We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (4 page)

TWO

Conversations with the Enemy

O
n the morning of the final day of battle in Landing Zone X-Ray, I stood looking down at the crumpled bodies of three North Vietnamese soldiers who fell, among many others, in a futile attempt to break through our lines. Dark bloodstains showed starkly against the yellowish uniforms, their limbs akimbo. I wondered who they were. Were they farm boys called by their country to serve, as so many of my own troopers were? What brought them here to this valley so far south of their homes to die on this battlefield? They seemed quite young, still in their teens. When my soldiers spoke harshly, with anger, of our enemies, I told them to remember that these men had mothers who would be shattered by the news of their deaths; that they, like us, had been caught up in great-power politics and were doing their duty as we were.

There were so many questions about the other side that lingered in our minds and, from the beginning of our decade-long research into the Ia Drang battles, Joe and I knew that somehow we had to persuade the North Vietnamese commanders to sit down with us and talk about how the battle looked from their side if we wanted the answers to our questions of why, and why there, in that remote valley. Although the prospects when we began serious work on our project that cold January day in 1982 seemed dim indeed, still we decided that when the time came we would make a strong push for this unprecedented opportunity to talk to our old enemies.

Not since the end of World War II in Europe had Americans been able to sit down with their former enemies and discuss in detail the battles they had fought—and it was possible then only because the German commanders were in our prisoner-of-war camps and had no real choice in the matter. No one likes to talk of their defeats, only their victories.

With that in mind, on the eve of our first return to Vietnam we bombarded the Vietnamese diplomatic mission at the United Nations in New York with requests to interview the North Vietnamese Army commanders who had fought against us in the Ia Drang Valley. We only knew the name of Senior Gen. Chu Huy Man, the overall commander, and Maj. Gen. Hoang Phuong, the historian who had written the North Vietnamese after-action report on the battles. The others who fought us—the battlefield commander, his battalion commanders and company commanders—were mysteries to us.

We met neither encouragement nor rejection from the Vietnamese diplomats, but that first trip would prove both challenging and frustrating in the extreme.

At the time some of our friends and some of the veterans of the battles were astounded that we wanted to go back to Vietnam and sit down and talk to those men who had tried hard to kill us all—and we them—in the valley of death. For us, doing our best to record the truth of those battles for history, it was vital that we talk to everyone we could find who had firsthand knowledge, and that clearly included our old enemies.

The first of our many trips back to Vietnam came in August and September 1990, when we interviewed military and civilian officials in Hanoi for the
U.S. News & World Report
cover story on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Ia Drang battles. Except for interviews with two remarkable Vietnamese officers, Senior Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap and General Phuong, our hope of talking to our actual opponents who fought us in the Ia Drang—and our stated goal of returning to the battlegrounds—failed to come to pass on that trip.

We returned again the following year, in October and November 1991, in the wake of the publication of Joe’s prizewinning article, and things went a lot better. This time we were granted the crucial detailed interviews with the enemy commanders we had sought.

We tape-recorded hours of conversations with Senior Gen. Chu Huy Man, who as a brigadier general was the de facto division commander in the Central Highlands in 1965; with Lt. Gen. Nguyen Huu An, who as a senior lieutenant colonel and my opposite number directed the attempts to kill us all from a bunker on the slopes of the Chu Pong Massif; and with Major General Phuong, the official historian of the Vietnamese army, who as a lieutenant colonel was sent down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to write a lessons-learned report on the Pleiku Campaign. Their comments and answers to our questions were a vital part of our research.

As important as those 1991 interviews were, for us the real prize was our return in October 1993, when, finally, we were allowed to return to the old battlefields with Lieutenant General An and two other North Vietnamese veterans of the battles. Traveling with us was the ABC correspondent Forrest Sawyer and members of his documentary film crew, who captured it all for a one-hour documentary first broadcast in January 1994 on the now-defunct
Day One
program.

The last trip that Joe and I made together to Vietnam was in October 1999, when we visited the old French battlefield of Dien Bien Phu on a journey that grew out of a compulsion to see and walk that 1954 battleground that marked the end of a century and a half of French rule in Indochina and the beginning of America’s equally doomed involvement in the affairs of the Vietnamese. General Giap told us that he felt if we Americans had studied carefully the lessons of the French and their defeat in Dien Bien Phu, surely we would never have gotten involved in Vietnam, and he urged us to visit and study the place where the Viet Minh under his command defeated the French.

Each of us has made one or two trips back to Vietnam without the other—Joe most recently in April 2005, when Vietnam was celebrating, in a curious fashion, the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon and South Vietnam.

As stated, the first trip back in 1990 was the most difficult both bureaucratically and emotionally. The tight-lipped Vietnamese indicated that we should fly to Bangkok and obtain our entry visas from their embassy. There we met our photographer, Tim Page, an Englishman and a legendary figure during the Vietnam War, if for no other reason than that he was shot or blown up by every party to the war—the U.S. Air Force, the Viet Cong, the South Vietnamese army, and the North Vietnamese Army.

Bureaucracies of every stripe are notorious for hating to have to confront a problem that has never been dealt with before, and upon our arrival at the Vietnamese embassy in Bangkok it was made amply clear that we were just such a problem.

They said they had no problem giving visas to Joe and Tim. They were journalists and journalists visited Vietnam frequently. But no American general had ever come back to Vietnam on anything but an official mission, and even then very infrequently. Why would I want to go back? What were my intentions?

Days went by as we waited for some official answer from Hanoi. The bills for our lodging and meals, paid for by
U.S. News & World Report
, were mounting as the Vietnamese embassy in Bangkok tried to get all the ministries—Defense, Interior, Foreign Affairs, as well as the Foreign Press Office—to sign off on letting us in.

