Real War (18 page)

We had won the war militarily and politically in Vietnam. But defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory because we lost the war politically in the United States. The peace that was finally won in January 1973 could have been enforced and South Vietnam could be a free nation today. But in a spasm of shortsightedness and spite, the United States threw away what it had gained at such enormous cost.

After the disillusionment of the mid-1960s many Americans refused to believe that we could win in Vietnam. After years of fighting the war the wrong way and losing, many believed we could not fight it the right way and win. Egged on by the media and often by conscience-stricken “dissenters” who had been responsible for policy errors in the first place, American public opinion was poisoned. In the mid-sixties the “best and the brightest” told us that we could win in Vietnam overnight; that we could win the war on an assembly-line basis, as if entire nations operated like a Ford plant. Now the “best and the brightest” told us that there was no way we could win the war and that we should get out as soon as we could, abandoning South Vietnam to its fate. What they really meant was that since
they
could not win in Vietnam, they automatically assumed that nobody could. Arrogant even in defeat, with their guilt-ridden carping they poisoned an already disillusioned American public and frustrated all the military and political efforts we
made in Vietnam to win the war. Now, shocked by the bloodbath in Cambodia and the tragic plight of the boat people fleeing from “liberated” South Vietnam, they frantically thrash about trying to find someone to blame. All they have to do is to look in the mirror.

In retrospect it is remarkable that the public continued to support our efforts in Vietnam to the extent that it did for as long as it did. As
Newsweek
columnist Kenneth Crawford observed, this was the first war in our history during which our media were more friendly to our enemies than to our allies. American and South Vietnamese victories, such as the smashing of the Tet offensive in 1968, were portrayed as defeats. The United States, whose only intent was to help South Vietnam defend itself, was condemned as an aggressor. The Soviet-supported North Vietnamese were hailed as liberators.

The My Lai atrocities against 200 Vietnamese were justifiably deplored, and Captain William Calley was prosecuted and convicted for his role in them, but brutal murders of tens of thousands of civilians by the North Vietnamese were virtually ignored. During February of 1968 a Vietcong-North Vietnamese force occupied Hué and 5,800 civilians were executed or kidnapped. Following the city's recapture, at least 2,800 were found in mass graves—many of them apparently buried alive.

Hanoi's totally false and cynical charge that the United States had a policy of bombing dikes in the North and causing thousands to drown were given enormous coverage, and as a result of that coverage the charge was widely accepted as true. The truth—that there was no such policy and that no one was drowned—received scarcely any attention.

The South Vietnamese were loudly condemned for their treatment of prisoners. When actress Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark traveled to Hanoi, they received massive, largely positive American media coverage of their statements praising the treatment of the American prisoners of war, who in fact were being subjected to the most barbaric and brutal torture by their North Vietnamese captors.

The dishonest, double-standard coverage of the Vietnam War was not one of the American media's finer hours. It powerfully
distorted public perceptions, and these were reflected in Congress.

On January 2, 1973, the House Democratic Caucus voted 154-75 to cut off all funds for Indochina military operations as soon as arrangements were made for the safe withdrawal of U.S. troops and the return of our prisoners of war. Two days later a similar resolution was passed by the Senate Democratic Caucus, 36-12. This, it should be noted, was before Watergate began to weaken my own position as President, and only three months before withdrawal of American forces was completed, and the last of the 550,000 American troops that were in Vietnam when I took office in 1969 were brought back.

Thompson has observed:

The point was that President Nixon, having gained a dominant bargaining position when the bombing halted on 29 December, 1972, could not press his advantage because antagonism to the bombing itself, and the very fact of his strong bargaining position, brought him under increased pressure in Congress and in the United States to accept a ceasefire on any superficially acceptable terms which would immediately end direct American involvement. . . .

President Nixon was therefore compelled to accept terms because they coincided, at least on paper, with the terms previously laid down as representing “peace with honor.” Even so, if these terms had been meticulously kept or had been enforceable, there would have been an end to the war and “peace with honor.”

