North and South Vietnam) a total of 112 fighters and 68 bombers. On Sept. 24, 1965, the United States flew 167 bombers against North Vietnamese targets alone, dropping 235 tons of bombs and
simultaneously
flew 317 bomber sorties ‘in country’ [South Vietnam], dropping 270 tons of bombs.”
²²

Even as he made this comparison, however, Fall doubted it would make a decisive difference in the end. The unleashing of massive American firepower might make the war “militarily unlosable” in the short term, he wrote elsewhere that autumn, but at immense cost: the destruction of Vietnam. He quoted Tacitus: “They have made a desert, and called it peace.” Even then Ho’s Communists would not be vanquished, for in this conflict military prowess meant only so much—the war had to be won politically if it was to be won at all. This was the pivotal point about the French analogy, Fall maintained; this was the lesson that must be learned. But few in Washington seemed prepared to do so. Few seemed prepared to acknowledge the salient facts about counterinsurgency warfare that the French had learned the hard way: that results can be measured only over a period of many years; that success requires an effective host government that in the end can carry the burden on its own; and that notwithstanding counterinsurgency theory’s emphasis on nonmilitary measures, massive and brutal firepower will invariably be used, resulting in the widespread killing of civilians and increasing local resentments. Decades later, in a new century, Americans were still struggling to come to grips with these realities.
²³

One wonders what Bernard Fall would have made of these later military interventions and the debates surrounding them: In 1967, he was killed while accompanying a U.S. Marine battalion in an operation near Hue. Certainly, this astonishingly prolific writer, had he lived, would have produced more important books and articles on the struggle for Vietnam, works that would have reached a wide audience and added enormously to Americans’ collective knowledge. Not least, I’m guessing, Fall would have reminded us early and often that any serious effort at understanding America’s Vietnam debacle must range beyond the period of heavy U.S. involvement, to the era that came before. For as Fall once said, Americans were “dreaming different dreams than the French but walking in the same footsteps.”
²⁴

By the end of 1965, 180,000 U.S. troops were on the ground in South Vietnam. More were on the way.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
HIS BOOK HAS MY NAME ON THE COVER, BUT IT’S VERY MUCH A
collective enterprise. I am deeply grateful to the authors whose books and articles I read and reread over the past decade, and on whose shoulders I stand. The same goes for archivists at repositories in several countries, who patiently showed me how to navigate their collections and responded with alacrity when I emailed or phoned with this or that follow-up query. I’m also forever indebted to three dear friends who read the entire manuscript and set me right about facts or interpretations, who pushed me when I needed pushing, and who provided succor at just the right time: Chris Goscha, Jim Hershberg, and Ken Mouré. I can’t thank them enough. Other colleagues provided incisive critiques of individual chapters: Chen Jian, Will Hitchcock, Jack Langguth, Mark Lawrence, Tim Naftali, Andrew Preston, and John Thompson.

Many friends have been generous in sharing documents, and in notifying me of collections I needed to consult. Here I thank, in particular, Chen Jian, Chris Goscha, Matthew Jones, Merle Pribbenow, Priscilla Roberts, and Kevin Ruane. Merle Pribbenow also made a tremendous contribution by making available to me his translations of Vietnamese military documents, and by providing new translations seemingly instantaneously. During one memorable two-week stretch, it seemed that every time I opened my email there was a new document from Merle, pertaining to this or that military campaign we had been discussing.

George Herring and Ben Weber were delightful travel companions on a memorable visit to Dien Bien Phu, and I thank them for indulging my desire to traverse the area around Colonel de Castries’s battlefield headquarters and the nearby strongpoints. Nor will I soon forget George’s keen interest and superb input as he and I discussed my then-embryonic book project by the pool at the Metropole Hotel in Hanoi, or our harrowing trip to Phat Diem, in which our driver seemed determined to set a new land speed record between the two points and thought nothing of using both sides of the road to make it happen.

I owe a great debt to my many wonderful students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Cornell University, and in particular to a remarkable group of research assistants at the two institutions: George Fujii, Justin Granstein, Michael Mazza, and Kim Quinney. Samuel Hodges, at the time a Brown University junior, provided excellent help during a return visit to his hometown of Santa Barbara.

For their willingness to help in various ways, large and small, I thank Joanna Ain, Richard Aldrich, Arthur Bergeron, James Blight, Robert Brigham, Jessica Chapman, Jessy Chiorino, Campbell Craig, Craig Daigle, Philippe Devillers, William Duiker, Daniel Ellsberg, Dorothy Fall, Susan Ferber, Dominique Franche, Warren Frazier, Marc Gilbert, Pierre Grosser, Robert Hanyok, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Pembroke Herbert, Will Hitchcock, Pierre Journoud, Audrey Kahin, Walter LaFeber, Janet Lang, John Lee, William Loomis, Erez Manela, Zachary Matusheski, Glenn May, Anne Mensior, Edwin Moïse, Lien-Hang Nguyen, Andrew Preston, Priscilla Roberts, Kevin Ruane, Jennifer See, Jack Talbott, Keith Taylor, Martin Thomas, Stein Tønnesson, Trinh Quang Thanh, Thuy Tranviet, Hannah Stamler, Kathryn Statler, Vu Tuong, James Waite, Geoffrey Warner, Kenneth Weisbrode, Odd Arne Westad, George Wickes, Mark Wilson, Emoretta Yang, John Young, and the late Luu Doan Huynh and Jon Persoff. For expert work on the maps I thank Don Larson and his team at Mapping Specialists.