Finally the press counselor in the embassy suggested we go see an Australian who lived in Bangkok—a businessman with very good ties to the highest levels of the government in Hanoi—who could better explain the problem. On a Sunday morning we sat down with the Australian in his luxurious home in the suburbs and over coffee he laid it out: Joe and Tim could go. I could not. Joe went ballistic and told the Australian that it was an outrage and a personal embarrassment to him, and if all three of us did not get visas then none of us was going to Hanoi. He asked the man to relay that message to his friends in Hanoi, and tell them that he would personally write every story about Vietnam for the next twenty years and they would not find it pleasant reading.

The Australian was aghast: “Surely you don’t want me to tell them that?” Joe responded: “Surely I do, and in precisely those words.” The phone rang at seven a.m. the next morning in Joe’s hotel room. The press counselor informed him that visas for all three of us could be picked up immediately at the embassy.

We flew to Hanoi on August 28, 1990, and were met at the airport by Nguyen Cong Quang, the director of the Foreign Press Service, who arranged our appointments and assigned two excellent interpreters to us.

Quang told us that our request to visit the battlefields in the Central Highlands had been denied because of “security forces problems” in that touchy region along the Cambodian border. We pressed for an appointment with General Man both officially and privately, but got nowhere.

On August 30 we had a long session with a “Mr. Bai,” who ran the North American Division in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and later would be appointed Hanoi’s ambassador to Canada. Bai was a hard man, clearly a veteran soldier and not a career diplomat. He told us he had fought the French and later commanded a prison camp for American and South Vietnamese POWs in the Mekong Delta. Among those in his charge was a U.S. Army major named Nicholas Rowe, who made a spectacular and successful escape from his bamboo prison, only to be killed years later by Communist assassins in the Philippines.

Bai told us that General Man was “out of town” and unavailable but he could arrange for General Giap to see us. He seemed bemused by our total focus on our war in Vietnam and suggested that we might profit from a visit to the Vietnam Historical Museum nearby. It was good advice, and during some slack time—waiting is a big part of any trip to the Far East—we toured the museum Bai wanted us to see. The high point for us was not the exhibits but finding a huge mural stretched across one long wall that was both a timeline and a map of Vietnam’s unhappy history dating back well over a thousand years. There on the wall we saw thick red arrows dropping down into Vietnam from the north, depicting half a dozen invasions and occupations of Vietnam by neighboring China, and some of those occupations lasted hundreds of years before Vietnamese patriots and rebels drove them out, again and again and again. The Chinese section of the timeline stretched out for fifty feet or so. The section devoted to the French and their 150 years of colonial occupation was depicted in about twelve inches. The minuscule part that marked the U.S. war was only a couple of inches.

It put everything into a perspective few Westerners seemingly had ever considered before marching their soldiers off into the jungles of a nation full of ardent nationalists who had demonstrated that they were fully prepared to fight for generations until the foreign occupier got tired of war, or choked on his own blood. It was rich food for thought as we contemplated the political decisions that had brought my battalion to the shores of Vietnam and into pitched battle with a people who had no more give in them than the wild Scots-Irish frontier folk of Virginia and Tennessee and Kentucky and Texas who were always ready to shoulder a rifle and fight America’s enemies when the time came.

We Americans had a strong taste of such warfare in the first century of our history. We, too, began with a revolution, an uprising against a distant and exploitative foreign colonial ruler. Then with the War of 1812 we had to again fight off the British, who invaded to recapture their lost colony. We fought Mexico in 1845 to settle the question of who owned what on our southern borders. Then we fought each other in the bloodiest war in our history to permanently weld a nation together as one people. To me it sounded like we had a lot of shared history with the Vietnamese people—except that their history was a thousand years and more of war and rebellion, while ours was only a couple of centuries or so. Our leaders would have done well to reflect on that before trying to pick up the mantle of the defeated French in Indochina.

Although we had bulled our way into Vietnam, it was becoming clear that the Vietnamese were going to have things their way: We were not going to get to interview the people we most wanted to interview or go to the one place we had to visit. Instead we were run through the typical round of courtesy calls on top government officials, just as any visiting foreign journalist would. Bai said the Vietnamese agenda was normalization of relations with the United States and a subsequent lifting of U.S. trade sanctions on Vietnam. He stressed that as far as the Vietnamese were concerned the war was over, a part of history, and it was time now to get down to normal business.

As if to underline the fact that it was their agenda, not ours, which would be pursued, they ran us through meetings with Prime Minister Do Muoi, Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach, and the Vice Chairman of the State Planning Commission, Le Xuan Trinh. We drank a lot of tea and listened to a lot of polite chitchat about their programs to entice foreign investment and diplomatic recognition by Washington.

The prime minister asked Joe to “take a message to President [George H. W.] Bush” that he hoped normalization of relations between the United States and Vietnam would come sooner rather than later. He promised that Vietnam would cooperate fully in resolving the cases of Americans missing in action from the war. Foreign Minister Thach also touched on the MIA issue, telling Joe that this was not just an American issue; that some 300,000 Vietnamese soldiers were also missing in the war. “My own uncle’s son is missing in action. I understand the suffering of the American families,” he said.

Normalization of relations between our two countries would wait for another president, Bill Clinton, and three more years; the debate was contentious and focused on demands for resolution of the MIA cases and Vietnam’s record on human rights and its treatment of both Vietnamese and Montagnard tribespeople who had sided with America during the war.

Meanwhile, knowing what we had hoped to achieve by this visit, the Vietnamese were wasting our time and doubtless enjoying our visible impatience. All of it seemed familiar to Joe, recalling his own experiences living in Asia for a decade and more, and he told me of a Rudyard Kipling poem he had engraved on a plaque that decorated his office wall during those years:

The end of the fight is a tombstone white