A Clash of Cultures Civil-Military Relations during the Vietnam War (In War and in Peace U.S. Civil-Military Relations).pdf

A CLASH OF CULTURES

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PRAEGER SECURITY INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY BOARD

Board Cochairs

Loch K. Johnson, Regents Professor of Public and International Affairs,School of Public and International Affairs, University of Georgia (U.S.A.)

Paul Wilkinson, Professor of International Relations and Chairman of theAdvisory Board, Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence,University of St. Andrews (U.K.)

Members

Eliot A. Cohen, Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies and Director,Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies, Paul H. Nitze School of AdvancedInternational Studies, The Johns Hopkins University (U.S.A.)

Anthony H. Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy, Center forStrategic and International Studies (U.S.A.)

Thérèse Delpech, Senior Research Fellow, CERI (Atomic Energy Commission),Paris (France)

Sir Michael Howard, former Professor of History of War, Oxford University,and Professor of Military and Naval History, Yale University (U.K.)

Lieutenant General Claudia J. Kennedy, USA (Ret.), former Deputy Chief ofStaff for Intelligence, Headquarters, Department of the Army (U.S.A.)

Paul M. Kennedy, J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History and Director,International Security Studies, Yale University (U.S.A.)

Robert J. O’Neill, former Chichele Professor of the History of War, All Souls College, Oxford University (Australia)

Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland (U.S.A.)

Jusuf Wanandi, co-founder and member, Board of Trustees, Centre for Strategicand International Studies (Indonesia)

Fareed Zakaria, Editor, Newsweek International (U.S.A.)

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A CLASH OF CULTURES

Civil-Military Relations during the Vietnam War

ORRIN SCHWAB

In War and in Peace: U.S. Civil-Military RelationsDavid S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, General Editors

Praeger Security InternationalWestport, Connecticut · London

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schwab, Orrin, 1956–A clash of cultures : civil-military relations during the Vietnam War / Orrin

Schwab.p. cm. — (In war and in peace : U.S. civil-military relations, ISSN

1556–8504)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0–275–98471–0 (alk. paper)1. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—United States. 2. Civil-military relations—United

States. 3. United States—Politics and government—20th century. I. Title. II.Series: U.S. civil-military relations.DS558.S389 2006959.704'31—dc22 2006015384

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Copyright © 2006 by Orrin Schwab

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may bereproduced, by any process or technique, without theexpress written consent of the publisher.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006015384 ISBN: 0–275–98471–0ISSN: 1556–8504

First published in 2006

Praeger Security International, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.www.praeger.com

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with thePermanent Paper Standard issued by the NationalInformation Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

TM

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To the soldiers of the Vietnam War, 1954–1975

The outcome of the war is in our hands; the outcome of words is in the council.

Homer, The Iliad

You will kill ten of our men, and we will kill one of yours, and inthe end it will be you who tire of it.

Ho Chi Minh, President of the DemocraticRepublic of Vietnam

The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust our own government statements. I had no idea until then that youcould not rely on them.

J. William Fulbright, U.S. Senator

They’ve got us surrounded again, the poor bastards.General Creighton Abrams,

COMUSMACV, 1968–1972

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Series Foreword ix

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Abbreviations xv

1 The Context of Civil-Military Relations 1

2 Intervention 17

3 Operations: Part I 43

4 Operations: Part II 63

5 Denouement 85

6 Alternative Means 105

7 Propaganda and Rhetoric 123

8 Continuity 143

Contents

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Notes 161

Selected Bibliography 183

Index 189

viii CONTENTS

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No other aspect of a nation’s political health is as important as the rela-tionship between its government and military. At the most basic level, thenecessity of protecting the country from external and internal threatsmust be balanced by the obligation to preserve fundamental civil liber-ties. The United States is unique among nations, for it has successfullymaintained civilian control of its military establishment, doing so from afundamental principle institutionalized in its Constitution and embracedby its citizens. The United States has thus avoided the military coup thatelsewhere has always meant the end of representative government andthe extinguishing of individual freedom. The American military is theservant of citizens, not their master.

This series presents the work of eminent scholars to explain as well asassess civil-military relations in U.S. history. The American tradition of amilitary controlled by civilians is venerable—George Washington estab-lished it when he accepted his commission from the Continental Con-gress in 1775—but we will see how military leaders have not alwaysbeen sanguine about abdicating important decisions to those they regardas inexperienced amateurs. And while disagreements between the gov-ernment and the military become more likely during wars, there is moreto this subject than the institutional arrangements of subordination andobedience that mark the relationship of government authorities and theuniformed services. The public’s evolving perception of the military is alsoa central part of this story. In these volumes we will see explored the fineline between dissent and loyalty in war and peace and how the government

Series Foreword

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and the armed forces have balanced civil liberties against national secu-rity. From the years of the American Revolution to the present, the resortto military justice has always been an option for safeguarding domesticwelfare, but it has always been legally controversial and generallyunpopular.

The United States relies on civilians to serve as most of its warriorsduring major conflicts, and civilian appreciation of things military un-derstandably changes during such episodes. Opinions about the armedservices transform accordingly, usually from casual indifference to acuteconcern. And through it all, military and civilian efforts to sustain popu-lar support for the armed forces and mobilize enthusiasm for its opera-tions have been imperative, especially when the military has been placedin the vague role of peacekeeper far from home for extended periods.The changing threats that America has confronted throughout its historyhave tested its revered traditions of civil-military relations, yet Ameri-cans have met even the most calamitous challenges without damagingthose traditions. The most successful representative democracy in theworld has defended itself without losing its way. We are hopeful that thevolumes in this series will not only explain why but will also help to en-sure that those vital traditions Americans rightly celebrate will endure.

David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, General Editors

x SERIES FOREWORD

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The Vietnam War presents a seemingly inexhaustible topic for histori-ans. This work interprets U.S. civil-military relations as they evolved in aconsistent fashion over the course of the war. By necessity, the groundcovered is broad, and my treatment concise. I have attempted to developa framework for analyzing the complexity of the subject matter. Civil-military relations are understood as encompassing political, social, cul-tural, psychological and international dimensions. The military relied onthe culture it inherited from two world wars in the twentieth century andmany other limited conflicts that engaged the U.S. armed forces through-out its history.

The most important problem for the U.S. military during the Vietnamera was that civilian society was simultaneously supportive and opposi-tional. The desire to support military action was demonstrated in publicopinion polls and congressional votes that gave the military sanction toprosecute the war. At the same time, civilian society imposed conditionson the military. The design of the war favored by senior military officerswas never implemented. As the war progressed, and its severe costs inlives, resources and international prestige became apparent, the divisionbetween military and civilian ideologies and cultures became ever moreconflicted.

Two cultures, one grounded in military history and institutions, theother civilian, founded in the political and social milieu of post–SecondWorld War America, diverged over the Vietnam War. The clash over be-liefs, expectations and interpretations of the war produced the policy

Preface

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course of four American presidents. Ultimately, the tragedy of Vietnamwas the mutual damage to both cultural systems. For the decision mak-ers, civilian and military leaders, the outcomes of their actions appearedpredetermined by the political context of the war. William Westmore-land and Creighton Abrams, the Vietnam commanders, were in a strictsense, captive to the architecture of the war that they in turn helped tocreate. In turn, the civilian leaders, American presidents and their advi-sors were also framed within the political nature of the war, a globalconflict with mutually reinforcing mechanisms of response and reactionbetween national actors.

xii PREFACE

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I would like to thank my editors, Heather Staines, editorial director ofPraeger Security International, and David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler, serieseditors, for their cheerful encouragement over the past two years as Ibrought this project to completion. I was honored to be invited to writemy second monograph on the Vietnam War. My first monograph,Defending the Free World: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and theVietnam War, 1961–1965, was brought to publication by Praeger Pub-lishers in 1998. Ms. Staines was also my editor, and I believe her timelyoffer in 1997 to publish the book has allowed me to continue my aca-demic writing, which has included the publication of Redeemer Nation:America and the World in the Technocratic Age, 1914 to the Present in2004. Both of these prior works have been referenced in this work.

I would also like to thank the Regenstein Library at the University ofChicago for their impeccable resources to a grateful visiting scholar andalumnus. The Vietnam Virtual Archive, based at Texas Tech Universityin Lubbock, Texas, was also an invaluable resource for me as it should beto all Vietnam War scholars. Finally, I would like to thank my colleaguesat Iridium Partners, who have more than tolerated my continued work asa scholar of U.S. international and military history.

Acknowledgments

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AID Agency for International Development

ARVN Army of the Republic of Vietnam

CI counterinsurgency

CIA Central Intelligence Agency

CIDG Civilian Irregular Defense Group

CINCPAC Commander in Chief, Pacific

COMUSMACV Commander, United States Military AssistanceCommand Vietnam

CORDS Civil Operations and Revolutionary DevelopmentServices

DIA Defense Intelligence Agency

DMZ demilitarized zone

DOD Department of Defense

DRV Democratic Republic of Vietnam

GVN Government of Vietnam

ICA International Cooperation Administration

JCS Joint Chiefs of Staff

JCSM Joint Chiefs of Staff Memorandum

MAAG Military Assistance Advisory Group

MACV Military Assistance Command, Vietnam

Abbreviations

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MAP Military Assistance Program

NFLSVN National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam

NLF National Liberation Front

NSAM National Security Action Memorandum

NSC National Security Council

OSD Office of the Secretary of Defense

OSS Overseas Secret Service

PAVN People’s Army of Vietnam

PF Popular Forces

PLA People’s Liberation Army

POWs Prisoners of War

PRC People’s Republic of China

PTSD post-traumatic stress syndrome

RF Regional Forces

RVN Republic of Vietnam

RVNAF Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces

SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

SVN South Vietnam

USAF United States Air Force

USG United States government

USIA United States Information Agency

USIS United States Information Service

USOM United States Operations Mission

VC Viet Cong

VCI Viet Cong Infrastructure

VVAW Vietnam Veterans Against War

xvi ABBREVIATIONS

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1

The Context of Civil-Military Relations

The Vietnam War in American political and military history remains anextraordinarily complex phenomenon. This book will attempt to providethe reader with a coherent examination of the context and evolutionof U.S. civil-military relations during the era of the Vietnam War(1961–1975). The general idea guiding this exposition will be the devel-opment of a comprehensive view of the military’s role and functionwithin the national security system as well as the larger social and politi-cal environment of the United States. The premise for this overarchingconcept will be an understanding of the military as an institution andcultural system connected organically to civilian institutions and culture.In sum, how Vietnam affected American military culture and institutionsalso had a mutual and interactive influence on American society.1

LEGACIES

To truly understand the Vietnam War, we must have in-depth knowl-edge of the historical and geopolitical environment that created it. Thelarger Cold War, between the liberal Western states of the North Atlanticcommunity, and the socialist states of the international communist move-ment, established the political, strategic and psycho-cultural frameworkfor the war. The Vietnam War was part of a succession of low intensitymilitary conflicts that engaged communist and anticommunist forces inIndochina. From February 1950, when Secretary of State Dean Achesonurged recognition of the French Indochina states premised on the goal of

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containment, to the spring of 1975 when Henry Kissinger and GeraldFord watched the fall of Indochina helpless to stop it, the United Statesworked unsuccessfully to prevent the victory of communist armies.2

Nonetheless, despite the commitment of several million troops over morethan a decade of active intervention, the United States lost its military en-gagement in South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. This debacle, however,must be understood in its historical context. That context includes boththe history of the Vietnamese nation and the history of the United Statesas it entered the Cold War.3

The first historical context to consider is the premodern history of theVietnamese nation. From the very beginning of its national history, Viet-namese nationhood has been defined by resistance to foreign invaders,from the Chinese and Mongolian armies of the Song and Khan dynas-ties, to the modern wars against the French, Japanese and American pow-ers. Within the traditions, historical traits and public memory of theVietnamese people, there exists this core pattern of clandestine resistanceto foreign rulers; and an abiding desire to preserve or regain “Doc Lap”or independence for Vietnam. Vietnamese civilization can be traced to500 years B.C.E., when a tribe living in southern China began to migrateinto the Red River delta region. Given its geographic proximity toChina, Vietnam has always had to contest its independence from its im-mense neighbor. From its earliest history, the Vietnamese sustained a pat-tern of warfare and clandestine subversion against foreign occupiers. Forover a thousand years, the Vietnamese remained under the control ofChinese emperors who incorporated Vietnam into the Chinese provinceof Jiaozhi. Over centuries, recurring rebellions were unsuccessful. Underthe rule of its giant northern neighbor, the Vietnamese could not preventthe incessant process of Sinicization. However, in the tenth century, theVietnamese won an historic naval battle against a Chinese fleet and es-tablished for the first time in a millennium a measure of national self-determination.4

Still, a small state on the border of the world’s most powerful empire,true independence for Vietnam or “Dai Viet” (the great state of the Viet)was fleeting. From the tenth century to the arrival of the French in thenineteenth century, the Vietnamese continued to contest their nationalidentity from numerically superior foreign enemies. These included theMongol armies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries who were de-feated by indigenous Vietnamese resistance in three separate wars. De-spite the obduracy of the Vietnamese, they continued to fall underChinese rule. Periods of independence were dispersed between periods oftributary status. The Chinese Ming dynasty and later the Manchu dynastymaintained Vietnam as a tributary state up until the nineteenth century.

2 A CLASH OF CULTURES

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Indeed, the name Vietnam dates only from the year 1802. It was then thatthe founder of the last Vietnamese royal dynasty, Nguyen Anh requesteda name change to Nam Viet. The Manchu emperor reversed the order ofthe words to its modern form, Viet Nam (Viet people of the South).5

The French, driven by traditional European imperial interests, came toIndochina in force during the middle of the nineteenth century. By virtueof its military superiority over the Vietnamese and their neighbors, theFrench established their empire. Between 1858 and 1893, France suc-cessfully incorporated Vietnam and the other Indochinese states, Laosand Cambodia, into its overseas dominion. French Indochina included allof historical Vietnam, the regions of Cochin China, Annam and Tonkin,and the kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia. The colonies of Indochinawere soon considered a proud jewel for the French global realm. Withthe importation of French technology and administration, the regionquickly became a rich source of tropical products for its Gallic mother-land. The Mekong Delta produced a huge surplus of rice for the worldmarket, as well as rubber, jute and sugar. French domination increasedcommensurate with the development of the colonial plantation economyand the introduction of French institutions. Catholicism, the French lan-guage and French culture spread among the upper classes of Indochina.Despite the early and continuous existence of nationalist movementswithin the Indochinese states, French rule and the diffusion of metropol-itan French culture remained strong through the end of French occupa-tion in the 1950s.

Active Vietnamese opposition to French rule began with the annexa-tion of Vietnam in the nineteenth century. However, the first major orga-nized armed movement of Vietnamese began in 1930, when foreign-basedVietnamese nationalists initiated attempts to begin a widespread insur-gency movement. This guerrilla warfare was led by the Vietnamese Work-ers Party under its founding leader, Ho Chi Minh, and a small group ofloyal cadres carried on the resistance to French hegemony until the Frenchthemselves were forced to surrender to Imperial Japan during the SecondWorld War. From 1940 to 1945, the Vietnamese found themselves incommon cause fighting the Japanese for control of their homeland. Thedefeat of Imperial Japan in 1945 left a power vacuum in Indochina. Ini-tially, British and Chinese troops occupied the French colony until Frenchforces under the newly constituted postwar government of Charles deGaulle, returned to claim Indochina for France.6

In the contemporary literature on the Vietnam conflict, August 1945has been recognized widely as the starting point for what Americansand Westerners know as the “Vietnamese War for Independence” or the“Indochina Wars.” That month, several important events defined the

THE CONTEXT OF CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS 3

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context of America’s thirty-year military involvement in Vietnam and In-dochina. By August 1945, the French colonial government and Army hadbeen replaced by an occupying Japanese Army. Just six months earlier,the overthrow of the French colonial administration by the Japanese inspring 1945 destroyed eighty years of French suzerainty in less than aweek. The remnants of the French military withdrew to southern Chinaas the Japanese imposed their control in the last months of the SecondWorld War.

The quick destruction of French rule gave strong inspiration to Viet-namese nationalists. They waited for the defeat of the Japanese empire inthe Pacific. As soon as Imperial Japan ceased military operations in EastAsia, popular Vietnamese forces, under the leadership of Ho Chi Minhseized control of the country. August 15, 1945, witnessed the immediatesuccession of Vietnamese authority over most of Vietnam. On September2, 1945, the same day that Japan’s Emperor Hirohito signed instrumentsof unconditional surrender on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, HoChi Minh declared Vietnamese independence. A jubilant crowd esti-mated in the hundreds of thousands swamped Hanoi, as the nationalistand disguised communist gave an impassioned speech. With verbatimreferences to the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the French Decla-ration of the Rights of Man, Ho announced the establishment of theDemocratic Republic of Vietnam.7

Ho made his declaration of independence with U.S. intelligence offi-cers, members of the overseas secret service (OSS) standing at thepodium. He was a de facto ally of the United States in the last years ofthe war, as American, British and Chinese forces moved against the Japa-nese empire on the Asian mainland. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)had believed strongly in the necessity of Indochinese independence fromFrench administration. Decolonization was part of Roosevelt’s postwarvision for the international system. With respect to French control of In-dochina, FDR had particular disdain. In the summer and fall of 1945,Ho sent letters to the Truman administration asking for recognition forthe new republic. Those letters went unanswered.

Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945, a month before the end of thewar in Europe. Even before his death, the shadow of Soviet dominationspread all over Eastern and Central Europe. In every country liberatedfrom the Nazis, Soviet armies installed pro-Stalin provisional govern-ments. Communist parties were ascendant everywhere on the continent.With Roosevelt’s death and the emergence of the Cold War in Europe,American support for Vietnamese independence waned. President Tru-man faced a different reality than his predecessor. In fashioning earlypostwar Indochina policy, President Truman had to consider the value of


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the French as an ally in Europe. In the fall of 1945, the French were des-perate to return to Indochina. Charles de Gaulle, the commander of FreeFrench forces during the Second World War, and the president of France inthe immediate postwar period, used all political means to pressure theTruman administration. In regard to France, Truman had to consider thedanger of the pro-Moscow French communist party. In the war’s imme-diate aftermath, the party threatened to win control of the country. Toprevent the second fall of France, this time to Stalin, Truman needed toconsider the critical importance of French Indochina to the political sur-vival of Charles de Gaulle.8

France’s critical importance to the reconstruction of Western Europe,and its fragility as a member of the Western alliance, gave preponderantweight to the American decision to allow the French to return to its In-dochinese colonies. De Gaulle met with Truman at the White House atthe end of August 1945. He assured Truman that his government wouldnot maintain the status quo in postwar Indochina. Rather, the Frenchwere intent upon establishing independent states in the region. Satisfiedwith the French president’s assurances, in September 1945, U.S. militarytransports enabled the return of French military forces to Indochina.Over time, American logistical support for the French expanded to directmilitary aid.9

VIETNAM AND CONTAINMENT IN EAST ASIA

During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, U.S. observers, principally diplo-mats and journalists, perceived correctly that the Vietnamese indepen-dence movement was dominated by the Vietnamese communist party.The Indochinese Communist Party was founded by Ho Chi Minh in1927. A 1930 uprising against the French was brutally suppressed bythem. As part of a wide purge of communists, some 90 percent of partyactivists were arrested, and many were executed. Despite the link be-tween Vietnamese nationalism and the international communist move-ment based in the Soviet Union, a doctrinal linkage between U.S.national security and Vietnam did not appear until the institutionaliza-tion of the Cold War in Asia.10

Vietnam became a vital interest for U.S. foreign policy as its integra-tion into the world communist movement became apparent. By 1950,Dean Acheson, secretary of state for President Truman and acknowl-edged architect of the U.S. Cold War containment system, recognizedHo Chi Minh’s regime as a long-term threat to U.S. interests. By then,shortly before the Korean War, the communist-dominated Viet Minh hadbecome a formal ally of the communist bloc. Both the Soviet Union


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(USSR) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) recognized the VietMinh as the legitimate government of Vietnam immediately after the vic-tory of Mao Zedong and the Chinese communists in October 1949. Afew years earlier, in 1945–1946, in the wake of the dismantling of theFrench Indochina regime, the Viet Minh had established successfully arevolutionary government opposed to the French Union. At that histori-cal moment, the USSR had no observable relationship to the region, andthe People’s Republic of China (PRC) did not exist. However, Vietnam’sconnection to the larger Cold War soon became more apparent. The“Iron Curtain” so described by Winston Churchill, became reality inEurope. In East Asia, the Chinese communists, long ignored by Stalin,obtained victory and a military alliance with the Soviet Union. With theCold War division of Europe and the sweeping impact of the Chineserevolution in Asia, Indochina and Vietnam’s strategic value became quiteevident to American observers.11

Between 1947 and 1954, the Vietnam Independence League (VietMinh), under the political leadership of Ho Chi Minh and the militaryleadership of General Vo Nguyen Giap, waged a war of attrition againstFrench Union forces. By 1950, in order to secure international and espe-cially U.S. support, the French installed the Vietnamese emperor, BaoDai, as the first head of state of the newly created Republic of Vietnam.U.S. support for France expanded within the wider geostrategic contextof the Cold War. The Chinese Revolution of October 1949, the ensuingSino-Soviet alliance of 1950, enlarged the importance of French In-dochina to U.S. interests. Foreign policy planning documents from 1950showed the strategic significance of Indochina within the arc of contain-ment in East Asia.12

By the beginning of the Eisenhower administration, U.S. strategic doc-trine had clearly codified the Indochina region as a vital interest of theUnited States. With the critical defeat of French Union forces at DienBien Phu in June 1954, a new U.S. role seemed apparent. The 1954Geneva Accords laid the basis for this expansion to defend the regionfrom communist domination. The accords provided for a limited U.S. ad-visory role in Vietnam. Between 1954 and 1961, that advisory role in-volved fewer than one thousand personnel. However, over $2 billion inmilitary and civilian aid was provided by Eisenhower in a determinedprogram of modernizing the Republic of Vietnam’s military, its agricul-tural and industrial infrastructures, including schools, roads, hospitalsand communication systems.13

By the mid-1950s, the United States had made a very substantial invest-ment in the defense of Indochina. Doctrinal reasons for U.S. interventionin Indochina were to protect the East Asian region from communism. As


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the Pentagon Papers—released during the Nixon administration, clearlyshow, U.S. national security doctrine during the orthodox phase of theCold War genuinely perceived a foreign enemy with global ambitions.Eisenhower, like his predecessor, Truman, and his successor, John F.Kennedy, believed the United States was involved in a war for national sur-vival. U.S. perceptions of the Soviet Union were stark. The Soviet Unionand its allies, despite their public diplomacy for détente and disarmament,were perceived intent upon an aggressive strategy to subvert all Western,pro-Western and neutral governments.

To prevent subversion and the expansion of world communism,national security intellectuals sought a counterstrategy. To protect the se-curity of the United States required the deployment of a vigorous coun-terstrategy, waged on a global basis to protect all noncommunist or “freeworld” countries from communist expansion. This policy, known ascontainment, required treaty commitments, military and economic aidand in some cases, direct military involvement by the United States toprotect the containment system. Containment in East Asia stretchedacross the “rim” of the Sino-Soviet bloc. To preserve the East Asian con-tainment system, all countries on the defense perimeter from Japan andSouth Korea in the northeast, to Taiwan and the Philippines in the center,to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Malaysia in Southeast Asia,had to be protected. The fall of any of these countries threatened the fallof all of them. This idea, popularized by President Eisenhower, wasknown as the “domino theory.”14

From the vantage point of history, the domino theory as prescribed inthe 1950s appears to be primitive social science. The notion that globalforeign policy should rely on a simple metaphor of falling dominoes sug-gests an uninformed knowledge of the world. Nonetheless, U.S. contain-ment strategy in East Asia rested on two principles: (1) the assumptionof world revolution driven by a monolithic enemy and (2) the cascadingeffect of social and political revolution across regions and continents. ToU.S. military and political analysts, the demonic image of global com-munism was consistent with reports from inside the communist bloc andwith American experience in the mid-twentieth century. The SecondWorld War involved a global war against an enemy that appeared tohave demonic ambitions and capability. Likewise, the postwar con-frontation with the Soviet Union and Communist China seemed to be aperfect analog to the war against fascism.

With the Korean War and the first Indochina War, containment doc-trine was legitimated in U.S. foreign policy circles not only for East Asiabut around the world. Through the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnsonadministrations, as the United States began to make larger and larger


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political and financial commitments to the survival of South Vietnam,containment ideology acted as a reinforcing mechanism. Even as the po-litical and military situation in Vietnam became more and more problem-atic, the doctrine strengthened U.S. resolve to go forward. Ultimately, thecenter of American resolve was grounded in the synthesis of historicalmemory and geostrategic ideology. The essential core beliefs of Americanpolicy makers in the domino theory and the expansionist threat of Sovietand Chinese communism became the cement for the American groundwar in Vietnam.15

COLD WAR NATIONAL SECURITY INSTITUTIONS

The American war in Vietnam would not have been possible withoutthe ideological underpinnings of American anticommunism. A necessarycondition for the ground war was the doctrine that situated America’s in-ternational survival upon the defeat of communist expansion in SoutheastAsia. However, the containment strategy that expressed itself as the U.S.-led ground war in the mid-1960s also rested on the development of post-war national security institutions. Beyond ideology, the organizationalprerequisites for major war were met by large military and civilian institu-tions. The executive departments of the federal government, reconstitutedin the 1940s to deal with global war, had the political and economic re-sources to implement complex international containment strategies.

Therefore, an essential context for the unfolding of the U.S.-Vietnameseconflict was the institutional structure of U.S. national security. TheVietnam War would not have been possible without the development ofpowerful military and civilian institutions that enabled the projection ofAmerican power across the Pacific Ocean to the remote area of In-dochina. To send, as happened in the 1960s, 750,000 soldiers, airmenand sailors to a theater of combat some 7,000 miles from the continentalUnited States, required a global institutional system prepared to supportsuch a deployment. Prior to the Second World War, U.S. military powerwas extremely limited. The Army and Air Force were comparativelysmall and inconsequential. Despite the nation’s industrial and financialdominance, two main sectors of military capability were not factors inthe global balance of power. Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,only the U.S. Navy was a strategic factor in world affairs. In pre–WorldWar II America, the idea of sending substantial numbers of troops to In-dochina or any place outside of the Americas was inconceivable. TheUnited States not only lacked a strategic rationale for moving forces ontothe Asian mainland, it had no means of fielding such a force.

All of these inherent constraints on U.S. military policy changed with


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the Second World War. In the space of just a few years, U.S. military in-stitutions expanded geometrically. The Army, a force of 140,000 troopsin the mid-1930s, had 8 million by the end of the war. The U.S. Navy, aforce that was nearly obsolete during the same time period, had moreships and planes than the rest of the world’s navies combined. U.S. mili-tary force and the organizational structure that supported it underwentpermanent expansion with the Second World War and the Korean War ofthe early 1950s. The early Cold War made the American “national secu-rity state” a permanent institutional system for the projection of militarypower on a global basis.16

By the Eisenhower administration, a bipartisan foreign policy supportedthe allocation of fully 10 percent of U.S. economic output to the postwar“peacetime” military. The professional armed forces of the United Stateshad become a monolithic entity, with massive modernization programs inplace. Whereas the 1930’s U.S. military had nothing but aging battleships,primitive tanks and propeller-driven aircraft, the 1950s military had anexpanding fleet of nuclear powered submarines, supersonic jets, aircraftcarriers and a huge Army of heavily armored tanks and other vehicles.The global force structure for U.S. military operations had grown expo-nentially. In the first decade after the Second World War, the Joint Chiefsof Staff (JCS) had made certain that the U.S. armed forces would be de-ployed in forward positions in the event of another world war. By themid-1950s, the United States had hundreds of overseas bases. The peace-time military of the early Cold War was endowed not only with newweapons systems but also, through military conscription, a nearly end-less source of available manpower. By the late 1950s, U.S. doctrine andmilitary resources had created the institutional environment for defend-ing Indochina with major deployments of U.S. troops, planes and ships.The concept behind an active military response to perceived communistexpansion was enshrined in the national security doctrine of the Eisen-hower administration:

A central aim of U.S. policy must be to deter the Communists fromuse of their military power. . . . If this purpose is to be achieved, theUnited States and its allies in the aggregate will have to have, for anindefinite period, military forces with sufficient strength, flexibilityand mobility to enable them to deal swiftly and severely with Com-munist overt aggression in its various forms and to prevail in gen-eral war should one develop. In addition, the deterrent is muchmore likely to be effective if the United States and its major alliesshow that they are united in their determination to use militaryforce against such aggression.17


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During the Truman administration the formal mechanisms for globalpower were institutionalized by congressional legislation. The postwar na-tional security state replaced the Second World War’s Department of Warwith a Department of Defense. The Truman and Eisenhower administra-tions developed the National Security Council (NSC) as a WhiteHouse–based office to manage the expanded role of the United States in in-ternational affairs. The postwar State Department increased its analyticalbranch, the bureau of intelligence, and added new institutions for manage-ment of world and international public opinion and the distribution of in-ternational aid. The postwar intelligence community was institutionalizedby the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947 and theDefense Department’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 1961.18

By the early 1960s, the Kennedy administration included a well-defined institutional system that integrated global military operationswith political, economic and intelligence functions. Cold War nationalsecurity involved the production of weapon systems, human and elec-tronic intelligence, social science and military doctrine, and a managerialideology that supervised the development of foreign policy. To a degree,all policy decisions by the U.S. government were mediated by a pro-grammatic agenda that included the varied political interests withinAmerican society. Kennedy’s Vietnam policy and later the policy of Lyn-don Johnson were vetted by the institutions that governed Cold War for-eign policy. In practical terms, Kennedy’s and Johnson’s national securityinstitutions were responsible for maintaining the political significance ofVietnam and Indochina to the Cold War containment system and to pro-duce and implement plans that supported the involvement of the UnitedStates in the preservation of its Indochina allies.

MILITARY CULTURE AND NATIONAL SOCIETY

The national security state that launched the Vietnam War could nothave existed or have been so dominant without broader support fromAmerican society. The Second World War had forced the total mobiliza-tion of American civil society. Sixteen million men and women, out of apre-war population of 130 million, served in uniform. Millions of othersworked in defense industries and supported the war effort through amyriad of activities. When the United States began the major deploymentof troops into Vietnam, perhaps the greatest source of public supportcame from the vast socialization of American society to war that beganin the early 1940s and continued to the beginning of the Americanground war in the mid-1960s. In the largest sense, global war in thetwentieth century had militarized American society and culture.19


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Postwar American society glorified the U.S. armed forces and militaryculture. Leading American actors gained recognition for portrayingheroic soldiers, seamen and airmen, who defeated the Nazi and Japaneseaggressors of the Second World War. Popular war movies from the 1940sthrough the 1960s commemorated the character of the American soldier,the intensity of American patriotism and the moral certainty of Americansociety in fighting overseas. The McCarthy era, created not only a cli-mate of fear for the political left, it also extolled the role of the militaryas the guardians of the country and the necessity for using force againstcommunism. To be “soft on communism,” became the ultimate politicalepithet, used by members of both Republican and Democratic parties tode-legitimate electoral opponents. Pride in military history and a perva-sive xenophobic anticommunism made militarism a fashionable motif. In1964, Barry Goldwater’s famous speech to the Republican Party conven-tion delegates implied an absolute faith in a military solution to the ColdWar. Goldwater lost his election to Lyndon Johnson, but the politicalposition he represented, and the militaristic mode of understanding theworld that he employed, were important factors in the prosecution of theVietnam War.20

Along with Goldwater’s conservative pro-war ideology, other condi-tions reinforced the military’s cultural appeal. Universal military con-scription in the postwar era continued the socialization pattern forAmerican males that supported the Cold War and the supremely popularmilitary ethos. When the deployment of U.S. forces took place in themid-1960s, American society had acculturated an entire postwar genera-tion to support large military operations in the defense of ideologicalgoals. Defending the free world through force of arms, however thatworld was defined by America’s political and media establishment, wasendemic to a militarized society and national culture. Prior to America’sinvolvement in the Vietnam War, the vision of a heroic military por-trayed by Hollywood and recounted in family dinners by millions of warveterans, was fully embedded within American popular consciousness.That vision or script, so broadly and deeply defined in the public identityof Cold War America, created a necessary foundation for the beginningof the Vietnamese-American conflict.21

HISTORICAL MEMORY:THE MUNICH ANALOGY

For many historians, historical memory, namely, a culture’s represen-tation of the past is an important concept. In a sense, both Vietnam andthe United States were captive to memory. In the case of Vietnam, theirapproach to America was not substantially different than their strategy


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vis-à-vis the invading Mongol armies of the Middle Ages. In the case ofAmerica, Vietnam, like the Cold War in general, was defined by thememory of the Second World War. The Vietnam War literature includesthe famous concept of the “Munich analogy.” Munich refers to theworld historical event that occurred in Germany in fall 1938. AdolfHitler, chancellor of the German Reich, with the support of Benito Mus-solini, leader of fascist Italy, met with British and French prime ministersNeville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier. The infamous “MunichPact” allowed Germany to dismember Czechoslovakia and led directly tothe Second World War. The betrayal of an ally became indelibly markedin America’s historical memory. America’s impotence in the face of anaggressive enemy became a symbol and an unconscious mechanism withinAmerican culture to resist a repetition of Munich. For the generationsthat fought the Second World War, the historical memory of Munich andthe entire experience of the war shaped their response to all crises in thepost-1945 international system.22

The Korean War, launched suddenly in late June 1950, did not appearto a neutral observer to be a battleground for the United States. U.S.forces supported the Republic of Korea in the southern part of the Ko-rean Peninsula, providing support for a free world ally. However, Korea,according to publicly declared U.S. foreign policy, was not a vital interestof the United States. Neither the Joint Chiefs of Staff nor State Depart-ment viewed Korea within the Pacific defense perimeter. Korea was notdeemed vital to the reconstruction of Japan nor the safety of the PacificFleet. In practical terms, the loss of Korea would have made little differ-ence to U.S. national security, at least according to national security doc-trine as of June 1950.23

Yet, within hours of the invasion, the Truman administration re-sponded with outrage and a determination not to let the North Koreaninvasion succeed. The Munich syndrome, not to appease an aggressor,was, in the case of the Korean War, a reflexive response to an act of overtaggression by an enemy country. For Harry Truman and his secretary ofstate, Dean Acheson, ignoring the unilateral action of the North KoreanArmy or negotiating the unification of Korea in the face of such aggres-sion, would have been an unthinkable act of appeasement.

Similarly, the psychological response to Vietnam in the 1950s and1960s was in the classic pattern of the Munich analogy or syndrome. Un-willing to repeat the appeasement that led to Hitler’s dangerous victoriesin Europe, American policy makers and the American public, condi-tioned by Munich’s iconographic historical memory, supported an offen-sive response to the crisis in South Vietnam. This same reaction pattern,demonstrated in determined public policy speeches as well as internal


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discussions by high-level decision makers, was apparent in U.S. actionsand rhetoric in other international imbroglios, from the Berlin, Formosaand Laos crises of the Eisenhower administration, to the multitude ofevents under other Cold War presidents. In particular, the presidencies ofJohn F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reaganwere brimming with the Munich syndrome. Even the post–Cold Warpresidencies of George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton and George Bush Jr., showthe continuing relevance of Munich as a cultural symbol and historicalmemory; this despite the disaster of the Vietnam War and countervailing“Vietnam syndrome” that appeared to mitigate its impact on Americansociety and foreign policy.24

THE ROLE OF THE MILITARY

The military’s role in the Vietnam War was complex, reflecting bothits political and operational responsibilities in the conflict. The politicalrole of the U.S. military reflected the institutional orientation of the U.S.armed forces as a conservative and nationalist entity within American so-ciety. For senior officers in all four major branches of the U.S. military,the Vietnam War was a critical challenge against the nation’s primaryenemy, international communism. In the origins or context of the con-flict, military advice to the White House and the civilian departments ofthe executive branch, demonstrated a powerful preference for engagingthe enemy in Indochina.

From the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s, during the transitionfrom advisory roles to combat deployments, senior military officers inthe U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, argued for the sus-tained use of U.S. military force throughout the Indochina theater of op-erations. Working within the Clausewitzian theory of war taught bymajor war colleges and practiced by the U.S. armed forces since the nine-teenth century, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and its lower commands, com-mander in chief Pacific Command (CINCPAC) and Military AssistanceCommand, Vietnam (MACV), recommended large-scale integrated mili-tary operations against the North Vietnamese, Viet Cong and any otherforces allied with them. This was a constant and reiterated theme inmilitary-civilian communications about Vietnam and Indochina.25

The influence of the nineteenth-century German military historian andtheorist on U.S. military doctrine cannot be overestimated. The centralprinciples of operational and strategic art by all modern Western armiesreference Carl von Clausewitz’s most famous work, On War. In onebook, Clausewitz has given students and practitioners of war in theWestern world a vast encomium of military knowledge. He defined the


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practice of war as the execution of essential principles of military organi-zation and tactics. For Clausewitz, military culture and the institution ofthe Army were a unique and all-encompassing reality:

War is a special business, and however general its relations may be,and even if all the male population of a country, capable of bearingarms, exercise this calling, still it always continues to be differentand separate from the other pursuits which occupy the life ofman.—To be imbued with a sense of the spirit and nature of thisbusiness, to make use of, to rouse, to assimilate into the system thepowers which should be active in it, to penetrate completely intothe nature of the business with the understanding, through exerciseto gain confidence and expertness in it, to be completely given up toit, to pass out of the man into the part which it is assigned to usto play in War, that is the military virtue of an Army in the indi-vidual.26

As a practical matter, civilian politics acted as a brake upon all mili-tary requests for escalation. Driven by two hundred years of Clausewitz-ian war theory, military officers trained at West Point always aimed at thequick massive application of force against the enemy. The purpose ofmost civilian authority was to limit military aspirations for total waragainst civilian fears of just that. Over years of debate and constantchanges in operational circumstances, military requests were agreed to inan incremental fashion. Nonetheless, during the Vietnam War conflict ofthe 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, from the beginning of the strategic com-mitment to Indochina, military and civilian actors within the executivebranch engaged in a constant mainly oppositional dialogue.27

The opposition between military and civilian views of the conflict wasset in the context of the larger Cold War. Cold War ideology, national se-curity institutions and military culture set the military’s role in opposi-tion to the diplomatic and managerial roles of the civilian branches of thegovernment. If the U.S. military had control over America’s conduct ofthe war in Vietnam, the engagement would have been very different. Yet,that was not to be. The context of the war reflected the architecture ofAmerican society and culture in the post–Second World War world. Itwas a context framed by the nuclear age and social forces within the do-mestic system of the United States.

From the beginning of the Kennedy administration through the fall ofthe three Indochina regimes during the Ford administration—over four-teen years of international and American history—military officers, civil-ian strategists, diplomats and statesmen, struggled over the direction of


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Indochina policy. Four American presidents attempted to reconcile mili-tary solutions with political solutions to the conflict. The military playedits role under the immense pressures of war and political dissent. Mili-tary institutions and individuals suffered under these twin vices, tryingto win a war that in practical terms had become unwinnable. The “les-sons learned” from the war, as military analysts calculated in the yearsimmediately after its denouement, has shaped modern U.S. strategic doc-trine for decades. The following chapters describe the experiences of themilitary in more detail, showing how military and civilian approaches tothe war reinforced strategic and operational compromises that in the endresulted in a comprehensive defeat for the United States and its military.


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The Kennedy administration came into office without a specific agendafor Indochina other than to continue the policies of the EisenhowerWhite House. Nonetheless, the pull of containment policy vis-à-vis theregion was irresistible. The day before his inauguration, Kennedy metwith Eisenhower at the White House to discuss national security con-cerns. Eisenhower’s most pressing concern, after eight years in the ovaloffice was the Laotian crisis of January 1961. Eisenhower believed thatthe victory of Pathet Lao forces over the existing pro-Western regimewould doom Indochina to communist invasion and control. The Kennedyadministration took this under advisement and consulted immediatelywith the JCS.1

The dialogue between the Kennedy White House and the JCS overLaos in spring 1961 was a dry run for the civilian-military dialogue overIndochina during the Vietnam War. Clearly, had Kennedy taken the ad-vice of the JCS in the first year of his administration, a huge deploymentof U.S. forces to the Indochina region would have occurred. As discussedin chapter 1, the strategic ideology of senior military officers was Clause-witzian. Based upon more than a century of large field Army experience,the JCS understood the application of military force to require the pow-erful directed use of force to accomplish specific objectives. If Kennedywanted to intervene in Laos, a decidedly unfavorable area for U.S. mili-tary forces, the JCS recommended a force of over 100,000 men. Thepresident did not accept the JCS views on Laos, and he quickly decidedto defer to diplomacy, and had Averill Harriman, his undersecretary of

2

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state for political affairs and a key advisor, lead a U.S. diplomatic team tonegotiate an end to the Laotian Civil War.2

Kennedy and later Lyndon Johnson were at permanent odds with theJCS over war strategy in Indochina and in the larger Cold War. The cen-tral idea of military realism, the strategic vision of the U.S. military, wasthat the international system was governed by power relations; to pre-serve America’s strategic power, sufficient force had to be deployed todeter and if necessary to defeat national adversaries. The Soviet Unionand the People’s Republic of China were defined as enemies of the UnitedStates, comparable to the fascist states of the Second World War. JCSdoctrine required the forward deployment of forces in East Asia and Eu-rope to meet the presumed expansionist designs of these twin enemies.

The first year of the Kennedy administration was marked by Cold Warcrises over control of Laos, Cuba, the newly independent Congo and thecity of Berlin. Kennedy was advised to take major military action in allof these conflicts if particular crises escalated beyond certain points. Se-nior Army, Air Force, Navy and marine commanders premised theiradvice on their military experience and the presumed overwhelming su-periority of American arms. While the State Department viewed the useof nuclear weapons to be a doomsday device, only to be contemplated inthe event of global nuclear conflict, the JCS thought otherwise. In severalmemorandums drafted in March 1961, the chairman of the JCS, LymanLemnitzer, argued for the need to include nuclear weapons as an optionin limited warfare. To do otherwise, he suggested, would compromisethe ability of the United States to implement the doctrine of “flexible re-sponse,” that is, to deter the communists from engaging in regional con-flicts as in Indochina.3

The uncompromising pro-war stance of the JCS was in stark contrastto the thinking of the congressional leadership. The most powerful manin Congress in 1961 was Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana. He hadfamiliarity with Asia having served there for years while he was in theNavy. A strict opponent of the French Indochina war, he had notchanged his mind in 1961 with respect to Vietnam. A profound fear ofChinese intervention framed bipartisan congressional opinion during theKennedy administration. To the degree that sending U.S. combat forcesto South Vietnam would be perceived by the Communist Chinese as athreat from their southern flanks, Mansfield and his colleagues were un-willing to authorize or finance U.S. forces.

The military, wedded to the strategic realism of its culture and institu-tions, did not view the Soviets or the Chinese as direct threats to militarysuccess in Indochina. The greater danger for men such as Air Force Chiefof Staff Curtis Le May and General of the Army and chairman of the JCS


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Lyman Lemnitzer was to allow Indochina to fall to international com-munism. “What do we have to do to win,” Lemnitzer asked in May 1961in a telegram to his colleagues in the Pentagon. He referred to the cau-tious strategy that the Kennedy administration was taking in South Viet-nam. Diem was in trouble, and U.S. military assistance needed to beexpanded. For Lemnitzer, piecemeal approaches to military problemswere antithetical to accepted doctrine. If division level deployments wererequired to secure a strategic asset, that is, South Vietnam, then doctrineindicated that the only logical and feasible solution was to commit what-ever resources were necessary to “win.”4

THE CREATION OF MACV

An important legacy of the Kennedy administration for the Vietnamconflict was the creation of an expanded in-country organization to co-ordinate U.S. military operations. The Military Assistance Command,Vietnam (MACV), replaced Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG)in 1962 as the principal field organization for U.S. armed forces in Viet-nam. After the general review of Vietnam policy in November 1961, itwas deemed necessary to create a larger military advisory system to accom-plish U.S. operational and strategic objectives. To protect South Vietnamfrom the growing Viet Cong insurgency, a larger military organization withauthority at the same level as the U.S. diplomatic mission was needed. U.S.policy documents from the period indicated a consensus view in Washing-ton that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) had to be expandedto over two hundred thousand men. To improve the overall combat capa-bilities and the size of the ARVN, the advisory effort had to be upgradedwith a larger field organization commanded by a more senior military offi-cer. Paul Harkins, a lieutenant general of the Army, was sent to Vietnam asthe first MACV commander.

Rivalries between the service branches compromised the effectiveness ofMACV as a unified center of command. In theory, all military operationsin the Indochina theater were supposed to be authorized by MACVthrough the chain of command in Hawaii (CINCPAC headquarters). Inreality, MAAG continued to coexist with MACV until June of 1964.Of greater consequence was that military operations were coordinatedthrough separate CINCPAC commands. Air Force, Army and MarineCorps Pacific Commands delivered orders in the Indochina region to theirrespective MACV service commands. Simultaneously, MACV under thetheater commander retained control over the field of operations. This verycomplicated parallel command structure violated basic war doctrine,which required unity of command as a fundamental operational principle.5

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Nonetheless, the political component of MACV enabled the MACVcommander to support the broad political and strategic objective of theU.S. military in Indochina. By having a unified field commander for allmilitary operations in theater, the civilian sector of the government aswell as the American public could focus on the military as a distinct andimportant actor in U.S. intervention. When the MACV commander,William Westmoreland, requested a major increase in ground forces in1965, and in effect, a major political commitment by the Johnson ad-ministration to a prolonged ground war with U.S. combat units, the po-litical role of MACV was quite important. It established a focus for themilitary as an actor in the war effort, even if major political decisionsconcerning the war were made in Washington.

The expansion of the ARVN and the creation of MACV in early1962, coincided with an aggressive new program of pacification. Alongwith the ability to find and engage main force National Liberation Front(NLF) units, the Diem regime understood that the key to success restedwith the ability of the South Vietnamese government to defeat the enemyat the village level. Unless the Government of Vietnam (GVN) could denythe NLF access to the poor rural farmers who were the base of both itspolitical and military organizations, the ARVN would never be able todefeat the insurgency. A protected or fortified hamlet, adopted fromBritish counterinsurgency in Malaya, became the focus of Diem’s vigor-ous if ill-fated pacification program.

STRATEGIC HAMLET PROGRAM

A Vietnamese hamlet consists of a cluster of huts in an agriculturalsettlement. Hamlets comprised the smallest administrative unit in Viet-nam. In the early 1960s, there were some 12,000 hamlets in South Viet-nam. In turn, these communities belonged to villages; between three andfive hamlets comprised a rural village. The Strategic Hamlet program,was adopted by the Diem government as their primary tool for denyingthe NLF their essential means of recruitment and logistical support in ru-ral Vietnam. By exclusion or separation from the Vietnamese peasants,the GVN assumed that the communist insurgency would weaken andeventually die. Based on the successful British counterinsurgency modelused in Malaya during the 1950s, the Diem regime began a vigorouscounterinsurgency (CI) program based on the concept of fortified vil-lages with trained local militias.6

Presented to policy makers as a comprehensive pacification strategyfor all of South Vietnam, the Strategic Hamlet program received the en-thusiastic endorsement of the Kennedy Administration. President Kennedy


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was deeply impressed with the new techniques of counterinsurgencywarfare. In 1962, the Strategic Hamlet program was at the center ofKennedy’s counterinsurgency program in South Vietnam. The adminis-tration was looking for a way of winning the war in the countrysidewithout deploying large numbers of troops, either South Vietnamese orUnited States. Key civilian advisors, including Edward Lansdale, one ofthe most experienced military advisors, with a long history in Vietnam,championed the Strategic Hamlet program, as did Roger Hilsman, thedirector of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.Civilian enthusiasm for the hamlet program centered on their belief inthe utility of village based self-defense. State Department and South Viet-namese officials believed they could successfully implement the Britishprotected village program that had been successful in Malaya during the1950s. The British military advisor, J. Walter Thompson, visited SouthVietnam as a guest of the U.S. advisory team and the administration ofNgo Dinh Diem. His advice, carried back to Washington by the VietnamTask Force, encouraged the Kennedy administration in their belief inprotected hamlets as a viable pacification strategy.7

Despite the optimism of civilian officials, the JCS saw little militaryvalue in the hamlet program. Senior U.S. military officers were openlyskeptical of the viability of the program from the start. They viewed theconcept as a civilian based attempt to solve a military problem with lim-ited means and effectiveness. From the perspective of professional mili-tary officers trained in modern tactical warfare, the Strategic Hamletprogram violated basic principles of operational doctrine. The programdid not engage enemy forces, but simply waited for them to attack. Theorganization of thousands of hamlets around the country seemed grosslyimpractical, and would not prevent the enemy from massing his forcesand exploiting weaknesses in the program. Indeed, the GVN was con-structing the fortified hamlets at a pace of 300 per month throughout1962 and 1963. However, many of the settlements were in isolated re-gions in the country’s north and interior, a substantial distance from themain force units of the ARVN. Since the existence of the hastily builthamlets themselves would not reduce the absolute numbers of the irreg-ular forces on the ground, senior U.S. military officers remained aloofand skeptical that they would truly effect pacification. JCS ChairmanLemnitzer expressed his view that unconventional warfare was an over-rated means of operation: “Recently, I have detected efforts on the partof individuals and agencies to minimize the importance of the regularmilitary forces of a nation in counterinsurgency operations. I have takenissue with such approaches on every occasion when the opportunity pre-sented itself.”8

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On the other hand, the political oriented view of the State Departmentwas dominant in the Kennedy administration. Counterinsurgency spe-cialists such as Edward Lansdale, and former military officers such asRoger Hilsman, disagreed with the military critique of the hamlet pro-gram. Key political officers in the administration supported the SouthVietnamese government’s pacification project. From the CI perspective,Strategic Hamlets would work if they were implemented with enough re-sources and organizational support. Once they were operational and de-prived the NLF with the support of rural villages, the Viet Cong (VC)would be fatally weakened. Once Vietnamese peasants could see thatthey were protected from Viet Cong raids, and that they had a stake inthe existing Saigon government, the war would turn. By providing pro-tection form VC terror, as well as the material support of food, medicineand educational supplies paid for with U.S. foreign aid, the hamletswould become loyal anticommunist settlements.9

There was no contention among political and military observers ofSouth Vietnam in the early 1960s that the rural areas were critical to thesurvival of the republic. The insurgency had support in the cities, but inthe Mekong Delta, in the Central Highlands and along the coast northtoward the ancient Vietnamese royal capital of Hue, NLF units couldfind men, food and intelligence support to expand their revolutionaryarmy. By fortifying thousands of South Vietnamese villages with moats,barbed wire and local militia units loyal to the government, it wasthought, albeit naively, that the insurgency would be dealt a decisiveblow.

Throughout 1962 and through the summer and early fall of 1963, thehamlet program was implemented by the Diem regime with the help ofMACV. In general, pacification reports sent to Washington determinedrapid and clear progress. Paul Harkins, MACV commander, reportedsteady progress in the ARVN. The South Vietnamese Army was be-coming more and more capable in field, inflicting substantial casualtieson the VC. The State Department reported problems with the imple-mentation of the Strategic Hamlet program. Many hamlets were beingbarely equipped with a handful of rifles for protection, but both MACVand State remained cautiously optimistic about the counterinsurgencyeffort.10

By the late spring of 1963, MACV and the U.S. Embassy were pre-dicting total success against the insurgency by 1965. Yet, the reports ofoutstanding progress were illusory. This was apparent to U.S. reporters,who went into the field with U.S. military advisors and their units in1962–1963, and State Department officers who by passed official chan-nels and went to look for themselves. The classic encounter between


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civilian and military officers over the success of the Strategic Hamlet pro-gram occurred in September 1963. In the wake of the Buddhist protestsagainst the Diem government throughout the summer of 1963, Kennedydispatched two observers, one military and the other civilian to report onthe state of the counterinsurgency effort in South Vietnam.11

The military and civilian team, Marine Corps General Victor Krulak,and State Department Officer John Mendenhall, attached to the VietnamTask Force of the National Security Council, reported directly to Presi-dent Kennedy after a five-day tour of South Vietnam. Victor Krulak re-ported that the Strategic Hamlet program and overall counterinsurgencyefforts were a success. The U.S. and the South Vietnamese, by his esti-mation, were winning the war. Mendenhall said precisely the opposite.He viewed the situation in the South as deteriorating rapidly and theStrategic Hamlet program as a definite failure. Kennedy wondered if thetwo men had visited the same country.

After the coup and assassination of Diem in November 1963, an ex-amination of the hamlet program by the U.S. military quickly deter-mined that the Diem regime had completely misrepresented the successof the hamlet program. Thousands of hamlets that would be shown onmilitary maps as under government control were actually overrun by theViet Cong and were under the control of the NLF. The insurgency,rather than being fatally weakened by the hamlet program, had grownsignificantly in men, weapons and logistical support. The hamlets hadproven easy prey for the VC, who massed their forces when the superiorgovernment units had left the immediate vicinity. Nighttime assaults byhundreds of VC cadres left targets with destroyed fortifications and localmilitias who had surrendered or joined the NLF.12

THE FALL OF DIEM

The fall of the Diem regime in November 1963 has been called a criti-cal early turning point in the Vietnam War. Once Diem’s autocratic gov-ernment was deposed by dissident ARVN generals, the South Vietnamesestate was never able to recapture the initiative vis-à-vis the Viet Cong.From the deaths of Diem and his brother Nhu, the precarious state of po-litical and military conditions in-country led to a rapid and seemingly in-evitable expansion of U.S. involvement. In no more than eighteenmonths from the November 2 coup, Viet Cong and U.S. troop numbersexpanded exponentially.

Despite these historical facts, counterfactual claims that keepingDiem in power would have stabilized South Vietnam are questionable.Under any circumstances, it would appear that Diem’s corrupt and very

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repressive government was not going to remain in power much beyond1963. As Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, learned in hispostcoup trip to South Vietnam, the Strategic Hamlet program was anabject failure. Viet Cong recruitment was vigorous and quite successfulthroughout South Vietnam, and North Vietnamese support was rapidlyincreasing through the Ho Chi Minh trail. Irrespective of Diem’s sur-vival, larger forces, including Chinese and Soviet military aid to NorthVietnam, and the profound unpopularity of Diem among the generalpopulation of South Vietnam, indicated that his overthrow was just amatter of time.13

Diem’s downfall occurred over a period of months, beginning with theprotests of Buddhist priests in May 1963. In spring 1963, repressive mea-sures by Diem’s secret policy against the Buddhist community, prompteddramatic acts of self-immolation, which were photographed and ap-peared on the pages of newspapers all over the world. Diem’s sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, was quoted widely as sharing open contempt for theBuddhists who committed suicide. The overt cruelty of her remarks was apublic relations disaster for Diem. Criticisms of his regime’s nepotism andbrutality mobilized domestic and international opposition to his govern-ment. Since the South Vietnamese people did not freely elect Diem, and along record of repression was documented against him and his associates,political support from the United States was limited to conservatives whoadmired his pro-Western and anticommunist positions. Diem’s Catholicfaith made him very popular with conservative Catholics such as HenryLuce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines. Nonetheless, the prepon-derant view of Diem among both military and civilian observers insideand outside Vietnam reflected a profound disappointment.14

In the wake of growing civil protests against Diem’s government in thelate summer and fall of 1963, Diem maintained the support of the Amer-ican ambassador Fritz Nolting. However, Nolting was fired from hispost, after a scathing report at the White House by the esteemed seniorKennedy administration diplomat, Averill Harriman. As Nolting de-parted the scene, General Paul Harkins, MACV commander, and nomi-nally a strong Diem supporter, indicated to President Kennedy thatsenior South Vietnamese generals were plotting to overthrow Diem.Harkins was so disappointed with the Diem regime, after two years ofardent support, that he told Kennedy he supported the coup leaders’plans. Kennedy, in secret communication at the end of August, reluc-tantly gave the green light to the new ambassador, Henry Cabot LodgeJr. and Harkins to allow the coup to go forward.15

Kennedy and his key advisors followed the coup planning until themoment that military units, under the command of Dong Van Minh


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(“Big Minh”) physically removed the Ngo brothers from power. Shortlyafterward, President Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were killedgangland style. President Kennedy was deeply shocked by the deaths ofthe two men—he had not ordered their executions. Kennedy himself,without knowing it, had less than three weeks to live before he toowould be assassinated in Dallas, apparently by a lone gunman. Despitethis striking coincidence, no documents suggest a relationship betweenKennedy’s assassination and the prior coup that ended the Diem govern-ment.

TRANSITION TO THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION

The political context of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution began with thetransition to the Johnson administration. In his three years in office,President Kennedy had oriented his Indochina policy toward limit-ing U.S. involvement. In his reluctant expansion of aid and advisors,Kennedy was very sensitive to the prospect of a wider Asian war. Al-though he believed in the necessity of protecting U.S. interests in a non-communist Southeast Asia, there were strict limits to his willingness touse direct military force. Both Kennedy and the Congressional leadershipwanted to avoid a second land war with the People’s Republic of China.Under these circumstances, the JCS advocacy for an aggressive expan-sion of U.S. forces in South Vietnam was never considered seriously byKennedy. The president remained committed to nation building, and CIoperations in the Republic of Vietnam, while simultaneously pursuingchannels of negotiation with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam(DRV), the USSR and China to reach a political settlement.

Lyndon Johnson was a different leader. His perceptions of the situa-tion in Vietnam were the same as Kennedy’s, but his willingness to con-sider military escalation, was greater. Johnson remained at odds with theJCS and the military lobby in Congress on the level of force. Despite hisardent determination to maintain the West’s containment position in In-dochina, Johnson refused to endorse large-scale troop deployments andextensive, wide-ranging bomber sorties by U.S. airpower. Nonetheless,the new Johnson administration took a noticeable turn toward the ideol-ogy of force, what I have termed “military realism,” at the expense ofthe political track favored by State Department internationalists. Indeed,nation building, counterinsurgency operations and diplomacy continuedin full swing under Lyndon Johnson. However, the focus of Vietnam pol-icy during the first year of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was preparation.Johnson and his key advisors were involved in staying the ongoing crisisin South Vietnam, while they prepared the nation and the world, largely

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through public diplomacy, for greater U.S. involvement, including directmilitary action.16

In the first month of his administration, Johnson was briefed by senioradvisors on the state of affairs in post-Diem South Vietnam. The Depart-ment of Defense, which had disputed the State Department’s dour viewof the Strategic Hamlet program, reported to Johnson in December 1963that the program was in ruins. Thousands of fortified hamlets had beendestroyed or overrun by the NLF, and little remained of the pacificationefforts in the countryside. Politically, the fall of Diem had replaced aweak but stable authoritarian regime with a very weak and unstable mil-itary junta. The South Vietnamese generals had no inherent gifts for do-mestic politics. At the end of January 1964, General Duong Van Minhthe leader of the coup group against Diem, was replaced in a bloodlesscoup by General Nguyen Khanh, who feared the South Vietnamese gov-ernment under Minh wanted to declare itself a neutral country, and seekreunification with the communist North. The ongoing power strugglewithin the GVN benefited the growth of the insurgency. The NLF greweach month with new recruits and southern cadres who returned fromspending years in the North. Opposing the energized communists werethe war weary and apathetic South Vietnamese, who were now accus-tomed to corrupt, self-serving local officials, and an equally corrupt andundisciplined officer corps with little interest in defending the fledglingRepublic of Vietnam.

In March 1964, Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, gave aspeech outlining new actions for U.S. policy in Vietnam. In large mea-sure, the program outlined in the speech maintained the balanced mana-gerial strategy that combined political and military tracks. Politicalefforts would include enhanced and accelerated means for supporting theGVN. The GVN would be helped with improving its civilian administra-tion of the South. It would be given more resources to expand its coun-terinsurgency operations against the NLF, as well as military equipmentthat would develop the conventional military capabilities of the ARVN.17

THE MILITARY AND THE GULF OF TONKIN

The Gulf of Tonkin incidents and the congressional resolution that re-sulted from them were a critical turning point in the escalation of theVietnam War. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution of August 1964 gave legaland political support to the Johnson administration in its prosecution ofthe war. The incidents themselves were of questionable veracity, almostfrom the time they occurred. The first incident did happen: a minor con-frontation in international waters in Tonkin Gulf, some ninety miles


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from the North Vietnamese mainland. The second incident, however, oc-curred at night, several days after the first one, and was never proven. Inthe middle of the night, the heightened state of anxiety aboard the navaldestroyers patrolling off the North Vietnamese coast seemed to have in-duced the appearance of an attack. Radar signals that were interpreted astorpedoes were found in after-action reports to have been more likely theresult of radar bouncing off the ship’s starboard rudders. John McCain,who later became a captured pilot and prisoner of war in Hanoi, and stilllater a U.S. Senator, was one of the pilots sent out to search for the at-tacking North Vietnamese missile boats. He found nothing, in what wasmost likely an utterly phantom episode.18

Despite the flawed nature of the twin incidents, the first and secondpresumed naval attacks in the first week of August 1964 provided abadly needed pretext for mobilizing domestic public opinion and con-gressional support. Throughout the first half of 1964, Vietnam wasgrowing to be a political albatross for Lyndon Johnson. He despised thethought of going into the country with a major commitment, yet he sawno political and strategic alternative but to find some way to support theSouth Vietnamese government. In order to increase the size of the U.S.commitment to South Vietnam, and to increase the range of military op-tions they could use against Ho Chi Minh and his communist regime, theJohnson administration needed a critical event such as the Gulf ofTonkin.

Indeed, Johnson and his senior staff were waiting for a major crisis in-volving North Vietnamese aggression to mobilize public opinion andcongressional political capital. Johnson needed to take the issue of U.S.intervention in Southeast Asia to the Congress and the public. He neededto establish the legal and political authority for wider action in the In-dochina region. No sooner had the brief naval encounter ended, thanLyndon Johnson went on national television to ask for a congressionalresolution granting him specific executive branch authority to use forceas necessary to “preserve the peace and security” of Southeast Asia.

The resolution was repealed by Congress in 1970. In 1964, however,the Tonkin legislation established an immediate level of support andcommon objective between the Congress and the U.S. military. The JCShad since the beginning of the Kennedy administration, advocated large-scale military operations in Indochina to defeat the NLF and force theNorth Vietnamese into a political settlement that guaranteed South Viet-namese independence. On the other hand, Congress was in general quitewary of any military involvement in Indochina, irrespective of the fateof the Republic of Vietnam. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution, opposed byonly two U.S. Senators, established common ground for the military and

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civilian branches of the U.S. government. If only a chimera, the consen-sus pursued by Lyndon Johnson was a platform for aggressive deploy-ments to support South Vietnam.19

TONKIN AS POLITICAL AND STRATEGIC EVENT

The military actions in the Gulf of Tonkin in the first week of August1964 were a God send to the interventionist wing of the Johnson admin-istration. For the JCS, the immediate results of the Tonkin Gulf Resolu-tion were modest but essential. The resolution passed House and Senatewith but two lone senators opposing it. The unity of purpose that the res-olution gave the country created a solid base of legitimacy for whateverfuture strategy the United States deployed against the communists in In-dochina. By reaffirming the power of the President to use all “necessarymeans” to protect U.S. security interests in the region, strong advocatesof intervention, which certainly described the senior officer corps in theU.S. armed forces, now had the political capital with U.S. public opinionto support their plans.20

The military, however, did not control the president or the executivebranch. All military action in Southeast Asia had to be approved by theWhite House in consideration of the views of the Congress and withinthe context of the entire universe of world politics and domestic politics.Planning for intervention went forward, deliberately and inexorablyfrom August 1964 to the following summer, when Johnson initialed theescalation strategy that resulted in what contemporary Americans under-stand as the Vietnam War. Yet, the military could only lobby the WhiteHouse for its unified Clausewitzian perspective; that military force in In-dochina would only be effective if it was applied according to the princi-ples of war; namely, that military force, whether it was land, sea- orairpower, had to be integrated into a coherent, simplified strategy ofoverwhelming force against the vital assets of the enemy.

THE GROUND WAR BEGINS: 1965

The American ground war began in 1965 because the South Vietnam-ese government was clearly in danger of collapse. Daily and weekly fieldreports sent to Washington, by State, CIA and MACV, all described theincreasing ability of NLF units against the ARVN. Only a few years be-fore, the Viet Cong were attacking isolated villages and hamlets withsmall groups of new local recruits. VC units were armed with spears, ob-solete rifles and whatever arms they could home manufacture or obtainfrom captured government stocks. Communist attacks in the early 1960s


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were frequent but minor. Acts of terror included the targeted assassina-tion of local officials, thousands of whom died often brutal deaths. Mili-tary operations consisted mainly of the harassment of government forces,using the small arms and planted explosives available to the NLF.

By 1965, however, NLF combat operations had undergone a dramatictransformation. Infiltration from the North provided trained soldiers anda modest supply of arms. Very effective recruiting activities in the Southexpanded the size of the NLF despite very significant battle-field casual-ties. In 1961, company-size attacks by the VC were common but this wasthe limited of their operational capabilities. Four years later, despite thehuge American counterinsurgency effort and the expansion of theARVN, the NLF was conducting battalion-size operations throughoutSouth Vietnam. With over a hundred thousand full-time soldiers, and forthe first time, reinforcement by North Vietnamese regular Army divi-sions, the communists looked capable of destroying entire South Viet-namese divisions. With the introduction of U.S. troops, the NorthVietnamese Army, People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) began to deploybelow the 17th parallel demilitarized zone (DMZ). Operationally, byJune of 1965, the situation looked quite desperate for the South Vietnam-ese. By June 1965, without major deployments of U.S. combat forces, itwas apparent to many U.S. government observers that the ARVN wouldsoon be overwhelmed and destroyed by the NLF and the PAVN.21

INITIAL DEPLOYMENTS

The first U.S. combat units arrived in early March 1965, to protectvulnerable U.S. military bases from incessant VC attacks. The introduc-tion of combat forces was a dramatic development. For more than adecade of involvement in South Vietnam, successive presidential admin-istrations had resisted the introduction of U.S. combat forces. For themilitary, the initial deployments were vital to protect the South from cer-tain defeat. For civilians, the combat troops were considered more omi-nous portents of a future ground war, than a necessary stage in theescalation of the United States commitment.

Chairman of the JCS, General Earle Wheeler asked MACV com-mander William Westmoreland if the situation in South Vietnam wasclose to collapse:

I do not wish to harass you, and I recognize that the request madein cited message imposed a sizable task of analysis and study.Moreover, I understand the time-consuming activities falling to thelot of field commanders. Nevertheless, as set forth in reference and

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in other messages over the past several months, there is growingconcern here that VC inroads—territory-wise, population-wise, andpsychological—are in fact destroying the fabric of South Vietnam.Those at highest level here wonder whether this erosion is reachingthe point where, regardless of our actions against the DRV, thecountry will fall apart behind us.22

Whatever the views of military or civilian observers, by spring 1965open discussions about the escalation of the war were becoming commonin public. The deployments came quickly, adding more troops to wherenew troops had already arrived. From March to July 1965, the first U.S.combat units were deployed in South Vietnam. The first combat battal-ions were U.S. Marines, sent to secure the naval base at DaNang fromNLF attacks.23 There was little public opposition in the United Statesover the initial movement of combat troops into the military theater ofoperations. Given the desperate plight of the GVN, and the increasing op-erations of U.S. airpower against both the NLF and North Vietnam, theneed and legitimacy for the first deployments faced no major challenge tocivil-military relations. In response to the mortar attacks on the U.S. air-base at Pleiku in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, PresidentJohnson authorized the first sustained program of bombing raids againstthe North. The program of graduated pressure was known as “RollingThunder.” The start of Rolling Thunder prompted the need for greaterbase security and the deployment of several thousand marines to DaNang.

Despite the expanded military operations, including covert raidsagainst North Vietnam, the attempted interdiction of communist supplylines and the new equipment supplied to the ARVN, the military situa-tion in South Vietnam did not improve in spring 1965. In April, stillmore troops were requested by MACV commander Westmoreland. Theywere needed to attempt to stabilize a rapidly deteriorating combat envi-ronment. Those requests, for approximately 20,000 more troops, weregranted quickly by Johnson. It was now apparent to Johnson and all ofhis closest advisors that the next move in Vietnam had to be a majorcommitment of forces. In February and March, Johnson and McNamarawent on rounds of Vietnam information sessions with members of Con-gress, outlining the parameters for U.S. intervention in South Vietnam.Both the administration and the Congress had to contemplate a costlyand long-term commitment to save South Vietnam. Over and over, John-son and his secretary of defense defined the war in limited terms. Even ifthe Chinese Army moved south to defend North Vietnam, the DefenseDepartment calculated that only six U.S. combat divisions would beneeded to contain and defeat a Chinese invasion.24


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The most critical request for U.S. troops was issued at the beginningof June 1965. The famous Westmoreland “44 battalion” request wouldset the protocol for the incremental expansion of U.S. ground forces inSouth Vietnam. The request for roughly doubling the number of U.S.troops in South Vietnam was made through CINCPAC Commander Ad-miral Ulysses S. Sharp, who endorsed Westmoreland’s assessment. The de-tailed analysis by MACV was premised on a need to hold the line againstthe expansion of both NLF and PAVN forces in the south. For the firsttime, the North Vietnamese were deploying nearly full divisions, respec-tively, the PAVN 304th and 325th divisions. Westmoreland delineatedforce-level reinforcements for the entire country. In doing so, he establishedthe first plan for ongoing combat operations by battalion-size U.S. forces.

STRATEGIC ARGUMENTS OVER INTERVENTION

In the mid-1960s, the professional military was united on the strategicrationale for intervening in Indochina. The ranking offices in all branchesof the armed officers endorsed the strategic doctrine of the JCS. Namely,that the loss of Indochina to communist forces would have a severe detri-mental impact on U.S. defense posture and that such an event should beavoided by all means necessary. The strategic necessity for interventionwas a bedrock principle for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There was nogreater need, from the military’s perspective, than to protect the integrityof the containment system. Abandoning South Vietnam to its fate wasunthinkable for both civilians and military officers. For the JCS, how-ever, the impact of defeat in Indochina was of such grave consequencethat virtually any means was considered acceptable to preserving thecountry’s base in Indochina and Southeast Asia. These views were madeexplicit many times from the Truman administration to the Johnson ad-ministration. The military’s strategic doctrine for Vietnam related it tothe wider strategic concept for Southeast Asia:

b. RVN is a military keystone in SEAsia and is symbolic of US de-termination in Asia. The United States is committed in the eyes ofthe world to the defense of RVN as a matter of national prestige,credibility, and honor with respect to world-wide pledges and de-claratory national policy.

c. SEAsia is strategically situated between Communist China andthe Indian sub-continent and Australia. It is the southern anchor ofthe US and Free World defense posture in the Western Pacific.

d. SEAsia is of unique economic importance as a major source ofrice for the food deficit countries of Asia and is among the world’s

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primary sources of natural rubber and tin. Control of the area,therefore, would not only be important to communist economic de-velopment, but would convey additional political leverage in deal-ing with countries which depend upon Southeast Asia’s resources.25

Strategic unity, however, did not mean equivalent unanimity in tacti-cal doctrine. Preferred means of accomplishing the overarching strategicobjective in Vietnam differed widely between the service branches. Inter-service rivalry predicted different tactical doctrines based upon the capa-bilities and weapons systems of the respective branches of the armedforces. It came as no surprise that the Air Force believed in a greater re-liance on bombing to demonstrate the utility of airpower in limited wars.Conversely, the Army always favored strategy that emphasized the effi-cacy of land power. It was no small wonder that U.S. Army doctrine fa-vored large powerful maneuver battalions for search and destroymissions in Vietnam. Alternatively, the Marines advocated an adaptationof its “small wars” strategy; a method of intervention that was inconsis-tent with Army doctrine.26

Finally, the Navy had no institutional preferences for an Asian landwar other than the effective use of naval resources. The U.S. Navy hadformidable assets to deploy in the Indochina theater including its carrier-based airpower, and its ability to control the harbors and sea lanes thatresupplied the North Vietnamese and the NLF forces in the South. Thetactical rivalry between the Army and the Marine Corps did not concernthe Navy so much as the net result of tactics and doctrine resulted in mil-itary victory. Whatever combination of tactical doctrines would hold theline against communist advance in Southeast Asia was the preference ofthe Navy.

Yet, in the final analysis, the professional armed forces were united intheir support for war in Indochina to protect U.S. strategic interests.However, in operational terms, there was no unity, nor could there havebeen, given the separate capabilities and missions of the respective ser-vices.

THE U.S. ARMY VIEW

The proprietary nature of tactics was most apparent in the Army’srole during Vietnam War. The U.S. Army’s tactical doctrine was basedon the Army’s long experience in fighting land wars against powerful ad-versaries. Since MACV was under Army control, and the Chairman ofthe Joint Chiefs of Staff in the mid-1960s was an Army general, Armydoctrine was to thoroughly dominate and shape the land campaign in


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Vietnam. Since the American Civil War, the U.S. Army practiced classicEuropean land warfare, which emphasized powerful military units thatemployed superior force and numbers to destroy major concentrations ofenemy forces. The Army’s search and destroy strategy was an adaptationof traditional U.S. Army tactical doctrine to conditions in Vietnam.

William Westmoreland, utilizing the Army’s helicopter and groundsupport fixed-wing aircraft, intended for Army forces to search out anddestroy main force enemy units, intercept enemy supply lines and“pacify” enemy controlled villages by capturing and or destroying them.In an age of television warfare, the Army’s methods had serious politicalcosts that over time would endanger the survival of the Army’s mission.Nonetheless, Westmoreland fought the war as a traditional conflict, ex-pecting to render the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units’ combat in-effective and force a peace settlement.

THE MARINE CORPS VIEW

Wallace Green, Marine Corps Commandant in 1965, supported U.S.intervention apparently without dissent. Nonetheless, the Marines ap-proached combat in South Vietnam from a different institutional per-spective. The Marines were experts in “small wars.” Between World WarI and the World War II, the Marine Corps had engaged in numerousoverseas missions to pacify countries under U.S. occupation. The experi-ences of the Marines with the pacification of local populations, wheretheir mission lasted a number of years, fashioned their counterinsur-gency doctrine.

The Marines saw South Vietnam as an opportunity to employ theirtested pacification methods through a “clear and hold” strategy. TheMarines were initially deployed along the central coast of Vietnam to se-cure DaNang and other coastal cities vital to the Navy’s mission in In-dochina. General Greene envisioned an enclave strategy for SouthVietnam. Marine and Army units would secure coastal areas and begin along-term program of pacification in those areas. As additional rein-forcements arrived, the combined Army and Marine forces would pushnorth, south and inland, securing larger populated areas for pacification.Instead of searching for and engaging main force enemy units, the clearand hold doctrine emphasized the primary objective of pacification, anddenying the enemy access to local populations.27

The Marine Corps doctrine was effective, but it never replaced theClausewitzian land war strategy of the U.S. Army. Marine strategy alsorequired many hundreds of thousands of troops, and a commitment ofmany years to achieve its objective of pacification. The political costs of

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the Marine Corps strategy were significant, if not as great as those of theArmy’s way of war.

THE AIR FORCE VIEW

Air Force doctrine in Vietnam reflected the lesson of airpower’s mili-tary history. The first sustained use of airpower was during the SecondWorld War. Thousands of land- and sea-based bombers were deployedagainst primarily military and industrial targets against Axis countries.Airpower was decisive in naval warfare, destroying most of the surfacefleet of the Japanese Imperial Navy. The U.S. Army Air Force was effec-tive in destroying lines of communication in both Europe and Asia andinflicting very serious damage on transportation and industrial infra-structure. On the battlefield, airpower was deadly, destroying tank for-mations and giving preponderant advantage to whoever controlled theair. Finally, airpower was decisive against the Japanese in 1945, as wavesof American bombers firebombed Japanese cities, and then with nuclearweapons, forcing Japan to surrender unconditionally.28

Air Force doctrine for Vietnam and Indochina was consistent with itsoperational experience during the Second World War and Korea. To min-imize U.S. casualties and force an end to the conflict in the shortestamount of time, Air Force generals recommended the broadest applica-tion of airpower directly against vital military and industrial targets inSouth Vietnam. The Air Force critique of Westmoreland’s June 1965 warplan was that it relied insufficiently on Air Force assets. Westmoreland’sland-based strategy did not apply sufficient airpower to interdict enemysupply lines. Further, it left the enemy’s vulnerable industrial infrastruc-ture largely intact, providing North Vietnam with little incentive to bringthe conflict to a quick end.

In 1964, Curtis LeMay, strategic architect of the air war against Japanin 1945, and Air Force general chief of staff, designed an intensivethirteen-day bombing campaign against North Vietnam. He believed hismassive assault with B-52 bombers against strategic targets in Hanoi,Haiphong and elsewhere, would force the North Vietnamese to the peaceconference table. Later in the war, the Johnson administration adoptedthe Air Force strategy. It was to have serious effects on North Vietnam-ese morale and war fighting capability, but it did not bring the war to aconclusion. Still later in the conflict, the Nixon administration deployedmassive air strikes throughout Indochina. The Nixon administration didend the war with the aid of Air Force doctrine, but it did not win the con-flict. Once again, the political costs of conventional war reduced theability of airpower to effect the overall strategic objectives of the UnitedStates in Indochina.29


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THE NAVY VIEW

As mentioned earlier, since Vietnam was a land conflict, U.S. Navytactical doctrine was of marginal significance. In addition to supportingthe air war with carrier-based aircraft, the Navy’s role was to interdictcommunist boats along the coast, control the Gulf of Tonkin andthreaten the sea lanes, gather intelligence through listening posts in inter-national waters, and deploy gunboats in the Mekong delta to supportland operations against the enemy. However, the Navy did not have adominant role in the tactical doctrine of the war, since naval warfare in-volved principally ocean warfare.

Operationally, MACV reported directly to CINCPAC, the chief ofNaval operations in the Pacific. In this regard, the U.S. Navy as an insti-tution supported the doctrines proposed by the Army, Air Force andMarines. Admiral Sharp, CINCPAC commander in 1965, supported thestrategic view of the JCS and the operational views of MACV. TheNavy was responsible for maintaining containment in the entire IndianOcean and Pacific region; this encompassed 51 million square miles ofocean and approximately one quarter of the earth’s surface. To the de-gree that land and air war in Indochina supported the strategic objectiveof maintaining U.S. naval supremacy in the Pacific, the Navy supportedthe standard Clausewitzian orientation of the armed forces.

In his Vietnam War memoir, Sharp represented his views of effectivemilitary force. He claimed he had always supported an extremely ag-gressive attack on North Vietnam, specifically the harbors that were con-duits for most of the supplies for the war effort:

Repeatedly my messages, which the JCS supported, urged the aerialmining of the harbors of North Vietnam, but we were never able toget authorization. At long last, in 1972, President Nixon authorizedthe mining of those harbors. They were mined in a one-day operationand were closed to all shipping until we swept the mines in 1973, af-ter the so-called truce. The mine-laying operation cost the UnitedStates less than a million dollars. Not a single person on either sidewas lost. Why didn’t we do this in 1965? Or in 1967? Or in 1969?30

CIVILIAN PERSPECTIVES: CIA, PENTAGON, NSC,WHITE HOUSE

Civilian perspectives on the ground war tended to support the politi-cal or managerial tracks. In particular, civilian officials who were re-sponsible for political affairs, domestic or international, took a dourview of the escalating ground war. Since all news and military accounts

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of the situation in South Vietnam suggested a protracted and very costlyconflict, the dominant perception of civilian executive branch officers,was tepid support for a necessary engagement. Few argued in 1965 thatVietnam and the Indochina region as a whole were not important to thecontainment system. However, the aggressive and expensive strategiesproposed by the generals and admirals seemed far too dangerous. SinceState Department and White House executives were extremely sensitiveto the political ramifications of war, including the possible global effectsof an aggressive ground and air war in Vietnam, civilian policy makersusually worked to oppose the consensus Clausewitzian view of thearmed forces.31

Lyndon Johnson’s proclivities were to steer between the dominantviews of Vietnam War policy. On the one hand, he had advisors on theright who urged aggressive military action. On the left, however, politi-cally oriented advisors rejected the strong military options, and favoredequally aggressive politically oriented strategies. Military solutions prof-fered by the uniform services had impressive allies in the executivebranch and legislative branches. Senior officials in the CIA, notably Di-rector John McCone and Deputy Director Ray S. Cline, were very con-sistent in their critique of Johnson’s administration policy. They fullysupported the views of the JCS, recognizing that the limited air war thatbegan in early 1965 would hardly force the North Vietnamese to theconference table. Over the course of the war, the CIA split over the con-duct and necessity of the war, but in 1965, the agency supported thestrong military option against the limited approach proffered by mana-gerial internationalists.32

In Congress, pro-military views dominated the conservative wing ofthe Republican Party. In addition to Senator Goldwater, who inserted anavowedly Clausewitzian war strategy in the 1964 Republican platform,other military supporters were former vice-president Nixon, formerpresident Eisenhower, the House Republican leader and future VietnamWar president Gerald Ford, and Strom Thurmond, a leading member ofthe Senate Armed Services Committee. These and other senators, andcongressman mainly on the right, supported a strong military solution inVietnam, despite the majority consensus that favored a managerial com-bined political-military approach to the war.33

While almost all State Department officers advocated for politicaland diplomatic tracks to achieve a successful outcome in Vietnam, anexception was W. W. Rostow, former deputy director of the NationalSecurity Council, and head of strategic planning for the State Departmentin 1965. Rostow was famous for his robust support for a military solu-tion to the conflict, whether through intensive bombing, a land invasion


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of the North, or some combination of expansive and costly military op-erations. While Rostow did not play a role in the July 1965 decisions toescalate the war, he left State in 1966 to become Johnson’s NSC advisor.His star began to rise soon after the start of the major ground war, whenJohnson’s small circle of advisors soon became disenchanted with theirincremental war policies. In the role of NSC advisor, replacing thedovish McGeorge Bundy, he was a rare civilian executive branch ally ofthe JCS.

In institutional terms, the civilian Department of Defense supported amanagerial approach to the war, balancing military strategy with politi-cal costs. The NSC staff, for the most part, oriented itself along the samemanagerial perspective, combining strong political tracks and nation-building initiatives with a constrained military strategy. State Depart-ment officials favored either the managerial or an overtly politicalapproach to the war, making the military’s role purely secondary and un-der the strict control of the civilian branches of the government.

For the military at all levels, from the field to the roundtable of the JCSin Arlington, Virginia, the civilian concept for fighting the Vietnam Warwas anathema. With limited means, and strict rules of engagement, theywere left with the task for conducting a major ground war against an in-digenous, highly motivated, adaptable, and determined enemy. Using avast wilderness and rural population to its advantage, as well as supplylines that ran through difficult unguarded terrain, including neutralCambodia, the enemy could draw upon a large pool of irregular forces,as well as professional units from the North Vietnam, whose territorywas largely off limits according to the political constraints imposed byWashington. Despite the massive resources at their disposal, the con-straints imposed by the civilians infuriated senior military officers, whosaw a very protracted engagement with serious problems, including thestrength of political support for their campaign.

JOHNSON’S WAR:THE JULY 1965 DECISIONS

In one sense, members of the senior officer corps of the U.S. armedforces were bystanders to the fateful strategy deliberations of July 1965.In another sense, they were very important actors within the politicalcontext of the intervention. Statutorily, the Chairman of the JCS in July1965, Army General Earle Wheeler, was a key advisor to President John-son. Wheeler participated, along with other senior advisors and cabinetmembers, in a series of decisive White House meetings on Vietnam at theend of July 1965. His advice, as well as that of the other members of theJCS, demonstrated a consistent view of the military leadership: that in

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order to save South Vietnam, a major plan of military action involvinghundreds of thousands of U.S. forces had to be implemented immedi-ately. In addition to the Westmoreland troop requests of June 1965,Johnson had been given numerous consistent recommendations from theJCS for military strategy in the Indochina theater. The president had lis-tened attentively to the service chiefs, who summarized their argumentsand answered pertinent questions. All of this is documented in the offi-cial records of the Foreign Relations Series of the United States.34

Nonetheless, despite their consistent and repeated advice, the JCS didnot fashion the strategic plan and tactical recommendations produced bythe Pentagon. Civilian defense analysts in the Office of the Secretary ofDefense produced the policy document that guided the U.S. ground warfrom July 1965 through the end of the Johnson administration. The ulti-mate policy pursued by Lyndon Johnson compromised the military’sinveterate beliefs in the use of decisive force. In recognition of the sub-stantive concerns of political officials in both the executive and legislativebranches, the final policy document approved by Johnson was a perfectexample of managerial internationalism. His strategy balanced politicaland military objectives with political and military means, thereby limit-ing military actions to satisfy the perceived needs of the global politicaltrack pursued by the White House. In doing so, the president appeared toobviate the military as a senior branch of the executive decision-makingprocess. No matter what amount of force the military was authorized touse in Vietnam, everything it did was under civilian control. Ultimately,in the postwar military literature on the war, civilian constraints on mil-itary action became the sine qua non for explaining military defeat inSouth Vietnam.

Yet, the victimization of the military as decision makers belies the his-torical context of the armed forces in the conduct of the Cold War.Without the impressive political support the JCS enjoyed in the conser-vative wing of the Congress, intervention in Vietnam in the mid-1960swould most likely have never occurred. President Johnson for one had aprescient foreboding of disaster for his policy. As early as 1964, Johnsonis recorded expressing his deep fears of an intractable and un-winnableland war in Asia. Vietnam held no intrinsic interest for him, or for manyleft of center liberals who were his advisors. Indeed, conservative advi-sors, such as Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, a close confidant ofPresident Johnson, did all they could to prevent him from making his ul-timate decision. There were many reasons for Johnson, as a liberaldemocrat, committed to a wide-ranging program of domestic reform, tohave wanted to exit Vietnam irrespective of its fate at the hands of Ho


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Chi Minh. Yet, this neo-Wilsonian perspective on foreign policy wascompromised by the political will of the military and the military’s alliesin the Congress, who subscribed to an orthodox interpretation of theCold War. For the military, abandoning South Vietnam in the mid-1960swas pure anathema. They made it very clear to the civilian leadership thatsuch a policy would incur severe political reprisals. Indeed, contempla-tion of an exit strategy from South Vietnam was precluded in 1964 and1965 by the military as an institution and its political base within theU.S. Congress and the American public. To “lose Vietnam,” as one for-mer policy maker and Vietnam historian argued, was the political linethat no American politician dared to cross.

The escalation of the war began in earnest in summer 1965. It contin-ued unabated until after the Tet Offensive of February 1968. The seniorcommanders of the U.S. armed forces were deeply troubled by Johnson’sprogram. They continued to lobby the president for an expansionistClausewitzian design for the war. The need was clear, from their point ofview, to defend the containment line in South Vietnam. However, thestrategic necessity had to be supported with the means to achieve victory.The troop commitment levels could prevent the fall of South Vietnam.However, in the long term, the limited war strategy envisioned by themanagerial internationalists in the Pentagon and the NSC, was not astrategy for “victory.” The military’s consensus view was expressed in aJoint Staff study in July 1965. The military wanted an unrestricted airwar against North Vietnam, including targeted bombing of the capitalHanoi, the major port of Haiphong, rail links to the Chinese border andif necessary the destruction of the dike system in the Red River Delta. Alllines of communication and all military and industrial assets of theNorth Vietnamese were to be under the assault of the most massive aircampaign since the Second World War.

With the intensive air war, the ground campaign would include manyhundreds of thousands of U.S. troops committed to search-and-destroyand pacification activities throughout Vietnam. If necessary, forces wouldbe sent over the DMZ to challenge the PAVN on its own ground, wellcutting supply lines to the South. Both Cambodia and Southern Laoswould be subject to U.S. military action on the ground and the air. Finally,the U.S. Navy would use its air and surface fleet and submarine forces toclose down the North Vietnamese coast. This all-encompassing, inte-grated assault on the North Vietnamese and NLF was considered theonly truly certain method of victory in Indochina. Needless to say, theJCS position was never considered seriously in 1965 by the Johnson ad-ministration or the Congressional leadership.

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In June 1965, Senator Mansfield summarized the opinion of the dom-inant political wing in the Congress:

The Senate cannot direct you in the conduct of foreign affairs evenif it wanted to and I think you know that there is no substantialgroup in the Senate which is going to take the initiative in urgingyou to put more American ground forces into South Viet Nam. Ithink you know too, that what has been done to date in the way ofresolutions, however one-sided the votes, has been done with gravedoubts and much trepidation on the part of many Senators. It hasbeen done largely on faith, out of loyalty to you and on the basis ofthe general view that when the President has the responsibility andwhen he requests legislative support in a crisis, he should have it.35

Mansfield continued his long and unforgiving harangue of the inter-vention process. In the face of the hapless nature of the South Vietnam(SVN) government, and the stream of negative reports coming from thefield, his predilection to avoid war entirely was compromised by the rockhard opposition of the defense establishment, which saw absolutely noalternative but to escalate the war in 1965.

Conversely, whatever plans the U.S. military could negotiate to fightthe war in South Vietnam, it had to come to terms with the thinly veiledhostility of the Democratic leadership in the Senate. Johnson had his ownlimits with respect to the war, which was partly determined by the oppo-sition in the Congress, but also by his own doubts about going to war.No matter what information the professional military could summon forits own strategy, it had to fight the war within the given political contextof the civilian leadership.

Overtime, as the war continued for seven years, Johnson and thenNixon gave the military increasing resources and wider freedom of ac-tion in the Indochina theater. Yet, as we shall see, the massive use of mil-itary force, complemented by intensive counterinsurgency operations andcivilian aid programs, were still unable to accomplish the tactical objec-tives of the war that would lead to the paramount objective that Ameri-can intervention was premised; the Republic of Vietnam would surviveindependent of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, depriving bothChina and the Soviet Union domination of the Indochina region.

In the summer of 1965, as the country moved into a full-scale groundwar in Indochina, civilian and military leadership were at odds over thecharacter of the intervention, and even if the new war was necessary forU.S. security interests. This area of fundamental disagreement continuedand magnified through the remainder of U.S. involvement, poisoning


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U.S. civil-military relations for the better part of a decade. Yet, the policydocuments from the period reveal that the leadership groups were trapped.They were committed by their own institutional interests, ideologies andself-defined political realities to wage a bureaucratic war against eachother, while engaging the enemy in a very deadly, albeit limited, war inIndochina.

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MILITARY ORGANIZATION IN THE SOUTHEAST ASIA THEATER

Military power in modern states has always been applied through organ-izational controls. In the case of the Vietnam War, the deployment ofmilitary power was carefully controlled from White House to the field.In the beginning, as noted in chapter 2, the commitment to Vietnam andIndochina was quite modest. The Truman administration had created theMilitary Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in 1950 to supervise U.S.military assistance to the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF).The first budget was on the order of $10 million, and only fifty advisorswere dispatched to Vietnam. By 1955, consistent with the expansion ofU.S. presence in South Vietnam, MAAG was expanded to approximately650 advisors, a limit imposed by the 1954 Geneva protocols. In 1962, inrecognition of the expanded advisory responsibilities of the UnitedStates, MAAG was incorporated into the newly formed Military Assis-tance Command, Vietnam (MACV). The first commander was GeneralPaul Harkins, a protégé of General Maxwell Taylor, former chairman ofthe JCS and key military advisor to President Kennedy. Harkins, andlater his successors, Generals William Westmoreland and CreightonAbrams, reported to the commander in chief of the Pacific (CINCPAC).In effect, the military command in Vietnam was under the control of anArmy general who in turn reported to a very senior naval officer, thecommander of all armed forces in the Pacific region including the formi-dable U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet.1

3

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From CINCPAC, the chain of command led directly to the JCS andthen to the Secretary of Defense. Administratively, civilian control of allU.S. military operations rested with the President who delegated his au-thority to his staff and the Secretary of Defense. Hence, the U.S. retalia-tory strike against North Vietnam in August 1964 in response to theGulf of Tonkin incidents was sent from the White House and executed inthe Indochina field of operations through CINCPAC and MACV. Allmilitary actions from bombing sorties to ground troop deploymentsthroughout the region were initialed by the White House. General West-moreland’s famous request for forty-four battalions in June 1965 wasconsulted through the chain of command and submitted ultimately to theWhite House for executive authority.

The organization of military authority, strictly hierarchal and consis-tent with U.S. constitutional law, suggested to some historians of theVietnam War that the military had little input or control over the charac-ter of war. In fact, the administrative structure of decision making doesnot reveal the political nature of military policy during the 1960s. Thegradual escalation of the Vietnam War under Presidents Kennedy andJohnson reflected a very complex bureaucratic compromise betweencompeting visions of Vietnam and Cold War policy. As noted earlier,unity of command was not practiced in the Indochina theater of opera-tions. Air operations were divided between the Air Force Pacific Com-mand, the Strategic Air Command and the Navy’s Pacific Command.Covert CIA operations did not report to the MACV commander, nor didthird-country forces deployed in South Vietnam.

Combat restrictions, however, were applied to military forces by theWhite House. During the Johnson administration the chain of commandenforced strict rules of engagement that limited the scope of U.S. militaryoperations in Indochina. Bombing restrictions included within a thirty-mile radius of Hanoi and ten miles of Haiphong harbor. Johnson pro-hibited U.S. ground forces in Laos, North Vietnam or Cambodia.Despite military recommendations, Johnson did not mine the NorthVietnamese coast or attack Chinese manned antiaircraft installations.Throughout the Johnson administration’s extensive bombing campaignin the North, strict guidelines sought to limit civilian casualties. This wastrue even though the magnitude and adverse conditions of the bombingmade civilian losses unavoidable.

The election of Richard Nixon led to a substantial change in those rulesof engagement. Nixon ordered the military to conduct increasingly aggres-sive, wide-ranging attacks on the PAVN, the People’s Liberation Army(PLA) and the North Vietnamese homeland. Military operations were ap-proved for both Laos and Cambodia. During the spring 1972 North Viet-


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namese offensive in the South, Nixon ordered the mining of Haiphong inaddition to bombing PAVN sites in both North and South Vietnam. At theend of 1972, faced with an intractable North Vietnamese negotiating posi-tion, Nixon ordered, through his command structure, the most intenseurban bombing campaign since the Second World War. Despite serious dif-ficulties with the assignment, including morale problems, the professionalcommand structure executed Nixon’s orders. In the final analysis, all mili-tary action conducted by the United States represented the orders and ac-tions of the President of the United States. Sworn to obey the constitutionalauthority of the executive branch, the professional military had no otherpurpose than to fulfill the orders directed from the White House.

DEPLOYMENT LEVELS

Through two and a half decades of operations in Indochina, beginningwith first MAAG mission during the Truman administration, the U.S.command structure remained essentially constant. The regional com-mands reported to the Pacific Command, which in turn reported to theJCS, the Secretary of Defense and finally the White House. What changedover decades were the levels of deployment; numbers that were alwaysfound in media reports, which reflected the intensity of the U.S. commit-ment to the region. During the Vietnam War, troop deployments alwaysimplied political decisions that compromised military and civilian per-spectives over military strategy. From 50 advisors in 1950, to 650 in1955, to 16,000 in 1963, rising deployment remained a product of mili-tary requests compromised by civilian decisions to limit costs and per-ceived risks. By the summer of 1965, some 75,000 U.S. military personnelhad been deployed or were in the process of being deployed to the In-dochina theater of operations. The incremental escalation of the war, andthe careful documentation of that escalation, was a critical political andstrategic issue. In the historiography of the conflict, troop levels weresignposts to the Vietnam War’s progress.2

The number of troops and the types of units available in-country deter-mined precisely what operations MACV was capable of. Prior to 1965,MACV and its predecessor MAAG had no significant ground capability.The most the U.S. could do was orchestrate the ground war against theNLF by the ARVN. Since the ARVN was poorly led and motivated, thenet effectiveness of MACV was quite small. With the beginning of majorcombat deployments in 1965, the United States took a quantum jumpin its ability to control events on the ground. With ARVN assistance,U.S. forces coordinated search-and-destroy missions that challenged theviability of the NLF and the emerging presence of the PAVN.

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As more and more troops and resources were deployed into the In-dochina region, U.S. capabilities against the NLF and North Vietnam in-creased commensurately. Communist losses mounted under the massiveair attacks and armor sweeps throughout South Vietnam. The use ofAmerican airpower against the North incurred serious damage on theNorth Vietnamese economy and the national morale. Nonetheless, de-spite years of intensive combat operations, the U.S. did not quite breakthe North Vietnamese war effort. With the deployment of over 500,000troops came the huge political costs of a domestic and international anti-war movement.3

The Nixon administration began the long de-escalation of the war.Troop levels dropped over the entirety of Nixon’s first term, dropping toalmost zero. By the end of 1972, no U.S. combat units remained in SouthVietnam. With the withdrawals, the political costs of the war droppedcommensurately. The policy of Vietnamization was designed specificallyto reduce the political costs of the war. To preserve the Republic of Viet-nam (RVN) as an ally in the Cold War, the only viable solution for theU.S. military was to dramatically increase the operational capabilities ofthe South Vietnamese armed forces.4 As major U.S. troop withdrawalswere announced in 1969 and 1970, under considerable public and Con-gressional pressures, the mission of the U.S. military was threefold. First,search-and-destroy missions continued, with expanded operations inCambodia, Laos and North Vietnam. Second, with the ARVN and itsspecial counterinsurgency forces, pacification activities increased signifi-cantly, in a broad attempt to destroy the political infrastructure of theNLF in the South. Finally, the ARVN and the other branches of theSouth Vietnamese armed forces were trained to undertake both conven-tional and unconventional military operations independent of U.S. forces.This final step was critical if South Vietnam was to survive at all onceU.S. and other allied troops were withdrawn.5

When the number of U.S. forces dropped to insignificant levels, themilitary’s political weakness vis-à-vis the Congress and the antiwarmovement did not lessen. Faced with the task of supporting an ally thathad very little genuine commitment from the Congress, the Pentagon, theJCS and the White House struggled to maintain the South Vietnamesegovernment against serious odds for its survival. In the end, however, thewithdrawal of U.S. combat troops was an untenable position for the Re-public of Vietnam. The end of U.S. involvement did not lead to victory.MACV, no matter what its intentions, had been unable to turn the SouthVietnamese military into the tough, disciplined and motivated organiza-tion that its adversary, the PAVN, had proven to be. Without the contin-ued deployment of U.S. combat units in South Vietnam, the war was lost.


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This was apparent in the spring of 1975, but no amount of pleading bythe military or the Ford Administration stood the remotest chance ofchanging the minds of Congress and the public, who refused to saveSouth Vietnam from its fate.6

THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE VIETNAM WAR

The sociological aspects of the Vietnamese-American conflict in-volved a complex interchange between societies that existed in separateparts of the world, and whose historical and cultural backgrounds wereradically different from one another. In addition to its intercultural as-pects, the sociological dimensions of the war involved profound pres-sures on institutions and cultures within the United States as well inSoutheast Asia. Civil-Military relations are by definition a field of soci-ology. The sociology of the Vietnam War involved significant changesin both military and civilian cultures, and how they related to one an-other.

The conflict coincided and was a major catalyst for the political andsocial “revolutions” that impacted upon not only American society butglobal culture and society as well. The war coincided with the modernAfrican American civil rights movement, which became deeply con-frontational at the same time that Lyndon Johnson ordered the escalationof the war in 1965. By 1968, the United States was in the throes of a so-cial and political revolution. Wide-ranging changes in social mores, aswell as political, social and economic rights, coincided with a massiveantiwar protest movement that derailed Johnson’s Vietnam War policy,and led his successor, Richard Nixon, to fashion a plan based solely on aproper exit strategy for the country.7

Indeed, there were many levels to the social and cultural aspects of thewar. On one level, the conduct of the war produced major effects in bothIndochina and in the United States. To a degree, all military conflictstranscend the battlefield and the diplomatic exchanges that mark theirbeginnings and ends. The war in Vietnam was not just a military andgeopolitical conflict. It was also an encounter between different cultures,both Southeast Asian and American. Both Vietnamese and American so-cieties were complex multiethnic social systems. As one would expect fora conflict that extended over a decade and involved vast sectors of thepopulation of both societies, the war’s social impact was profound. Bothsocieties, Indochinese and American, were affected deeply by the de-struction and cross-cultural encounters. In the end, the Vietnam Warproduced wide-ranging trauma as well as structural change to all thegroups involved in it.8


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For Vietnam, the affected groups included the Viet Cong, the broadcommunist movement in the South; the major minority groups in Viet-nam, the Indo-Malay tribes of South Vietnam’s Central Highlands,the Khmer or Cambodian minority of the Mekong Delta region, the eth-nic Chinese who dominated economic activity in Saigon, VietnameseCatholics, who were predominantly anticommunist, the Buddhist com-munity, and the various cults or religious sects that emerged in the twen-tieth century as a product of Vietnam’s encounter with the West. Thisintricate panoply of ethnic, religious and political divisions shaped thenature of U.S. intervention. For Vietnam and Indochina the sociologicalimpact of the war went beyond the victory of communism.9

For the United States, the sociology of the conflict included the effectthe war had on the common soldier. The war produced hundreds of thou-sands of psychiatric casualties. Political issues that intersected with thewar’s sociology included the domestic effects of the vast antiwar move-ment, which underlay the cultural changes of the Vietnam War era, whenevery major American institution underwent forms of de-legitimization. Invery concrete ways, the war had a profound effect on the sociology ofAmerican culture.

THE ENEMY

In Indochina, the nature of the enemy was the most important chal-lenge to the U.S. military. Although the U.S. Army and Marines hadfought irregular forces or counterinsurgency campaigns since the earliestdays of the republic, never had they faced an adversary with such ex-traordinary organizational skills, logistical and intelligence capabilities asthe Viet Cong. For U.S. intelligence, the nature of the Viet Cong, its po-litical, social and military organization was a major object of study.From field intelligence including captured VC and VC documents, acomplex portrait of the enemy emerged. Douglas Pike’s Viet Cong re-mains a landmark study of the Viet Cong organization of the mid- andlate 1960s. U.S. intelligence had a detailed understanding of the nature ofboth the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese command structures, po-litical support in the South and clandestine resistance activities. Therewas no misunderstanding in the U.S. military with respect to the formi-dable psychological and organizational assets available to the enemy.10

What made the NLF and the North Vietnamese such extraordinaryenemies was the immense clandestine system that supported their opera-tions. The NLF was run by highly disciplined, dedicated and determinedrevolutionaries. They were willing to sustain enormous losses, and makeprofound sacrifices in lives to accomplish their long-term goal. Their mili-


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tary and political mission was a classical one in Vietnamese history. TheNLF and their dominant allies in North Vietnam were completely com-mitted to the liberation of their homeland from foreign domination. Heirsto the millennial traditions of Vietnamese clandestine resistance, theywere eminently successful in building and maintaining an effective politi-cal organization in South Vietnam. The country had forty-one provincescomposed of more than 200 local districts. Through every province anddistrict, NLF political officers coordinated the recruitment and retentionof VC soldiers. NLF spies and supporters were everywhere in the South,despite the repressive measures of the GVN and its police and securityservices. No matter how powerful and skilled the U.S. forces were at en-gaging and defeating VC combat units, the overall organization survived,and regenerated its forces.

Sophisticated recruitment and intelligence networks enabled the VC tocontinually rebuild, no matter what level of damage was done to theirmilitary forces and infrastructure. Despite the massive search-and-destroyoperations that characterized the U.S. ground war, the dogged determina-tion of the Southern party and the national government in the North re-fused to allow the ARVN and the U.S. win. Despite the deployment ofover one million soldiers, ARVN, the United States and other allied coun-tries, and the VC and North Vietnamese were able to maintain effectivemilitary forces capable of inflicting serious losses on their adversaries.

The typical VC soldier was barely five-feet tall and weighed a hundredpounds. His health and nutritional status was quite marginal, which wasunderstandable given the conditions that VC units endured in the field.The communist forces were under constant threat of attack by highlymobile and lethal air and ground units, including the intercontinentalB-52 bomber, U.S. and ARVN jet strike fighters, and heavily armoredtanks and armored personnel carriers. Despite massive technological su-periority, VC and PAVN units subsisted in remote areas with local sup-plies and limited arms and reinforcements through the famous Ho ChiMinh trail. The trail, originally a bicycle path through the dense highlandforests straddling the Vietnamese border, was widened into a two-lanehighway by the early 1970s. Intensive bombing by the U.S. Air Forcefailed to cut off this vital supply route. Whenever portions of the supplysystem was disrupted by U.S. strikes, communist engineering battalionswould go to work immediately, restoring not only the trail, but the road-work and bridges in North Vietnam that were essential parts of the sup-ply system. After extensive technical study, the Pentagon concluded asearly as the fall of 1966, that supply interdiction would never defeat thePLA and PAVN forces in the South. The communist forces required as lit-tle as fifteen tons of material a day to sustain their forces in the South.11


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U.S. policy makers and senior military officers never underestimatedthe tenacity and lethality of the communist forces. Both VC and PAVNunits were capable of savage reprisals against South Vietnamese popula-tions that supported the government. A routine reprisal against progov-ernment villages was political assassination. The torture and killing oflocal government officials, including village school teachers, was a com-mon PLF strategy to intimidate hostile or disloyal populations. Duringthe 1968 Tet Offensive, three thousand government “collaborators”were killed by VC units during the famous battle of Hue. The cruelty ofNLF reprisals against civilians was soon matched by the ARVN and U.S.forces who waged terrifying counterinsurgency assaults against areascontrolled by the Viet Cong.12

Despite casualty levels that would have eliminated other armies andresistance movements, the Vietnamese communists maintained a remark-able ability to recover from enormous battlefield losses. New recruitswere found in southern areas under NLF control, or former southernerswere repatriated from North Vietnam to join the ranks of the VC. Whilethe NLF were clearly severely damaged over the course of the war withthe United States and the ARVN, their survival, grounded in an un-breakable will to resist, never seemed open to doubt.

The indomitable nature of the enemy became a major source of con-tention in the debate between civilian and military policy makers. Civil-ian officials, especially in the White House and the legislative branch,always doubted the possibility that U.S. forces could “win” against anenemy that could survive and recover as well as the VC and the PAVN.On the other hand, senior military officers in all branches of the armedservices believed that the total application of U.S. military power couldhave won the military campaign. The dominant military view alwaysmaintained that the Vietnam War was not lost because of the nature ofthe enemy, but by the failure of American strategy and political will todefeat the VC and the North Vietnamese.13

In the aftermath of the conflict, William Westmoreland blamed the massmedia and the antiwar movement for the loss of the war. Despite the im-pressive victories against the best units the communists could put in thefield, the ability to wage war was constrained by a Congress and a publicunwilling to provide sufficient resources and range of action to win a de-cisive victory. Other historians have suggested that the war had been wonby the early 1970s; it was only the lack of an ability to support the victorythat allowed the North Vietnamese and the NLF to regain the initiativeand defeat the South Vietnamese who were abandoned to their fate.14

Over the course of more than a decade, the VC or the NLF were able toadapt to intensive conventional and unconventional military operations by


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the United States designed to defeat it. The Phoenix program, imple-mented by the CIA in the late 1960s, was particularly effective in rootingout the extensive NLF infrastructure in the Mekong Delta. By the end ofmajor U.S. involvement in 1973, most of the Mekong region had beenpacified through the village level counterinsurgency methods employedby Phoenix. Nonetheless, despite the loss of most of its cadre in theMekong, and the relatively weak state of its military units in the centralhighlands of South Vietnam, the NLF continued to resist the forces ofthe South Vietnamese government. Their more numerous and far betterarmed cohorts, the PAVN, maintained forward deployment in northernsectors of the South, despite the huge combat losses suffered from themid-1960s to the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. More than any other fac-tor, the tenacity of the Vietnamese communists, the product of bothMarxist-Leninist discipline and millennia-old Vietnamese military prac-tice, enabled them to endure, while their Western adversary could not.Vietnamese military historians summarized these ideas in their officialhistory of the PAVN. They pointed to the elemental role of the commu-nist party and Vietnamese history and culture:

Looking back over its (the Vietnamese communist party) historicjourney from the date of its formation (December 1944) until itbrought a victorious end to the resistance war (April 1975), fromthe battles of Phai Khat and Na Ngan to the historic Ho Chi Minhcampaign, our army, under leadership of the Party, fulfilled everyone of its duties toward the nation and fully carried out its interna-tional duties toward our friends and neighbors. Our cadre and sol-diers are profoundly grateful to the leadership of the Party, thework and the teachings of Uncle Ho, the support of our compatri-ots throughout the nation, and for the assistance of our interna-tional brothers and friends.15

With respect to U.S. civil-military relations, the concept of the enemywas a critical point of debate. For military officers, responsible for day today operational as well as longer-term strategic analysis of the Vietnam-ese communists, the enemy was determined, ruthless and beguiling. Sincethe Diem period, the North Vietnamese and the NLF were responsiblefor countless thousands of assassinations against South Vietnamese offi-cials and individuals associated with the national government. Decadesof studies by U.S. intelligence and political analysts had come to thesame seemingly incontrovertible conclusion: Communist ideology, basedupon Marxist-Leninism, was rigid and totalitarian, whether it was prac-ticed in the Soviet Union, any of the Soviet satellite states, in Cuba, China


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or Indochina. The serious split within the worldwide communist move-ment notwithstanding, Marxist-Leninist practice and doctrine unitedcommunist movements around the world. It was not exceptional, from adoctrinal point of view, that the PAVN and the PLA were willing to sac-rifice entire divisions in combat to achieve military objectives. SinceLeninist doctrine was premised on ends justifying the means, the loss ofindividual lives was acceptable. Given the extraordinary nature of an en-emy who was immune to internal public opinion and was willing to in-flict whatever punishment necessary on resistant civilian populations,most U.S. military observers and active duty officers believed the enemyhad to be dealt with in classic military terms.

For civilian observers and policy makers, the military’s concept of itsadversary was a point of sharp contention. On one hand, there were asignificant number of civilians who supported the war and the military’sgeneral point of view. Pro-war civilian society was found in the mostconservative regions of the country. The governor of California, RonaldReagan, was a vocal supporter of the military and the military realistview of the war. Conservative members of Congress, military families,refugees from the communist world, aggressive anticommunist factionsin all areas of American society viewed the enemy in demonic terms. Forthe avowedly pro-war sector of American society, the Viet Cong were nomore than terrorists, the North Vietnamese no more than agents of theinternational communist movement. From this perspective, the proper re-sponse was a war of annihilation waged with the full resources of theU.S. armed forces.16

The extreme pro-war ideology never had more than a significant mi-nority support in the United States. More centrist views of the war tem-pered a natural rejection of communism as totalitarianism with a dose ofmodern political realism. The majority of the Congress and the publicsupported the war with certain political restraints on the use of force.The enemy was seen as hard and duplicitous, but not without a basis ofsupport among the civilian population in the South. Congressional lead-ers and civilians in the executive branch viewed the social and politicalbasis of the insurgency seriously. They recognized the historical contextof the war and how it placed the United States at a serious disadvantage.Civilian leaders emphasized the political costs of the war, both in theUnited States and around the world. The efficacy of strong military ac-tion was weighed against the potential consequences of such a response,including a much wider and destabilizing war that could include China.17

Beyond the moderate political critique of the Clausewitzian responseto Vietnam, an ever expanding domestic antiwar movement viewed the“enemy” in very different terms. The antiwar movement, which emerged


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nationally in 1965, drew many millions of supporters and sympathizersby the end of the decade. In their view, which had increasing power inthe Congress, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese were first andforemost legitimate nationalists resisting a foreign power. In contrast tothe armed forces, who were tasked with the defeat of this enemy, the an-tiwar movement began to view the enemy more as heroes. This was espe-cially true of the antiwar intellectuals who populated leading U.S. andinternational universities. In the framework of the anti–Vietnam Warmovement, the Viet Cong were often romanticized as defenders of im-poverished villagers. On the other hand, the U.S. military was portrayedas the true terrorists, practitioners of a new kind of hi-tech genocide.18

The antithetical view the VC and North Vietnamese was best exem-plified by acts of public sympathy, such as the actress Jane Fonda visitingNorth Vietnam in 1972 and having her picture taken on an antiaircraftbattery. Other acts that challenged the view of the Vietnamese commu-nists as adversaries included pro–Viet Cong marches with pictures of HoChi Minh and the NLF flag. Of course, these acts were extreme. In be-tween the extreme left and the extreme pro-war right, a large middleground in the United States had a complex picture of the enemy that in-cluded the demonic as well as the historical context of Vietnam as apostcolonial Asian society.

As the war progressed under increasing pressure from the civilian an-tiwar movement, the military remained wedded to the objectives that es-tablished U.S. combat involvement. With some notable exceptions,senior military officers and members of the JCS retained their uncompro-mising image of the enemy throughout the war. The military required theimage of the enemy as cruel and duplicitous to support their strategic andtactical objectives. The military leadership had differing views of whatstrategy would ultimately defeat the North Vietnamese and the NLF. Yet,at bottom, all believed in increasing resources and freedom of operation.Postwar analyses of the conflict by professional military historians havenot contradicted the beliefs of the field commanders. In his famousanalysis of the war, Colonel Harry Summers, saw the military as trappedby the failure of civilian policy makers to grasp the nature of a pro-tracted land conflict, and the nature of an adversary who could recover aslong as there were limits placed on the U.S. response.

Nonetheless, civilian antiwar leaders, prominent in the Senate andHouse of Representatives, emphasized different aspects of the enemy.The Viet Cong were not a threat to the physical security of the UnitedStates, they argued. The use of horrific weapons, such as heavy bombers,cluster bombs, helicopters and artillery upon lightly armed village peas-ants demonstrated the rigid and perhaps farcical position of military


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officers, who somehow continued to believe that the loss of South Viet-nam meant the loss of large areas of Asia. Civilian leaders who took apolitical view of the war never accepted the predominant strategic viewsof the senior officer corps. The elite views of the U.S. armed forces wereperceived as extremist, not only with respect to Vietnam, but to the ColdWar in general. This gap, cultural and ideological, determined the con-trasting images of the communist enemy in Vietnam, and the nature ofthe policy debate between civilians and the military.19

MINORITY GROUPS

From the very beginning of U.S. engagement in Indochina, militaryand civilian decision makers were aware of the political divisions withinthe region. These divisions both helped and hindered U.S. actions. Thepolitical structure of South Vietnam, divided along religious and ethniclines, was a critical factor in both military operations and nation building.For counterinsurgency operations especially, the diverse non-Vietnamesetribes who inhabited most of the highlands of the South, were of partic-ular importance to U.S. special forces.

What most contemporary and many historical observers of the Viet-nam War do not realize, is how diverse Vietnam and Indochina was. TheVietnamese dominated the rice growing regions of the deltas and coastalareas. They were the majority of the population in the country as awhole, but through large areas of the mountainous interior, the Montag-nards, French for mountain people, were living on land that their ances-tors had inhabited for centuries or millennia. More than thirty MonKhmer and Malay-Polynesian tribes lived in the interior areas of bothNorth and South Vietnam. In the South, U.S Special forces were verysuccessful organizing many of the district tribes into progovernment mil-itary units. Throughout the war in the South, Montagnard tribesmenwere mobilized into the Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG). TheCIDG eventually reached a full strength of 60,000 men, and were highlyeffective fighting alongside U.S. and ARVN units against the Viet Congand North Vietnamese.20

In addition to the Montagnards, other important groups in SouthVietnamese society included Catholics, Buddhists, Cao Dai and Hoa Haoreligious sects, ethnic Chinese and Cambodians. Vietnamese Catholicswere a key progovernment constituency. Although they represented nomore than 10 percent of the South’s population, their fierce opposition tothe communists made them a dominant group in the South VietnameseArmy and government. The Nhu family, which ruled the South for eightyears after the Geneva Accords were devout Catholics. It was also true


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that other prominent members of the southern leadership, during andafter the Diem regime, were Catholic.

A key area of conflict in South Vietnam was between the Catholicsand the Buddhists. Buddhists were by far the largest religious group inVietnam. Their usual political position was neutrality in the war be-tween the NLF and the South Vietnamese government. However, inde-pendent of their views on the NLF and the future of Vietnam, Buddhistleaders demanded freedom from government interference, and politicalequality with the Catholics in the national government. The Buddhistswere constantly at odds with the national government, routinely makingdemands in public speeches, for greater representation in the South Viet-namese assembly.21 In fact, the Buddhists, who had considerable clout inspecific provinces, were at odds with both the atheist communist move-ment and the non-Buddhist South Vietnamese government. They wereinstrumental in overthrowing the Diem regime in 1963 and remained abelligerent antigovernment group through all of Diem’s successors.

For MACV, with the exception of the half million or so Montagnards,the various political groups in the South were primarily seen as impedi-ments to the war effort. The constant power struggles between the vari-ous groups had a disastrous effect on the South Vietnamese to fight a warof national survival against a very disciplined and formidable foe. The di-versity of South Vietnamese society was yet another burden of proof forMACV and the White House, to justify the war to an increasingly skep-tical Congress.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR

War has always been a psychological event. All the great military the-orists, including Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, and all the great generals, fromAlexander the Great to Frederick IX, Robert E. Lee and George S. Pat-ton, understood that the nature of military conflict involved the psychol-ogy of strategy and the soldier. In psychological terms, the Vietnam Warworked at the level of statesmanship, the level of field commanders, at thegroup level and the level of soldiers and common people. All levels ofpsychological warfare were deemed critically important to the prosecu-tion of the war. This was true of both communist and “free world” com-manders, as well as foot soldiers, antiwar protesters and by all participantsin the conflict.

Both civilian and military leaders in the United States understoodthat the critical variable for victory was to break the will of the NorthVietnamese. This could be accomplished, they thought, through variousmilitary pressures and by success in the South. Such success was depend-


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ent upon achieving the defeat of the enemy on the battlefield, and in the“hearts and minds” of the South Vietnamese. The psychological dimen-sions of the war encompassed all these aspects. The war entailed the psy-chology of pacification, troop morale, the global propaganda war andfinally, the inner reality of the major decision makers themselves.22

On a global level, psychological warfare took the form of competingimages and rhetoric broadcast to constituencies on every continent. Forthe United States, maintaining the psychological advantage in domesticpublic opinion was critical. With the mass media reporting daily on mas-sive destruction of villages and towns, civilian casualties and Americanwar dead and wounded, the battle for moral high ground against the en-emy became an ever-greater challenge. As the war progressed, the anti-war movement pressured the minds of not only national decision makersbut also military leaders in the field, who had to cope with seriousmorale problems related to the war and its representation to the public.

The ongoing challenges and assaults on the legitimacy of the war un-dermined the military necessity for maintaining national political will toensure unremitting pressure on the North Vietnamese and their allies. Inthe early years of the Nixon administration, the aggressive air war andcounterinsurgency operations of the U.S. military inflicted serious dam-age on the PAVN, the PLA and North Vietnamese society. Nonetheless,the war was lost in the most important arena of all, the psychological re-ality of the American public. With crumbling political resolve, success onthe battlefield was meaningless.

COUNTERINSURGENCY DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE

A principal component of CI practice and doctrine was also psycho-logical warfare. The idea behind CI was simple in theory, but complex inits full application. General William Westmoreland, MACV commanderand architect of the ground war, said famously that the war would bewon by “winning the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people. Ofcourse, the same idea resonated with NLF commanders and indeed withunconventional warfare practiced all over the world. The idea was ele-mental. The basis of victory in a conflict that entailed large-scale civilianparticipation was control over civilian populations. In the absence ofsheer terror and wholesale atrocities to inspire fear, civilians in Vietnamhad to believe in the goals and methods of the allies. If civilians as in pre-vious wars in Asia and other continents sided with the insurgents, theprospects of permanent victory would prove illusory.23

Counterinsurgency as practiced by the U.S. Army for most of the wardid little to win popular support. While some special operations officers


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practiced their own forms of pacification, which relied on the idea ofbuilding local bases of support to resist the NLF, the Army remainedwedded to traditional operational methods. The ARVN, trained by theU.S. Army, focused on engaging the main force units of the PLA and thePAVN and defeating them decisively.

Alternatively, the CIA, along with their South Vietnamese counter-parts, developed a new counterinsurgency campaign during the Nixonadministration. The Phoenix program involved small combat teams toinfiltrate NLF controlled villages to attempt to flush out the politicalcadres who kept the village as part of the communist resistance. Prac-ticed for several years, until the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973, thetruly unconventional program yielded excellent results, especially in theMekong Delta. By the end of U.S. military involvement, the Viet Congcould field only a few dozen operational combat battalions in South Viet-nam. In total, they represented just 25,000 combat troops facing thecombined million-man force of the RVNAF.24

For the entire length of the conflict, U.S. psychological warfare offi-cers worked relentlessly on ways to gain support from the civilian popu-lation. CI practice included numerous ways of indoctrinating localpopulations to support the GVN and oppose the communists. Modern-ization theory, a darling of 1950s and 1960s American social science, in-formed the methodology of the military and the CIA in promoting thefundamental legitimacy of the GVN. Leaflets, dropped by air or handedout to villagers, instructed them in Vietnamese how the government andthe United States would help provide their needs as long as they remainedloyal and resisted the recruitment efforts of the communists. From the1950s through the 1970s, extensive humanitarian aid programs were inplace to support rural hamlets. The U.S. government, as part of its psy-chological war effort, provided South Vietnam with thousands of schools,millions of textbooks, free medicine and health clinics, food and agricul-tural assistance. All this vast effort, implemented by various military andcivilian departments of the U.S. government, were designed for their psy-chological effect on the populace.25

At the same time that pacification/modernization efforts were under-way in the South other methods of psychological warfare were usedagainst the North. Punishing assaults on North Vietnam’s industry andtransportation sectors were designed to weaken the psychological mo-tives for the North to continue the war. To the chagrin of most seniormilitary officers, the psychological effects of the bombing delivered toWhite House approved targets did not inflict sufficient psychological dis-tress to bring the North Vietnamese to the conference table. For bombingto be sufficiently devastating to a country’s morale, according to most


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military analysts, it had to be delivered so relentlessly and with such in-tensity that the enemy had to believe that his country’s very survival wasat stake.

Since there were limits to the bombing campaign, the North Vietnam-ese, while under serious pressure, were able to adapt enough to survivethe onslaught. In turn, the North Vietnamese used the attacks on theircities as potent psychological warfare tools. It was with little difficultythat the North Vietnamese were able to disseminate images of Americanbrutality to the world’s newspapers and electronic mass media. The psy-chological warfare component of the bombing was immediately returnedto the United States as global propaganda against it in the sphere of in-ternational public opinion. Whatever psychological and material coststhe United States inflicted on the North with its airpower was offset bythe psychological and ultimately political costs of that use of force on thelegitimacy of the war in world and U.S. public opinion.

Psychological damage was done to Viet Cong populations in theSouth, who saw their ancestral villages destroyed, and many of theiryoung men killed or imprisoned in counterinsurgency search and destroysweeps by the United States and the ARVN. Serious psychological dam-age was also incurred by North Vietnamese hamlets, villages and towns,whose civilian populations absorbed the effects of massive bombing raidson military and industrial targets. The collateral damage from RollingThunder, conducted from 1965 to 1968, was very significant but not cat-astrophic. Hundreds of thousands of sorties over three years resulted inperhaps fifty thousand civilian deaths in North Vietnam, out of a popu-lation of 18 million. Yet, the tens of thousands of dead, the many morewounded and traumatized, as well as the effect of the enormous militarycasualties from fighting in the South, established profound psychologicalpunishments for North Vietnamese; a level of trauma that they sharedwith other countries who had experienced the horrors of twentieth cen-tury warfare.26

THE AMERICAN SOLDIER IN VIETNAM

Duty for American soldiers during the Vietnam War was challengingon many levels. Combat conditions were very hazardous. Soldiers had tocope with tropical heat, diseases, and a mysterious and seemingly in-domitable enemy. Despite an enormous logistical supply line that provi-sioned a million tons of food, oil, weapons and ammunition per day over10,000 miles of ocean, the average soldier in the field lived day to day.Several million soldiers served in Vietnam from the early 1960s to theearly 1970s. Contrary to popular belief, most enlisted personnel were


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voluntary enlistees rather than drafted. 648,000 or 25 percent of U.S.forces in-country were draftees. In contrast, fully 66 percent of WorldWar II soldiers were drafted. Tours of duty were limited to one year. Onoccasion, soldiers volunteered for more than one tour. U.S. officers wereboth conscripted and professional career soldiers. For career soldiers,combat duty in Southeast Asia was essential for career advancement.From a sociological viewpoint, the U.S. military was a fair cross-sectionof American society. Some sectors of society were overrepresented in themilitary, and others underrepresented, but the conscript nature of themilitary during the Vietnam era—that is, the universal service obligationrequired of young adult U.S. males—preserved the diversity of the armedforces during the conflict.27

Overall, the Vietnam combat soldier was better educated and ofhigher socioeconomic status than the average American citizen. Fourfifths of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam had high school degrees. Three fourthswere from blue collar or middle class families. Postwar interviews sug-gest that the vast majority of soldiers supported the war during theirtours of duty and after they returned to the United States. Some 90 per-cent of U.S. combat veterans are “proud” of their service in the conflict.Finally, four-fifths of U.S. Vietnam combat veterans believe the war was lost because the United States lacked the political will to defeat itsadversary.

Postwar statistics that show overwhelming support for the war, under-estimate the damage to the military and to military-civilian relations as aresult of it. The nature of civilian-military relations during the war wasproblematic for most U.S. military personnel, principally because of thedeep conflict within civilian society over the conduct of the war. Soldierswho returned from tours of duty in the late 1960s and early 1970s wereoften confronted by civilians who attacked their character and integrity.Common complaints of returning combat veterans were verbal attacksby strangers who greeted them with the sobriquet of “baby killers.” