Fire in the Lake (50 page)

From one perspective the American officials seemed to have excellent reasons for optimism about the war. Whether or not Westmoreland correctly calculated North Vietnamese intentions, the American troops successfully engaged the enemy main forces and killed a great number of their troops. The statistics, even if they were only approximate, meant a great deal for a country the size of Vietnam. In Operation Masher/White Wing alone — a multi-regimental sweep through the north of Binh Dinh province — the Allied forces, by the estimates, destroyed an entire enemy division. In the process they left hundreds of civilians dead and wounded and “generated” so many refugees as almost to depopulate the fertile An Lao valley. In military terms the very scale of the war promised victory. Even in its first year the American war dwarfed the former struggles of the French and of the Saigon government. It seemed to dwarf Vietnam itself, reducing Vietnamese politics to the microscopic dimension of struggles between rotifers and paramecia. What army, after all, could take so many casualties and continue to fight with only the prospect of more destruction in sight? Ridiculous to talk of protracted warfare when the American forces killed eight times the number of men the enemy killed each month.

But oddly enough, these statistics — and the destruction they more or less represented — did not seem to have any immediate consequence for the war. Despite all of the bloody battles that year, the enemy actually increased its strength in the south. The Front forces maintained their numbers with a strenuous effort at recruitment, and the North Vietnamese, taking the brunt of the large-scale war in the northern provinces, continued to replace their losses through infiltration. While the American troops opened roads and “cleared” great stretches of territory, the Front guerrillas came back into every area except those heavily garrisoned by U.S. troops. By the end of 1966 the NLF continued to govern the An Lao valley as well as the suburbs of Da Nang, Hue, Nha Trang, and Saigon. If the war was being won, then it was not being won quickly; indeed, it was taking a great deal longer than administration officials had suggested the year before. With four hundred thousand troops in Vietnam, Westmoreland continued to request thousands more every two or three months. The generals remained optimistic, but in a way that by no means encouraged the President. As one general said, “We can knock this off in a year or two at the most if we intensify and accelerate the war. We could use several more divisions.… We could bomb North Vietnam more effectively, and really cripple their lines of communication and war-supporting industry. My guess is that with between 500,000 and 700,000 men, we could break the back of the Communist main forces by 1968–69.”
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Westmoreland wanted to invade the enemy “sanctuaries” in Laos and Cambodia; and there was talk of a “requirement” for the invasion of the southern provinces of North Vietnam and the “necessity” for an American presence in Vietnam for the next fifteen years.

In March 1967, just a year after the Honolulu meeting and the beginning of the Buddhist crisis, President Johnson and his advisers met once again with the members of the Vietnamese junta, Generals Ky and Thieu. (Only General Nguyen Huu Co was missing. While Co was off on one of his many “goodwill” trips to European and American capitals, Ky simply wired him not to return to Vietnam.) Johnson hoped for a strategy review session with the American field command alone. But the Vietnamese leaders offered the U.S. mission a completed draft of the constitution in return for an invitation to the conference. Their offer accepted, they wasted very little time on diplomatic modesty. “The first time we talked about building democracy at Honolulu,” Ky told the assembled journalists, “everyone talked about the so-called military junta and just laughed. So it’s now a pleasure to be able to be here and tell the Americans about the progress we have made.” This time it was Ky and not Johnson who turned the conference into a public relations display. In contrast to Ky’s confident talk about military victories, Johnson spoke of Vietnam as a “serious, long-drawn-out, agonizing problem that we do not yet have the answer for,” and McNamara said that the Communists were “by no means beaten.”
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There was, it appeared to the public, some miscalculation. In the first place, it seemed, Washington had underestimated the effort the North Vietnamese were willing to give to the south and overestimated the damaging effect the bombing would have on that effort. In the second place, the Pentagon had not taken into account the potency of the old and very well known strategy of “people’s war.” The North Vietnamese regulars had drawn off the American troops from the populated regions of the south, allowing the local Front guerrillas to harass the enemy bases and build up their strength among the civilian population. So long as the Front controlled the villages, its strength would remain far greater than the sum of its combat troops. To win the war, the Allies would have simultaneously to destroy the main forces and to secure the countryside, and with the present number of troops they did not seem able to do both at once.

Whether the Pentagon had erred in its estimates of the enemy or in its estimates of the President’s willingness to expand the war, the generals in the field took pains to impress their version of the source of the difficulty upon the journalists. In their view the American troops with reinforcements and an accelerated bombing program could halt the infiltration and destroy the regular Front forces within an acceptable amount of time. The real difficulty lay with the pacification program. As the Marine commander, General Lewis W. Walt so vividly put it, “Breaking the back of the VC main force won’t take that long, but rooting out the VC guerrilla is a long-term task.”
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To put the matter thus was, of course, to make a false distinction between the political and the military aspects of the war — but it was to pinpoint the blame for the slowness of progress. During 1966 the ARVN, under some American pressure, almost relinquished the large-scale war to the Americans to concentrate on the task of “clearing” the populated areas. The generals’ implication was thus that the Saigon government bore the responsibility for holding up the war effort.

The explanation seemed to come as a revelation to a large section of the American press corps. Here, at last, was the reason for the discrepancy between expectations and actual progress. Bursting through the solid front of coverage on American operations,
Time, Newsweek,
and some of the television networks began all of a sudden to stress the importance of pacification and “the other war.” The same publications that had stoutly defended the Saigon government for thirteen years began to run articles describing the poor combat performance of the ARVN and hinting at corruption and inefficiency within the top ranks of the GVN. These articles generally concluded with a suggestion that the Saigon regime might well improve with political stability and American training programs, but on the other hand that might take a long time. The tone was one of innocent surprise. Who, after all, could have predicted two years before that the Saigon government might not live up to its responsibilities as an American ally?