If the peace agreement was to have any chance to be effective, it was essential that Hanoi be deterred from breaking it. In a private letter to Thieu I had stated that “if Hanoi fails to abide by the terms of this agreement, it is my intention to take swift and severe retaliatory action.” At a news conference on March 15, with regard to North Vietnamese infiltration into South Vietnam and violation of the agreement, I stated, “I would only suggest that based on my actions over the past four years, the North Vietnamese should not lightly disregard such expressions of concern, when they are made with regard to a violation.”

In April, May, and June of 1973, with my authority weakened
by the Watergate crisis, retaliatory action was threatened but not taken. Then Congress passed a bill setting August 15 as the date for termination of U.S. bombing in Cambodia and requiring congressional approval for the funding of U.S. military action in any part of Indochina. The effect of this bill was to deny the President the means to enforce the Vietnam peace agreement by retaliating against Hanoi for violations.

•  •  •

Once Congress had removed the possibility of military action against breaches of the peace agreement, I knew I had only words with which to threaten. The communists knew it too. By means of the bombing cutoff and the War Powers resolution passed in November 1973, Congress denied to me and to my successor, President Ford, the means with which to enforce the Paris agreement at a time when the North Vietnamese were openly and flagrantly violating it. It is truly remarkable that, for two years after the signing of the peace agreement in January 1973, the South Vietnamese held their own against the well-supplied North, without American personnel support either in the air or on the ground and with dwindling supplies.

Throughout 1974 the Russians poured huge amounts of ammunition, weaponry, and military supplies into North Vietnam, and the North in turn poured them into the South. In March 1974 Hanoi was estimated to have 185,000 men, 500 to 700 tanks, and 24 regiments of antiaircraft troops in the South. With the threat of American air power gone, the North Vietnamese built new roads and pipelines to move their armies and supplies about. At the same time that the Soviet Union was arming Hanoi for the final assault, the United States Congress was sharply curtailing the flow of aid to South Vietnam. U.S. aid to South Vietnam was halved in 1974 and cut by another third in 1975. The United States ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham Martin, warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that such cuts in military aid would “seriously tempt the North to gamble on an all-out military offensive.” His warning was tragically prophetic.

The original plan of the North Vietnamese was to launch their final offensive in 1976. But then they stepped up their timetable. At the start of 1975 Phuoc Long province fell to the
communists, the first province South Vietnam had lost completely since 1954. There was relatively little reaction in the United States. Hanoi decided to make larger attacks in 1975 in preparation for the final offensive in 1976. On March 11 Ban Me Thout fell, and on the same day the U.S. House of Representatives refused to fund a $300 million supplemental military aid package that President Ford had proposed. Together with the earlier cutback of aid, this had a devastating effect on the morale of the South Vietnamese, as well as denying them the means with which to defend themselves; they were desperately short of military supplies and dependent for them on the United States. It also gave a tremendous psychological boost to the North. The North threw all of its remaining troops into the battle. Thieu tried to regroup his undersupplied forces in more defensible perimeters, and the hastily executed maneuver turned into a rout. By the end of April it was all over. Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City.

Hanoi had suffered an overwhelming defeat when it launched a conventional attack on the South in 1972. Then the North Vietnamese had been stopped on the ground by the South Vietnamese, while bombing by our air force and mining by our navy crippled their efforts to resupply their forces in the South. B-52 strikes could have had a devastating effect on the large troop concentrations that Hanoi used in its final offensive, but in 1975 Hanoi did not have to reckon with our air and naval forces, and thanks to ample Soviet military aid they had overwhelming advantages in tanks and artillery over South Vietnam's ground forces. After North Vietnam's victory, General Dung, Hanoi's field commander in charge of the final offensive, remarked that “The reduction of U.S. aid made it impossible for the puppet troops to carry out their combat plans and build up their forces. . . . Thieu was then forced to fight a poor man's war. Enemy firepower had decreased by nearly 60 percent because of bomb and ammunition shortages. Its mobility was also reduced by half due to lack of aircraft, vehicles and fuel.”

