Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (31 page)

Top-secret assessments of the fighting during the offensive among the US Joint Chiefs of Staff reveal they had the same doubts and concerns that were expressed by the American media. For the most part, the media had reported what it had seen and heard in an unbiased fashion. Even the most seasoned and respected journalists in the United States were shaken by Tet and sensed its ominous ramifications for the entire US war effort.
²⁰

While it is certainly true that Hanoi called on its own people “to overcome all hardships and sacrifices,” “overthrow the puppet regime at all administrative levels,” and place “ all governmental power in the hands of the people,” this was hardly the
critical
objective by which Hanoi would
judge Tet a victory or defeat.
²¹
Rather, these were Tet’s
optimal
objectives. One seriously doubts that a strategist with Giap’s realistic appreciation of the strength of American forces in late 1967 truly expected to achieve them. In his articles assessing the current state of the war in late 1967, Giap cautioned his comrades against excessive optimism. He indicates obliquely that he did not expect a quick or total victory from the next major revolutionary initiative—clearly a reference to Tet.
²²
A mid-1967 Central Committee resolution echoes Giap’s sentiments, painting the attacks of early 1968 as “
the first stage in a process
involving a very fierce and complex strategic offensive which will combine military and political attacks to be carried out . . . in combination with the diplomatic offensive [italics mine].”
²³

If the complete collapse of Saigon and a Communist ascension to power were not seen as Tet’s crucial objectives by Hanoi, what were? No one really knows for sure because we have no access to detailed discussions of the issue in late 1967 and early 1968. My own belief is that the crucial objective was not outright victory but, as the official history of the People’s Army of Vietnam put it, “to crush the American will to commit aggression and force the United States to accept defeat in South Vietnam and end all hostile actions against North Vietnam.”
²⁴
Given Hanoi’s healthy respect for American military strength, and what little we do know of its pre-launch discussions, it seems far more plausible that this, indeed, was the most important of the several objectives enumerated in the Central Committee resolution. As historian Gabriel Kolko writes, Giap’s “main concern was with the impact of military action on the political context of the war, both in South Vietnam and in the United States. That political framework . . . would prove crucial, and an offensive was an essential catalyst in the process of change . . . In the largest sense, the primary objective of the offensive was to influence the United States.”
²⁵

If we judge Tet in this light, it was clearly a brilliant success, albeit a costly one in blood. Despite Phillip Davidson’s claim that Tet marked the abandonment of protracted war and a quest for “complete victory in a single stroke,” neither Giap nor the Communist leadership as a whole thought of it that way. Neither should we. Tet was the continuation of protracted war by other means, an escalation in revolutionary violence, but it hardly marked the abandonment of protracted war strategy.

Of course, this does not mean that Hanoi had
no hope at all
that the attacks would bring about Saigon’s collapse, but it seems much more
plausible that that lofty objective was meant primarily to inspire revolutionary fervor—the mysterious “power of the masses” that Giap and the other senior leadership believed to be a defining element of people’s war—indeed, it might be said to be the distinguishing element of people’s war. The popular uprising was more a goal to inspire than a make-or-break objective. As Douglas Pike points out, the idea of the general offensive–general uprising in Vietnamese military thinking had long functioned largely as a “social myth” designed to capture the “Vietnamese imagination, to heighten revolutionary consciousness and rouse the peasant to battle. . . . Whether the general uprising would ever become a reality was irrelevant, what mattered was that people were willing to act out their lives as if it were a reality.”
²⁶

Johnson’s speech confirmed that Giap and Hanoi had achieved Tet’s most important objective. Tet turned out to be what Giap had hoped it would from the beginning of the planning process: not the final victory in the American War, but a decisive victory nonetheless. It had set in motion a chain of events that would lead to withdrawal, and it signaled the end of the long phase of American escalation. “For the United States,” Gabriel Kolko observes,

Tet was a long-postponed confrontation with reality; it had been hypnotized until then by its own illusions, desires, and needs. The belated realization that it had military tactics and technology but no viable military strategy consistent with its domestic and international priorities made Tet the turning point in the administration’s calculations. Those who had earlier favored the war finally made a much more objective assessment of the balance of forces.
²⁷

