Kitabı oxu: «"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War», səhifə 2

The Pentagon’s secret study shows that “Kennedy knew and approved of plans for the military coup d’état that overthrew President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963.”27 The Ngo brothers were assassinated only a few weeks before Kennedy himself perished by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas (it is noteworthy that Kennedy had championed the Catholic anti-Communist Diem back in the 1950s, well before he became the US president). The Pentagon study points out that Diem’s ouster presented an excellent opportunity for the US to disengage from South Vietnam and the taint of propping up an oppressive and anti-democratic government, but the effect was that US officials discovered that the war against the NLF had been much worse than had been thought and decided that it therefore ought to do more, not less, for the South Vietnamese government. The Pentagon Papers concludes that “by supporting the anti-Diem coup the US had inadvertently deepened its involvement.”28

The argument for direct military intervention was based on the alleged aggression of North Vietnam, which continued to be cited as an example of Communist bad faith. US officials always claimed that the National Liberation Front, the so-called Viet Cong, was merely the southern arm of North Vietnam and was controlled by Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital. In fact, the NLF was founded and sustained as a southern organization of resistance to Diem—a CIA report of December 1964 confirmed the NLF’s indigenous origins at that late date.29 Butterfield, in his chapter on the origins of the insurgency in the Pentagon Papers account, confirms that “the war began largely as a rebellion in the South against the increasingly oppressive and corrupt regime of Ngo Dinh Diem.”30 He goes on to argue that North Vietnam was “concentrated on its internal development.” The cadre members who remained in the south after the division of the country were ordered to engage only in “political struggle.” They evidently believed that they would eventually wrest control of the country through elections or through the collapse of the Diem regime from its own internal weakness.31

In any case, the Pentagon study makes it clear that the provocation for war initiated with the Americans: “an elaborate program of covert military operations against the state of North Vietnam” began in February 1964.”32 Covert operations included U-2 spy plane reconnaissance, the kidnapping of people for intelligence information, parachuting psyche war and sabotage teams into North Vietnam, commando raids to blow up bridges, and the bombardment of coastal installations by PT boats.33 Bombing raids that began in Laos against North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao (Communist guerrilla) troops were a prelude to the bombing of North Vietnam by the Johnson administration “to bring more military pressure against North Vietnam.”34 The bombing of North Vietnam increased as the NLF rebellion was prosecuted successfully in the South.35 The inability of the post-coup Saigon government under General Khanh to compete politically with Hanoi negated the possibility of a political settlement between the Vietnamese themselves, because it was believed that “it would result in a Communist take-over and the destruction of the American position in South Vietnam.36 What American officials and politicians insisted was the North Vietnamese “aggression” that prevented a peaceful settlement must be seen in this context.37

The pretext for the hot war came with the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident (August 1964), in which two US Navy destroyers in North Vietnamese waters, on a spying mission for the NSA, were said to have been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. A top secret analysis of the incident completed in 2000, however, “concluded that the second attack, the one actually used to justify the war, never took place.” Instead, NSA officials withheld 90% of the information on the incident from the Johnson administration officials, except for what “supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers.” The alleged attack, based on this misinformation, led to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which justified President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on North Vietnam without a formal declaration of war from Congress, as required by the US Constitution.38

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed on August 7, 1964, unanimously in the House and with the only two dissenting votes in the Senate cast by Wayne Morse and Ernest Greuning, who would later become leading opponents of the war. The resolution gave the executive broad authority to act and had no time limit, but it gave misleading assurances that the US would not escalate its involvement. Senator Morse said the US had provoked the attacks on the ships in the Tonkin Gulf by escorting South Vietnamese boats too close to the shore, charged the government with a “snowjob” about the attacks on northern coastal installations, and correctly foresaw disastrous consequences. Historian Robert D. Schulzinger notes that between August 1964 and July 1965, the US passed the “point of no return” in Vietnam, with the role of troops changing from advisors to combatants and the number of troops doubling.”39

The shift from advisors to combatants is one way of officially dating the beginning of the American Vietnam War. In March 1965, General Westmoreland, in what Stanley Karnow calls “one of the crucial decisions of the war,” requested a detachment of 3,500 Marines to be based in Da Nang, purportedly to protect the air base, which was the beginning of his repeated requests for more men. The build-up would reach almost 200,000 men by the end of that year. This first contingent of American ground forces (i.e. not counting the Special Forces units and other personnel already acting as advisors to the South Vietnamese Army) stirred up no political opposition because President Johnson presented it as a temporary expedient.40 In accordance with Johnson’s newly aggressive posture, the era of the US advisors to South Vietnam in the first half of the 1960s therefore drew to a close, and with the arrival of these combat troops a new phase of the war began with optimistic but generally ineffective operations both in the air and on the ground, which lasted until the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive of 1968, when the earlier optimism began to be replaced by serious doubt.

