Imperial Stars 3-The Crash of Empire (15 page)

At this point, say, General Vogt, the commander of our air force in Thailand, flies over the area and reports that he has never seen anything like it: enemy tanks, artillery, half-tracks, personnel carriers, bumper to bumper—since there are only a couple of roads capable of carrying this kind of traffic—all the way down to the outskirts of Saigon. After groping around in the jungle for years, and dropping millions of tons of explosives on trees, we have a target. "A turkey shoot," Vogt calls it. We could make those roads look like the Sinai in 1967, after the Israeli air force destroyed Nasser's motorized columns in the desert.

What would you do? Does the congressional interdiction wipe out your responsibility to provide for the security of our people in Saigon? Would you order the air-force commander and the carriers cruising along the coast to wipe out all that congestion on the highways and give the South Vietnamese a chance to pull themselves together? And thereby, in all probability, even if the American public rallied to your support, open up a constitutional crisis as bitter as the one that almost led to the impeachment of Richard Nixon?

I don't know whether such a notion ever crossed Gerald Ford's mind. I doubt it. In any case, it's all behind us now. A great power cannot afford to throw good money after the bad and lose itself in remorse and introspection. . . . Or can it? Should it?

The last letter in
The Palace File
is from Thieu, begging for the help he had been promised again and again. It was never answered.

For all that it is born of Hung's sorrow and Schecter's indignation, their book remarkably keeps its cool. It has the tone and gait of a historical narrative, not of a political tract—recounting lucidly what happened to the government and people of the South after we turned away, which each of us did at different times, of course, depending on who we were and how we were related to the situation. In my case, for example, I quit the Paris delegation late in 1969, after Kissinger had begun holding his secret trysts with Le Duc Tho, and retired from the Foreign Service. During the period covered by
The Palace File
, I forgot the few words of Vietnamese that I had learned and gradually lost touch with my friends in Saigon.

As a national phenomenon, however, the amnesia that befell us can be dated with some precision: the Paris Accords were signed on January 27, 1973, instituting a cease-fire in place and various political arrangements, including an international supervisory commission in which no one believed. For the North Vietnamese this was merely a phase, albeit an important one, in their famous fight-talk-fight strategy. For Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger it was a culmination and a release. Planes could now at last be sent to Hanoi to pick up our prisoners, who had been subjected to torture and ignominy not only by the Communists but also by visiting American literati; and by mid-July the last of our combat battalions was gone from the South. On August 15, ignoring warnings that the Paris agreements would have to be enforced, the Congress of the United States decreed that there would be no more funds for American military action of any kind in Indochina.

Richard Nixon, by then, was in irremediable trouble, although impeachment proceedings were still many months away. For Cambodia the worst was yet to come, as it was for Saigon, but the news media would now be shifting their attention elsewhere—to the Middle East, for example, where Egyptian staff officers were once again bent over maps of the Sinai. "Vietnam," in the words of a well-known survivor of Camelot, "could now return to the obscurity it so richly deserved."

What happened thereafter is told—admirably, in my opinion—from a point of view that strikes us as surprising and rather odd for the simple reason that it is South Vietnamese; and to this we have not been accustomed. The effect is to remind us that we have been experiencing the war in a multitude of ways, "in-country," as we used to say, or out, through the pain and bewilderment of our soldiers, or as a quarrel with others and with ourselves—but always or almost always this dimension has been missing: the people about whom or for whom, allegedly, it was fought. For this alone, and quite apart from the hitherto unpublished letters and skillful narration,
The Palace File
deserves an attentive reading.

But there is nothing in
The Palace File
to equal the pathos of Hung's last visit to Washington, as the enemy tanks are closing in on Saigon. Congress is in recess and no one suggests that it might be called back. The idea is absurd. Gerald Ford is playing golf in Palm Springs. Hung wanders down the long empty corridors clutching his letters, which should have been published years ago. Thieu has always refused to publish them or even allude to them because they are marked top-secret and he feared to anger the lords of the Larger Kingdom, his last resort. Now it is too late.

