The Atlantic and Its Enemies

had in effect lost the southern delta, and the northern delta, with its 2 million people, supplied much of the country’s food.

Colonel Cao had written a novel and talked windy French ideology; the French had not trained Vietnamese officers until late in the day and the soldiers, paid ten dollars per month in Saigon piastres, were not enthusiastic for the cause. On night patrol, for instance, they would cough, to warn Vietcong to keep away. If trouble came, American air power would be used, and the peasantry suffered from such indiscriminate firing. Vann became especially angry when a battle went hopelessly wrong at a village, Ap Bac, in the eastern part of the Plain of Reeds, early in 1963. The Vietcong had suffered from American helicopters in particular, but wished to show the peasantry that they had not been beaten. They had studied the situation, and worked out that, if they aimed in front of a passing helicopter, they would hit it; and they used captured American machine-guns. Now, holding a well- camouflaged zigzag line along irrigation ditches, which had small embankments and a dike on the outer edge, they threatened the South Vietnamese positions. On that side, what could go wrong, did — artillery firing inaccurately, American helicopter pilots resenting direction by South Vietnamese, landing in the wrong place, there to be shot to pieces; armoured vehicles pushed across impossible swamp; napalm dropped on peasant straw huts; Colonel Cao going into a huff and refusing to fight at all. A total of 350 Vietcong defeated four times their number, at that with fighter bombers, and five helicopters were lost. Reuters and Associated Press had been present to see the mess, and John Vann, in private, briefed them. He had been especially dismayed at the remoteness and serenity of the senior Americans — General Paul D. Harkins, swagger stick, gold braid, impeccable uniform, playing the part in a Hollywood movie about the Pacific war; the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, extraordinary two — dimensional energy, suit, writing down every figure he could in a little notebook for transfer into some machine that would mathematize everything (and produce the inevitable conclusion that the United States would win).

By 1963 much of the countryside was ungovernable, unsafe to travel in, and the Americans’ support encouraged the Catholics in charge of affairs to act high-handedly. In the summer, surrealism supervened. To the Catholics, the Buddhists were backward and absurd — a dozen and more squabbling sects, 750,000 monks who were, strictly speaking, parasitical. Their involvement in the sectarian protection rackets was dangerous, and they had links with the Vietcong. The Diem regime tried to control the Buddhists; a 73-year-old monk adopted the lotus position, arranged his saffron robes, covered himself in petrol, and struck a match. His example was followed, and Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu — wife of the president’s brother and adviser — clapped her delicate little hands in glee at the ‘barbecue’. Ugly episodes followed — the police manhandling protesting nuns, students, even young girls from school, some of them children of well-placed officials. That summer, there were further self-sacrifices by monks, and into this stepped forceful Americans, their patience barely under control. The ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, talked to the generals, and Diem was killed after a coup led by Duong Van Minh and despite an American safe- conduct. When, three weeks later, Kennedy was killed, his wife received a barbed letter of condolences from Madame Nhu.

The South Vietnamese now fell back, often enough, on passivity, expecting the Americans to do everything. One immediate consequence was an overloading of the American machinery: for instance, security had been left to the South Vietnamese, and a suicide car-bombing at the embassy in Saigon killed twenty and wounded 126, mostly Vietnamese, in summer 1965. Not even the glass had been reinforced, or covered with plastic. As Vietcong authority grew, so too did the number of Americans. By the spring of 1965 the South Vietnamese were taking $500m per annum, but this somehow did not give them a workable government. As William Bundy, a foreign affairs adviser, said, the government was ‘the bottom of the barrel, absolutely the bottom of the barrel’. There was even briefly a nonagenarian in charge. The problem as regards Buddhists continued — they sacked the American library in the city of Hue, for instance. It was not until the summer of 1966 that the Buddhist movement was (bloodily) crushed, but in towns and cities such as Hue it was the Vietcong that profited from the resulting hatreds. Meanwhile, South Vietnam became memorably corrupt. Import licences for cement were such that the entire country could have been paved over; theft from the PX was gigantic, even involving a computer worth two million dollars. Inflation had wrecked government salaries, so that corruption became the only means of survival — a provincial chief, with a family, could not survive on $200 per month, and there were networks of black-marketeering, involving wives, often enough, such that the Vietcong could obtain anything they wanted. Some Americans understood the situation well — Vann’s associate, Douglas Ramsay, who spoke the language, acquired the locals’ confidence, became a target for the Vietcong, and survived seven hellish years in their prison cages. The guerrilleros’ grip on the countryside was such that the roads to Saigon were mined, again and again, and Vann himself rode around in an unmarked pick-up, without ostensible defences.