General Maxwell Taylor, a commander in the Korean War, wanted these early combat troops to maintain merely a defensive role, authorizing patrols into a surrounding but limited area, but General William C. Westmoreland, an administrative commander with little experience in combat leadership, had no confidence in the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) and insisted that US forces actively seek out and engage the enemy—the notorious “Search and Destroy” strategy, which prevailed from 1965 forward. In one of few major battles of the war, the Army’s 1st Air Cavalry Division successfully fought the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) at the Ia Drang Valley, with heavy casualties on both sides. Thereafter, the NVA and NLF forces would avoid large battles with American forces, owing to the superiority of American firepower and air support in such confrontations, preferring to engage their enemy using hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, in which they were successful. On the American side, punitive excursions beyond the original perimeter soon escalated, accompanied by annual incremental increases in troop levels. The “Americanization” phase of the war had begun in earnest.

In the 1980s, conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan attempted to “rewrite” the history of the Vietnam War as a noble cause doomed by faint-hearted policies that ensured that the US would not prevail, a notion that many military men and civilians would claim thereafter, expressed in the popular phrase “they wouldn’t let us win.” What they evidently thought had been lacking was a policy that resembled Air Force General Curtis LeMay’s notorious advice to “bomb ‘em back to the stone age.” Given the international pressures of the period, however, of which Johnson and his advisors were well aware, unrestricted warfare waged on a civilian population was never an option. During the 1964 presidential campaign, the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater had talked about using nuclear weapons in Vietnam, making the incumbent Johnson appear so restrained by comparison that the latter was actually elected as the “peace candidate.”41 Johnson, however, soon gave into the pressures of the civilian advisors he had inherited from Kennedy and waged a more aggressive war to achieve the long desired but elusive military victory, including, one month before the landing of the first ground forces, a long-range bombing campaign, “Operation Rolling Thunder,” designed, in the expression of the period, “to bring North Vietnam to its knees.” In their persistence in the use of bombing to secure submission, however, the US leaders seriously underestimated Vietnamese endurance. Stanley Karnow wrote that President Johnson “eventually failed because he misjudged the enemy’s capacity to withstand pain, believing there was a threshold to their endurance.” 42

General LeMay, Defense Secretary McNamara, and presidential advisor Walt W. Rostow firmly believed in the effectiveness of long-range bombing to win the war. Significantly, all three men had participated directly in the long-range bombing campaign of Germany during World War II: McNamara had masterminded the campaign, LeMay had commanded it, and Rostow had selected targets. And yet, so-called “precision bombing” during that war had a poor record: the postwar U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey found that both civilian resistance and German industrial production actually seemed to increase after the bombing. It was the inaccuracy of this strategy that eventually led to “area bombing,” which increased civilian casualties, and, as Paul Fussell has suggested, led “inevitably, as intensification overrode scruples, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”43 The lone dissenter among Johnson’s civilian advisors was George Ball, who had apparently learned something from his participation in the bombing campaign of the earlier war. As a result of his dissension and persistent opposition to escalating the Vietnam War, however, Ball became increasingly isolated from Johnson’s “hawks” and from the president himself.

The other civilian advisors only disagreed with General LeMay’s call for the unrestricted nature of the bombing of the previous war. They supported bombing but insisted on selected targets to avoid population centers and the international censure that would surely follow. They mistakenly thought, however, that bombing would—again, in the face of evidence from the last war, which suggested that such attacks actually hardened the will of the enemy—weaken the morale of the civilian population and make Ho Chi Minh give in, or at least negotiate a settlement on favorable terms. The strategy of a limited bombing campaign would also have the advantage of being easier to control from Washington, where the targets were actually selected on a daily basis by Johnson and his civilian advisors.44

Air power would turn out to be militarily effective only toward the end of the US intervention, in the “Linebacker” campaign (1972) ordered by Nixon in response to the NVA’s major three-pronged offensive against South Vietnam after the withdrawal of nearly half a million US troops. Without the American presence on the ground, the NVA commander, General Giap (the victor of Dien Bien Phu), who had successfully waged the war for the north up to that time, finally adopted “the conventional, large-unit tactics that American air-forces are highly trained to counter.”45 This more unrestricted bombing campaign, however, which illegally extended the war into Cambodia, only temporarily saved South Vietnam from collapse. Despite earlier fears of losing prestige by abandoning the intervention in Vietnam, the bombing aroused, as critics had anticipated earlier, worldwide condemnation and accusations of genocide.