In a 1990 interview with journalist Stanley Karnow, Giap made substantially the same point as Kolko:

We chose Tet because, in war, you must seize the propitious moment, when time and space are propitious. [The attack’s] scope and ardor proved that both our army and people were disciplined and determined. We attacked the brains of the enemy, its headquarters in Saigon, showing it was not inviolable. Our forces destroyed large quantities of other equipment and crushed several of its elite units. We dramatized that we were neither exhausted nor on the edge of defeat, as Westmoreland claimed.
And though we knew most Americans had nothing against us, we wanted to carry the war into the families of America, to demonstrate,
n’est pas,
that if Vietnamese blood was being spilled, so was American blood. We did all this and more, and more Americans denounced the war.
²⁸

Vo Nguyen Giap’s Tet campaign revealed at once his audacity, acute sense of timing, and breadth of thinking about the chemistry of war and politics. Don Oberdorfer writes in his classic account of the Tet Offensive that he “came to the conclusion that Tet was a classic case study in the interaction of war, politics, the press, and public opinion.”
²⁹
So it was, and Vo Nguyen Giap was its principal author. In planning and executing Tet, Giap went beyond Mao’s doctrine, practicing a way of war that was distinctly his own. For the second time, he had forced a great nation to see the limits of its power and the futility of challenging the Communist revolutionaries on the battlefield. Tet was Giap’s second masterpiece as the commander in chief of the People’s Army of Vietnam.

10

FIGHTING, NEGOTIATING, AND VICTORY: 1969–1975

Richard Milhous Nixon assumed the presidency of the United States in January 1969. He had made his reputation in the 1950s as a hardcore anti-Communist—a reputation that he hoped would prove advantageous in his dealings with Hanoi. The new president fully accepted the sober conclusions concerning US policy and objectives in Vietnam arrived at by his predecessor: the war could not be won by force of arms, and the United States should seek a political settlement that would secure an independent pro-Western government in South Vietnam. Nonetheless, Nixon was sanguine about American prospects. Defeat was not so much unpalatable as unthinkable. Nixon, aided by his brilliant national security adviser, Professor Henry Kissinger of Harvard, would seek to depart from Southeast Asia with South Vietnam remaining a bulwark against world Communism, and with American credibility restored.

Three core elements of the Nixon administration’s strategy as it emerged were inherited from the Johnson administration: a gradual drawdown of American forces; a major effort to expand and improve the South Vietnamese armed forces—dubbed “Vietnamization” by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird; and the pursuit of negotiations with Hanoi from as strong a politico-military position as possible. Nixon and Kissinger considered themselves shrewd practitioners of realpolitik and believed that, even given the time limitations imposed on their efforts by the pressures of domestic politics, they could achieve “peace with honor.”

During his 1968 campaign Nixon claimed he had a “secret plan” to end the conflict. This was disingenuous. In fact, he had no concrete plan, but rather several promising new strategic concepts that he would apply to the problem at hand. Perhaps the most imaginative of the new strategies was enlisting the help of Hanoi’s allies in constraining its efforts on the battlefield and in softening its stance in negotiations through great-power diplomacy. In the late 1960s and early 1970s both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China were keenly interested in improving their strategic and economic relations with the United States—in large measure to gain certain advantages in their rivalry for dominance of the Communist bloc. Nixon planned on offering both nations a variety of incentives in exchange for promises to pressure Hanoi. The policy was called “linkage.”

Kissinger and Nixon believed that their predecessors had exhibited an unfortunate restraint in the application of US military force in order to limit the war’s destructiveness, and to wrest concessions from Hanoi in negotiations. They planned on making it clear through overt threats, bluffs, and
selective
escalations of force that they were more than willing, as Nixon would say later, to “bomb the bastards back to the Stone Age” if Hanoi played hardball and attempted to wait out the United States. The notion of threatening Hanoi with outright obliteration was widely known at the time as Nixon’s “madman theory”—the idea being that Kissinger, in his negotiations with the North Vietnamese, would obliquely hint that his boss was a fanatical anti-Communist who would go to any lengths, including the use of nuclear weapons, to force North Vietnam to make substantive concessions.