To certain experienced reporters such articles appeared to be a kind of madness. Returning to Vietnam after three years’ absence, David Halberstam found that his strongest impression was not that of the change wrought by the American buildup, but his sense of
déjà vu.
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Around the great American operations that were the exclusive concern of briefing officers in Saigon and the focus of Westmoreland’s strategy, the old war continued much as it had in the days of Diem. The Saigon government had changed no more than the war itself.

The improvement in ARVN morale, so carefully catalogued by Robert Komer and George Carver the year before, meant little more than an improved sense of security — a realistic assessment that with the American troops in the country the NLF would not win that year. The ARVN fought no better than it had in 1962. Relegated to the tedious duty of standing guard over the villages, the strike force battalions collapsed into lethargy and indiscipline. They refused to go out at night, to patrol in small units, or to use the local intelligence sources to engage the guerrillas. There were the same horror stories as there had been in the days of the Strategic Hamlet program. Just ten miles or so out of Saigon on Route 4 to My Tho, the U.S. congressmen visiting the Delta might have seen the encampment of one ARVN battalion and, five hundred yards down the road, the charred ruins of a village that the Front forces had burned to the ground while the battalion stood by without firing a shot. In one province, a “priority area” for the American command, an ARVN regiment had butchered the livestock of an entire village and raped so many women that the men of the village had cut their trigger fingers off as a protest against the government.
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If the “problem” of the ARVN was a problem of leadership, as the MACV officials insisted, then it was only one in the most extended sense of the word. When Halberstam, interviewing enemy defectors, asked a North Vietnamese major what he could do if given command of an ARVN battalion, the major replied, “I could command a division in North Vietnam. I have the ability to do that. But a platoon here, even a squad, I could not do that. What can you do? They have no purpose.”
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The GVN administration remained almost precisely as it was in the days of Diem. In the yellowed colonial buildings where the ceiling fans plowed through the damp heat, the officials leafed slowly through their piles of papers, affixing stamps to forms, signatures to documents, and turning them over again. There were a few new faces, but none to break the routine. The vast expansion of the bureaucracy merely meant that it was somewhat less exclusive, somewhat less wieldy and less competent than before. With the army officers holding the key posts in the provincial administration, the sole GVN authority in a district was often a young man with a year’s experience of dress drills. In theory the military administration coordinated civilian programs with military strategy, but in practice the regular army, the civilian ministries, and the military administration worked in almost total isolation from one another. The officers had a purpose — only it was not quite the same as that of the Americans. Orders, truckloads of supplies, even whole units would appear out of — or disappear into — nowhere. As usual, the chain of command had little to do with the organization charts.

As always there were new “concepts,” new hopes for the GVN within the American mission. In 1967 it was the Revolutionary Development program, heralded as a “coordinated approach to rooting out the Viet Cong infrastructure and rooting in the government.” From an administrative point of view, the goal of the program was to eliminate all the red tape that resulted from having several Vietnamese ministries and several U.S. agencies all involved in the pacification program. The achievement of the new program was in the nature of a compromise: the United States created a vast new ministry while continuing to maintain all the others. The duplication of efforts and the departmental fights therefore continued while the new ministry itself became a paradigm of the whole governmental and U.S. advisory system. In Saigon ambitious bureaucrats quit their jobs in the ministries of agriculture and social welfare to offer their services to the new program; in the provinces military officials turned their attention from juggling the budgets of the old ministries to juggling the budgets of the new; within the American mission the various agencies sharpened their bureaucratic teeth to fight over this vast new establishment. Instead of cutting through the bureaucratic morass, the Revolutionary Development ministry was absorbed by it as molasses in a solution of molasses.

The central feature of the ministry (known more modestly in Vietnamese as “Rural Reconstruction”) was the creation of fifty-nine-man cadre teams to do the complete work of pacification in the hamlets. The “concept” for these teams had an extremely long history in the GVN, beginning with Diem’s Catholic rural workers and proceeding through the Political Action and Census Grievance teams developed by Frank Scotton in 1964–1965. None of those teams had any spectacular success, but they were nonetheless bathed in a certain Special Forces mystique, the principle behind which was that the Americans could win the war if they imitated enemy tactics. The training program for the new cadre teams involved instruction by former Viet Minh officers under CIA aegis in everything from “self-criticism” to interrogation techniques to the art of living among villagers without stealing their food or their women. Graduating from the Vung Tao school with torchlight processions, patriotic songs, and speeches by Nguyen Cao Ky on the social revolution, these new cadres were then sent into the “cleared” hamlets to perform one hundred and ten tasks, beginning with the “rooting out of the Viet Cong infrastructure,” proceeding through the “elimination of wicked village notables,” and ending with the supervision of hamlet and village elections. The obstacles to their performing all these tasks were, as always, insurmountable. Placed under the jurisdiction of the district chiefs, many of the teams went to insecure villages and were threatened or killed by the NLF; others, switched about from village to village each week like common soldiers, had hardly the time to perform the first ten of their appointed tasks. Those teams that actually got to the point of investigating the political situation of the village usually discovered that the “wicked village notables” were in fact relatives or financial supporters of the local GVN officials. Retreating to the more innocuous tasks of building wells or maternities, they would find themselves without concrete or tin roofing so that all their efforts slipped back into the mud. As usual, the major difficulty was that only the exceptional men among them had any notion of how or why they should go about working with the peasants. With no cooperation either from the villagers or from the GVN officials, many grew discouraged. During the first year of the program one in four RD cadres deserted — most of them no doubt for the bright lights of a town. The majority, largely innocent of any desire to improve the government or the lot of the villagers, accepted their fate and became an addition to the GVN’s local defense system, an ill-rewarded and ineffectual and occasionally brutal occupation force.