In 1967, a large operation involving thousands of American and South Vietnamese forces, called “Operation Cedar Falls,” was launched with the aim of finding the long suspected headquarters of the NVA.46 It failed in that elusive objective but it did uncover an extensive underground network of tunnels in the area called the Iron Triangle, which revealed the extent of the military resistance to Diem in the south. In the same year, McNamara testified to a Senate subcommittee that the bombing raids had not achieved the twin objectives of reducing the flow of supplies from north to south and undermining the morale of the North Vietnamese, which were their original justification.

The turning-point of the war has been seen by most commentators as the Tet Offensive of January 31, 1968, the all-out NVA and NLF surprise attack on South Vietnamese and American government installations in Saigon and other cities that was, according to historian David Schmitz, “arguably, the most important event of the Vietnam War,”47 for it changed the American public’s perception of the possibility for victory and forced the US government to reevaluate. At great human cost to the oppositional forces—more than 80,000 of their troops were killed or captured—units from both north and south drove into the seven largest cities of South Vietnam and thirty provincial capitals from the Delta to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) but were eventually repulsed after savage fighting. The Tet offensive was designed by the North Vietnamese planners to instigate a general insurrection among the South Vietnamese population, in which mission it failed. On the other side, the outcome was regarded by the US press as an American military victory but a psychological and political defeat.48 In the end, Halberstam insists, “it was not American arms and American bravery or even American determination that failed in Vietnam; it was American political estimates, both of this country and of the enemy.”49

The year of the Tet Offensive revealed that the war was tearing American society apart. In March, Lieutenant William Calley led Charlie Company of the Americal Division’s 11th Brigade into the group of villages known as My Lai and perpetrated the massacre of up to four-hundred civilians, an atrocity that shocked the American public. The general feeling was: how could our boys behave like Nazis? President Johnson, buffeted by a long series of setbacks, announced that he would not seek re-election. Violence escalated at home as protests against the war became ever more numerous and aggressive. In August, a group of antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic convention in Chicago was savagely set upon by Mayor Daly’s police as the nation watched on television. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke out against the war and encouraged a united effort by civil rights and antiwar organizations, was assassinated in April. And Robert Kennedy, who was expected to step in as the Democratic candidate to bring a halt to the war, was assassinated in June.

In November, Richard Nixon, with only 43% of the vote, was elected president, promising an “honorable” end to the war (as Eisenhower’s Vice-President back in 1954, Nixon had wanted to send American troops to bail out the French at Dien Bien Phu, an idea that was squelched by Eisenhower). Instead of withdrawing from the war, Nixon instead extended it for several more years, undermining the Paris peace talks by sending a secret emissary to reassure the South Vietnamese government and by ordering the covert bombing of Cambodia to destroy enemy supply routes and base camps, which set off nationwide student protests. During the Christmas season of 1972, he ordered the bombing of North Vietnam in the most intense campaign of its kind ever, again setting off protests all over the country. Nixon’s rhetoric of “peace with honor” could not conceal the continuing American goal of a non-Communist Vietnam, essential to his chief advisor Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik global strategy.50 It was, however, secret negotiations between Kissinger, who would become Nixon’s Secretary of State, and North Vietnam’s Le Duc, which began in 1970, that would eventually lead to the withdrawal of US troops in 1973.

With the implementation of Nixon’s policy of “Vietnamization,” in which military responsibility was handed back to South Vietnam, defeat was virtually inevitable, and in fact came two years later, with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, followed by the reunification of the country by the North Vietnamese military and civilian authorities. By that time, the war had claimed over 57,000 American, and an estimated one to two million Vietnamese and other Indochinese, lives. The first article of the Paris Agreement, which formalized the withdrawal, stated: “The United States and all other countries respect the independence, sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity of Vietnam as recognized by the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Vietnam.”51 That is to say, nearly twenty years later and all the attendant deaths, suffering, and costs, the United States was back to square one.