As he walks, Hung encounters two or three departing solons, including the Senator from Massachusetts, younger brother of the President who first committed American troops to South Vietnam. But Teddy is pressed for time, and makes it clear that his celebrated compassion has its limits; he will pay any price, bear any burden, to bring this conversation with Hung to an end.

And then there is Hung's last sad ill-attended press conference which is reported by some surly stringers on remote back pages, if at all. Someone, it seems, thought to ask Henry Kissinger about this obscure Vietnamese who claimed to have some letters which etc., and Kissinger said yes, letters had passed between Nixon and Thieu, but no, there was nothing newsworthy in them (which, although it scandalizes Schecter and Hung, was sadly true in the sense that there had been nothing secret about the promises that we as a nation, speaking through an almost unanimous Congress, were now unwilling to keep, no matter what).

And so it goes. Back in Vietnam, we are overwhelmed with pathetic detail: an incident with some soldiers and a roadblock, a talk with an old peasant woman, desperate attempts to save endangered people and equipment; clues to a situation that we could not deal with honorably and therefore resolved to forget. In this richness of reference and atmosphere the protagonists of
The Palace File
come alive and we begin to recover, curiously, not only the little we knew about these people, our friends and victims, but much that we surmised and lacked the time or wit or patience to understand. And now there is something odd, different, in this effort to remember what we never properly knew. Is there any point to it? The story, after all, ends no less badly than it did before. Only the configuration has changed—and the moral center. It used to be a story about us. Now it is a story about them.

Nineteen sixty-eight was the climactic year of the American war, or more specifically of the American phase of the thirty-year war, in Indochina. This was the year of the Tet offensive, a pyrotechnic display featuring dramatic scenes of fighting within the American embassy compound in Saigon and the unprecedented ferocity of the struggle for Hué, preceded—by barely more than a week—by the onset of the siege of Khesanh. All these actions ended badly, even disastrously, for the Communist attackers on the ground, but they inflicted heavy casualties, terrified the South Vietnamese population, and profoundly affected American morale.

The Communists, as they have since told us, were now deliberately trading what they called the "blood and bones" of their followers, especially of their Southern followers who might in any case prove troublesome after the war, for political advantage in an arena they saw, quite correctly, as far more decisive than Hué or Khesanh. In Washington, the Defense Secretary had resigned, a month after the storming of the Pentagon by antiwar demonstrators; but the main thing was that this was an election year in the U.S., during which much of the Democratic party would behave as if it were already in opposition while Nixon, the Republican candidate, would mysteriously allude to a "secret plan" to end the American involvement—an echo of Eisenhower's "I shall go to Korea" promise of 1952. The North Vietnamese, who would later offend Henry Kissinger by instructing him on U.S. public opinion, could therefore deduce from the campaign posture of both candidates what they had already learned from the Soviet ambassador in Washington: that American policy—just as it had been based after 1963 on a national decision to stay in—would now have to conform to an equal and opposite consensus in favor of getting out.

On the other hand, the American war had given Thieu a victory of sorts: the Vietcong was finished, the delta increasingly secure, the government of the republic alive and in better shape than at any time since the early days of Diem. So Hanoi's problem was to make haste slowly: to accelerate the American departure sufficiently to deny the South time to consolidate its hold on the countryside and prepare for the PAVN's frontal assault; but not to such a point that the Americans, ceasing to take casualties and bearing a much lighter financial burden, would be able to install themselves in a garrison situation, as in Korea, and thus deprive the North of the prize it had sought for so long and at such great cost.

Richard Nixon, presumably, made similar calculations. For us, too, and for our allies, timing was crucial. Each move we made on the ground would have to be balanced against the effects it produced on our troops and at home. During the first five years of the American war our battle deaths had totaled some 16,000. By the end of 1968 the number had dramatically risen to 30,610. Disengagement began in 1969, but Hanoi saw to it that fighting remained heavy, with the result that another 10,000 Americans died in the course of the year. And the fact that we were now on our way out, in addition to affecting military morale, seemed to galvanize the most radical elements of the antiwar movement—those who were in fact pro-war, but on the enemy's side. In May 1970, for example, a few days after the start of a joint U.S.-South Vietnamese incursion into Cambodia, four students at Kent State University in Ohio were shot and killed by National Guardsmen during a demonstration; and all across the country colleges shut down in protest. Still, the Cambodian invasion vastly improved the security of Vietnam's eastern provinces, including the great rice-growing area south of Saigon; and Thieu had reason to be proud of the conduct of his troops.