Nixon was also determined to implement his strategy without the encumbrances of congressional, military, or bureaucratic input. The president’s penchant for secrecy and deception in shaping Vietnam policy led
directly to his downfall and disgrace, and that downfall, of course, stripped the United States of leverage in dealing with Hanoi. So too did Nixon’s ironclad commitment to the American people to gradually withdraw all its military forces. Hanoi was under no such pressure.

As a result of these difficulties, a great many historians have come to view Nixon’s prosecution of the war as tragically flawed. His intractability in negotiations and willingness to escalate military force to obtain unrealistic concessions from Hanoi needlessly extended the war. Over four years, Nixon’s elusive quest for “peace with honor” led to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives in Southeast Asia, bitter discord and social upheaval at home, and the collapse of the postwar consensus regarding America’s purpose in world affairs. As Walter Isaacson has written, Nixon’s effort to preserve American honor “squandered the true sources of [America’s] influence—and its credibility—in the world: its moral authority, its sense of worthy purpose and its reputation as a reasonable and sensible player.”
¹

ABRAMS’S STRATEGY

Westmoreland’s successor, General Creighton Abrams, a tough and aggressive commander who was well respected by his subordinates for his acerbic sense of humor and keen intelligence, was acutely conscious of the complex political dynamics of people’s war. He understood and even admired his adversary’s strengths: painstaking logistical preparation, defensive prowess, and a striking ability to move entire regiments vast distances undetected. He was well aware of the effectiveness of Giap’s indoctrination/education program in producing highly motivated and resilient troops. Referring to the average PAVN soldier, Abrams once remarked to his staff, “Adversity does nothing but strengthen him.”
²
In Abrams’s estimation the war was “basically a political contest.”
³
The NLF infrastructure “permitted the main forces to operate.”
⁴
Thus, the key object of the war was to break down Hanoi’s control over the villages and its ability to mobilize the energies of the people. “In the whole picture of the war,” Abrams commented wisely, “the battles don’t really mean much.”
⁵

The new MACV chief warmly endorsed a thoughtful army study arguing, in repudiation of Westmoreland’s approach to the war, that the critical developments in the contest were “those that occur at the village, district and province level. This is where the war must be fought; this is where
the war . . . must be won.”
⁶
For Abrams the critical index of success was population security. Without it, the GVN could not begin to develop the responsive governmental institutions and policies that would earn it long-term popular support and survival. The expansion of South Vietnamese Regional and Popular Forces for local defense (as opposed to offensive operations against powerful enemy forces carried out by the ARVN) was an indispensable element of this effort. Accordingly, Abrams gradually shifted US forces away from attrition to a “one war” strategy, integrating clear-and-hold combat operations, in which US forces rooted out guerrillas and then turned security over to South Vietnamese Regional and Popular Forces, with a revamped pacification program.

The upgrading of the South Vietnamese armed forces so that they could take over complete responsibility for the conduct of the war was at the very center of Abrams’s effort, as he had been told by his superiors to expect all American troops to be withdrawn by mid-1972. Yet Vietnamization went considerably beyond professionalizing and expanding South Vietnam’s armed forces. If the GVN were to survive after the Americans departed, it simply had to undertake political and social reforms that it had resisted for years.

Meanwhile, the unwieldy collection of GVN-US pacification and intelligence-gathering programs aimed at gaining the support of the population were efficiently streamlined through the Accelerated Pacification Campaign by William Colby, a hard-driving, ruthless CIA operative. Without question, the revamped pacification program created enormous difficulties for the revolutionary forces; venal GVN local officials were replaced by councils of village elders elected by the villagers themselves, and civic improvement programs were placed under the direction of better-trained and more responsive GVN administrators under the watchful eye of Colby and the CIA.