Ultimately, American policy in Southeast Asia was based on a misunderstanding of historical, political, and military realities. Despite the fears of American leaders, the press, and the public, there had never been a global Communist expansion controlled by Moscow. As Hobsbawm has argued, “there is no real evidence that [the U.S.S.R.] planned to push forward the frontiers of communism by revolution until the mid 1970s,” that is, by the time that the Vietnam War had ended.52

The war had far-reaching political, as well as economic and social, consequences. It divided the Democratic Party—with two presidents from that party leading the nation into Vietnam—to such an extent that it never recovered its reputation since the 1930s as the progressive party of working people. The economic boom after World War II ended in 1963 with the global oil crisis, but also owing to the immense cost of the Vietnam War, which resulted in part in the downward spiral of working people’s incomes that continues until today. The social and historical significance of the war continued to be felt long afterward.53 The American public’s confidence in its government had been dealt a mortal blow, which gave an impulse to the “New Right” in subsequent years and the candidacies of men like Ronald Reagan, who actually campaigned for government office on anti-government platforms.

ii. The Soldiers

In contrast to historical works, the imaginative literature of the war has focused on its soldiers, most of whom were ignorant of, or indifferent to, the momentous events that have been described in the previous section. More than two million Americans eventually went to Vietnam, only a small part of whom actually saw combat. Robert D. Shulzinger claims that the combatants made up no more than 20% of the US forces at any time, with 80% comprising supply and support personnel, but most of the fiction and memoirs written by ex-soldiers are, not surprisingly, by combat veterans. The number of women estimated to have served in Vietnam constitutes a small minority, between 8,000 and 15,000.54 The fighting men had an average age of nineteen, as opposed to that of twenty-six for the combatants of World War II, and over 60% of all the men killed were between seventeen and twenty-one.55 These youths came primarily (80%) from poor or working-class neighborhoods, with a proportionally greater number coming from rural or small-town environments.56

In his important sociological study of these soldiers, Working-Class War (1993)—from which these statistics are quoted—Christian Appy has demonstrated that the class-division between those who would fight the war and those who would protest it was in fact ensured by government policy. The reserve manpower for wars was historically designed to be made up of men in the Army Reserves and the National Guard, but neither of these groups, which are made up of older men from more secure socio-economic environments, was called up for active service in Vietnam: out of a million reservists and national-guardsmen, only 37,000 were mobilized and only 15,000 sent to Vietnam. In fact, many men tried to enlist in the National Guard as a way of avoiding the draft and being sent to war, including the (later) Republican President, George W. Bush, who, with his father’s influence, was admitted into the Air National Guard in Texas. Restrictive admission policies to these units were a way of ensuring that the underprivileged strata of society would not be able to avoid being drafted. Besides, as Appy argues, going into the army after high-school, or even before graduating, was perceived by working-class youths as much an expected and unavoidable part of their lives as going to college was for those of their middle-class counterparts.57

The US government apparently wanted to maintain the war at a low social profile. Medical deferments, for example, were easier to obtain by the more socially and economically privileged classes, and college students were exempted from military service through a policy of draft-deferments for those who were able to maintain a certain grade-point average in their classes.58 As the war ground on and the need for manpower increased, these socially-selective policies were not relaxed; on the contrary, the government continued to resort to the underprivileged, its primary replacement depot. Secretary McNamara’s program known as “Project 100,000” was designed to call up an additional 300,000 men who had been previously rejected from the armed forces because of low test scores. Through this program, youths of the underclass (80% high-school dropouts, 40% African Americans), would be given the opportunity to acquire employable skills and, incidentally, go to war in the place of students and reservists. These men did go to war (half of all the men who had entered the program did so, more than a third directly into combat), and they were both court-martialed and killed at twice the usual rate without acquiring the promised skills.59

It is notable that the patriotic motives (stop Communism, promote freedom) cited as the nation’s justification for going to war were admitted by only 11% of the enlisted men who volunteered in 1964 (a percentage that dropped to 6.1% four years later, when the war was more unpopular). Appy lists a variety of other motivations, social and cultural, that were given by the men who joined the armed forces: a) escape (bad home, mean streets, the police); b) a strong need, however undefined, for self-affirmation; c) solidarity with high-school and working-class buddies; d) a job-prospect in a future perceived as generally hopeless; e) assimilation of the media culture (especially war movies); f) pressure from fathers, uncles, and other men who had fought in previous wars; and g) a traditional cultural assumption of war as a rite-of-passage to manhood.60 It can be readily perceived that these various motivations may be interlocking joint influences, for example, (a), (b) and (d), or (e), (f) and (g).

Once these men, whatever their true motivations, were in the Armed Forces, they were taught, as part of the military’s indoctrination program, that they were helping an Asian nation to resist Communism, preserve democracy, and protect freedom. Their actual war experiences, however, contradicted those expressed aims at every turn. Communism turned out to have widespread popular support in both North and South Vietnam, even while the soldiers were told they were saving South Vietnam from Communist aggression. Accordingly, in the fiction of the war, the need to stop Communism tends to be invoked only by officers and “lifers,” as career soldiers were contemptuously called in the Army by the others, as if a career in the Army was a life sentence.