So it wasn't easy to draw up a statement of profit and loss. In this instance, my old friend Bui Diem, Thieu's ambassador to Washington, drafted a cable to Saigon to warn that Hanoi, on the whole, had come out ahead politically. So he tells us in his memoirs. But Thieu, with his Mandarin Confucian mentality, refused to take the point. The Cambodian action, he thought, was long overdue—as indeed it was.

However that may be, from the onset of the Nixon administration, as Kissinger began his secret talks with Le Duc Tho, our troops were removed from South Vietnam in increments corresponding (we said) to the growing ability of the South to defend itself—but also, obviously, to political calculations and pressures at home. It was the sort of thing we did well, and the process took on a life of its own. From our peak troop strength of 543,400 in the spring of 1969 we went to 24,200 in 1972; and the last of these were gone in the following year.

The ARVN, meanwhile, increased its complement from 820,000 to 1,048,000—an enormous effort, but insufficient to replace the shortfall in numbers and firepower; and the ARVN had become dependent on certain American command functions—intelligence and communications, especially—that the JGS was still far from being able to replace.

These were technical matters, and most Americans were happy to leave them to the experts. They wanted out, and expected that we would leave in an orderly and honorable way; and this general approval of Nixon's policy as it was understood was repeatedly confirmed by opinion polls and by the landslide Republican victory in the elections of 1972.

For the South Vietnamese, however, everything now hung on a thread. They knew that they could not have come this far without our help; and, having suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties during the preceding decade, they were physically and morally exhausted. Outnumbered, outgunned, with thousands of miles of porous frontiers and seacoast, they found themselves still facing a juggernaut, the PAVN, which could attack at will from sanctuaries in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, replace its losses from Soviet arsenals, and attack again. They knew that their country, for all the highly publicized faults of the Thieu government, was richer and freer than the North—but of what avail was such knowledge if Enlightened Opinion throughout the world decreed that Hanoi's nationalist credentials were more authentic, since it was Ho Chi Minh who had driven out the French; and if God, in any case, was on the side of the bigger battalions?

To continue to fight under such circumstances, the South Vietnamese had to believe in our ultimate commitment to their survival. This had always been difficult for a variety of reasons, the most obvious of which was that a great many Americans did not believe in it and said so. But of course it was also difficult for the Vietnamese, if not impossible, to interpret the many varieties of opposition to the war. So most of them tended, like Thieu, to shrug the American opposition—Hanoi's hope and comfort—away.

For the Southerners, the core of the problem was elsewhere:
they could not see our interest
, even when our involvement was at its height; and it became increasingly hard for them to grasp as we began to withdraw. The Vietnamese I knew, or more precisely met, in Saigon and a few years later in Paris, were incomparably more sophisticated than the villagers who made up the great mass of the population; yet even they astonished me by their ignorance of our world—which was almost as great as my ignorance of theirs.

The Southern bourgeoisie was composed for the most part of villagers once or twice removed, with bits of property somewhere in the delta or up north; or Chinese merchants with Vietnamese names; or professional people, lawyers, doctors, teachers, and (for some mysterious reason) an inordinate number of pharmacists. They had been to French schools, usually, and had absorbed a little elementary history, but this did not include the doctrine of containment. Obviously, our intentions were not colonial, as some had hoped and others feared; we built no plantations and did no business, except with each other. The great bases we built at Danang, Long Binh, Camranh Bay suggested a strategic interest, but by the early 70's we were turning these over to the government of South Vietnam. Rumors kept cropping up to the effect that oil, or some other natural resource, had been discovered; but none was confirmed.