•  •  •

Our defeat in Vietnam can be blamed in part on the Soviets because they provided arms to Hanoi in violation of the peace agreement, giving the North an enormous advantage
over the South in the final offensive in the spring of 1975. It can be blamed in part on the tactical and strategic mistakes made by President Thieu and his generals. It is grossly unfair to put the blame on South Vietnam's fighting men, the great majority of whom fought bravely and well against overwhelming odds. A major part of the blame must fall on the shoulders of those members of the Congress who were responsible for denying to the President, first me and then President Ford, the power to enforce the peace agreements, and for refusing to provide the military aid that the South Vietnamese needed in order to meet the North Vietnamese offensive on equal terms.

But Congress was in part the prisoner of events. The leaders of the United States in the crucial years of the early and mid-1960s failed to come up with a strategy that would produce victory. Instead, first they undermined a strong regime, and then simply poured more and more U.S. troops and matériel into South Vietnam in an ineffective effort to shore up the weaker regimes that followed. They misled the public by insisting we were winning the war and thereby prepared the way for defeatism and demagoguery later on. The American people could not be expected to continue indefinitely to support a war in which they were told victory was around the corner, but which required greater and greater effort without any obvious signs of improvement.

•  •  •

By following the strategy I initiated in 1969, we and the South Vietnamese were able to win the war militarily by the time of the Paris accords of January 27, 1973. The 550,000 American troops that were in Vietnam when I came into office in 1969 had been withdrawn and South Vietnam was able to defend itself—if we supplied the arms the Paris accords allowed.

But the public had been so misinformed and misled by unwise government actions and the shallow, inflammatory treatment of events by the media that morale within the United States collapsed just when the North was overwhelmingly defeated on the battlefield. We won a victory after a long hard struggle, but then we threw it away. The communists had grasped what strategic analyst Brian
Crozier said is the central point of revolutionary war: “that it is won or lost on the home front.” The
war-making capacity of North Vietnam had been virtually destroyed by the bombings in December of 1972, and we had the means to make and enforce a just peace, a peace with honor. But we were denied these means when Congress prohibited military operations in or over Indochina and cut back drastically on the aid South Vietnam needed to defend itself. In the final analysis, a major part of the blame must be borne by those who encouraged or participated in the fateful decisions that got us into the war in the 1960's, and who then by their later actions sabotaged our efforts to get us out in an acceptable way in the 1970's.

•  •  •

By inaction at the crucial moment, the United States undermined an ally and abandoned him to his fate. The effect on the millions of Cambodians, Laotians, and South Vietnamese who relied on us and have now paid the price of communist reprisals is bad enough. But the cost in terms of raising doubts among our allies as to America's reliability, and in terms of the encouragement it gives to our potential enemies to engage in aggression against our friends in other parts of the world, will be devastating for U.S. policy for decades to come.

The signals it sent around the world were pithily summed up by an Indonesian cabinet minister who has a Ph.D. from an American university. International analyst Pierre Rinfret reports that the minister told him just after the fall of Vietnam, “You Americans have lost your guts. You had the hell kicked out of you in Vietnam. You won't solve your energy problem. We'll make you pay and pay for oil, and you'll pay. You've lost your guts. Vietnam was your Waterloo.” And for the Soviets, it meant that in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Angola détente became a one-way street.

In essence, the final climactic battle at the end of a struggle that had been going on for twenty-five years was decided in favor of the communists because when the chips were down, the Soviet Union stood by its allies and the United States failed to do so. As I stated in 1972, “All the power in the world lodged in the United States means nothing . . . unless there is some assurance, some confidence, some trust that the United States will be credible, will be dependable.”