Soldiers newly arrived “in-country” learned that South Vietnamese civilians were often Vietcong or Vietcong sympathizers, and they naturally began to ask themselves why the South Vietnamese should be saved from an enemy with which they were in such obvious sympathy. Even worse, there was no training, or, for that matter, no accurate method for telling the difference between friend and foe, a circumstance that greatly increased the American soldier’s anxiety and suspicion towards his supposed allies.61 While the obstinate silence of the civilians whom the troops were supposed to be protecting was an important advantage enjoyed by the NLF (Vietcong), it was a source of constant frustration to the American soldiers trying to glean information about its intentions, whereabouts, and movements.

Given these circumstances, the veterans who emerged from this war were, in a number of important ways, unlike those of previous wars. There was a high rate of desertion. For those men who had terminated their tours, as many as 70,000 suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D.), a condition that in previous wars had been known as “shell shock” or “combat fatigue.” In addition, material and psychological problems resulting from the shortage of jobs in a less responsive economy, as well as an often hostile civilian reception, made it more difficult for these returnees to readjust to civilian life. Citing one indicator of social and psychological maladjustment to civilian life, Walter Capps claims that there were as many suicides among veterans from 1975 to 1990 as combat deaths in the war itself.62

For his part, Samuel Hynes has called the labeling of Vietnam veterans as victims one of the war’s necessary myths:

The story has been absorbed into the Vietnam story for the same reason that all war myths are accepted—because it gives events a comprehensible shape that is consistent with the myth of the war itself—the Bad War that was lost. Because the war was wrong, because children were killed and a country was devastated, men who fought there were devastated too.63

In support of his hypothesis of the myth of the veteran-victim, Hynes goes on to quote statistics showing that most men who went to Vietnam were not damaged by the experience and so their stories “have not entered the canon of Vietnam memoirs.”64 But one may legitimately ask how many men from this undamaged majority were actual combatants. Apart from the difficulty of assessing psychological damage, especially of men who do not overtly complain of it, the acceptance by veterans of their experience is perhaps true of any war, but it is also true that a great many Americans who fought in World War II and were supported by virtually the entire nation were also psychologically damaged—more, in fact, than were actually killed.

Many people, including veterans of earlier wars, have scorned the Vietnam vets as “losers” and “crybabies,” but the distress of these men was real and may partly be explained by the unique circumstances of the war. Psychological research has shown that killing in war actually causes more distress than the fear of being killed or seeing other men killed. General S.L.A. Marshall, the US Army’s chief military historian during World War II, found that the majority of men in combat did not even fire their weapons: “Fear of killing, rather than being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure in the individual,” Marshall wrote in his influential study Men Against Fire (1947), citing cultural upbringing and religious education against the taking of human life as the cause.65

Marshall’s findings were incorporated by the US Army into new training techniques to teach soldiers how to perceive their enemies as “targets” rather than as people and therefore be more willing to fire upon them. Trainees were also taught to fire at an area target like bushes or clumps of trees, rather than recognizable individuals, a technique facilitated by the newer, fully automatic weapons.66 The revised training regime was successful: by the time of the Vietnam War, as many as 90% of the men were firing their weapons. The technical success, however, had a psychological price: a study of veterans (1999) found that soldiers who had killed, or believed they had killed, people in combat had higher rates of P.T.S.D.67

Another way of making soldiers more willing to kill their declared enemies is through demonization, a technique that is more effective when dealing with a racial “other.” The Japanese during World War II, for example, were represented in propaganda as sub-human and so especially worthy of being killed. The Vietnamese enemy were subject to similar perceptions: dehumanizing epithets such as “gooks,” “dinks,” “slopes” and the like were routinely used among soldiers (as can be constantly seen in the fictional literature), and, like the Japanese in the former war, the Vietnamese enemy was seen as treacherous and fanatical, but there may be other cultural factors at work here that go beyond prejudice and racism. Jonathan Shay sees the roots of the demonization of the enemy in Biblical texts, using as illustration I Samuel 17, the story of David and Goliath, which he argues shows David’s lack of respect for his enemy. Shay’s contrasts this Biblical text with the duel of Hector and Ajax, in Homer’s Iliad, where neither warrior shows disrespect for the other.68

A great deal of blame has been assigned to American soldiers for morally despicable acts committed in Vietnam. The mother of Paul Meadlo, one of the men who participated in the My Lai massacre, is said to have complained: “I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer”. Meadlo was ordered by his platoon leader, Lt. Calley, to open fire on a group of civilians, and they both stood about ten feet from the victims, blazing away on full automatic: “It was pure carnage, with heads shot off along with limbs…” After a few minutes, Meadlo was emotionally unable to continue. Only a few children who had been protected by their mothers remained alive, but “Calley opened fire again, killing them one by one.”69