The Saigon government considered just abandoning the five north-central provinces, more or less difficult to hold, given the enemy’s safe supply road through Cambodia. In black pyjama-suits, the Vietcong could even infiltrate American airbases and use mortars against them, knocking out a dozen planes; at the end of 1964, undetected, they encircled Saigon and planted a bomb in an American hotel for officers on Christmas Eve. The bombers had perfect intelligence, had had South Vietnamese uniforms, had even studied how these soldiers smoked. A little later they brought off a similar coup against an airbase at Pleiku. Against such an enemy, the American tactics of bombing and aerial machine-gunning from gunships were ineffectual, or even made the problem worse, because peasants, their homes wrecked, would support the Vietcong.

Johnson could not quite understand the passions that went into the Vietnamese resistance: why could Ho Chi Minh not just be bought off, with some enormous project to develop the Mekong Valley (1965) in return for concessions to end the war? He would have, with great reluctance, to increase the American commitment. In August 1964 he profited from an incident of naval attack in the Gulf of Tonkin to take authority for the war — Congress gave it, with few serious dissidents — and was determined to Americanize the war altogether: ‘power on the land, power in the air, power wherever’. On 8 March 1965 came a decisive moment. The Marines landed at Da Nang, on the central coast, and heavy bombing began against the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of tracks through the jungle. Overall, the plan was to bomb North Vietnam in such a way as to show Ho Chi Minh that he must give way, and three times the weight of bombs used in the Second World War was duly dropped — 6 million tons. On the other hand, Johnson was very anxious to spare civilians, and every Tuesday he held a lunch where he himself specified the targets and bomb weights. Quite often — sixteen times — he ordered pauses in the bombing, hoping that the North Vietnamese would come to terms as, in the end, the North Koreans had had to do. There were seventy-two ‘peace initiatives’. None had any effect. The American ambassador in Moscow at one stage sent a letter inviting negotiations, and it was returned unopened.

By the middle of 1965 there were 50,000 American troops on the ground, who had been well-trained for the wrong war, and the military authorities said they needed many more. By November 1965 there were 250,000. Soon there would be half a million. Their arrival transformed the country. A colossal effort was made, with extraordinary ingenuity in engineering, to build a base at Cam Ranh Bay, 200 miles from Saigon, with six panoramic jet bases, carefully protected from infiltration. The Mekong Delta was dredged, to create a 600-acre island used as a secure camp site; six deep-draft harbours were rapidly set up, the pieces, prefabricated, towed across the Pacific. The base had forty ice-cream plants, and enormous deep-freeze facilities, such that on alternate days the electricity in Saigon was shut off. All the Americans’ food was flown in, and the enormous PX arrangements (at Cholon, on the scale of Bloomingdale’s in New York) meant that there was an equally enormous black market in stolen American goods of all sorts. Saigon itself became disgusting — heaps of uncollected rubbish, dogs and cats rooting in them; rats and stray dogs everywhere; drug-dealers, whores, GI bars, refugees pouring in from the stricken countryside. By 1971 the Pentagon said one third of the men were on drugs.

At this stage, the Americans’ tactics were simple enough. As Sheehan rightly said, men of limited capacity, who knew their limits, would just go on doing what they knew they were good at; anything different would bewilder them. General William Westmoreland was one such. He replayed the Korean War. ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’ went ahead, with huge quantities of explosives dropped on what were known as ‘free zones’. Westmoreland gave press conferences at which he outlined the stages in which the war was supposed to come to an end — in this case, quite precisely, November 1968, while McNamara busied himself with his mathematics on the subject, and his deputy, Cyrus Vance, established an air-mobile cavalry division, with Huey gunships, firing rockets from side-pods. In November 1965 there were already battles of some scale with North Vietnamese regular soldiers who had come down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and, given the patience and ingenuity with which these troops waited in ambush, with Soviet weaponry, the battles were testing for the Americans. Their firepower could reduce fishing villages to rubble but there was nothing they could do to prevent the Vietcong from reoccupying the rubble, and there were grotesque episodes in which tactics of attrition were used in rice paddies, complete with ‘Zippo jobs’ on thatched village huts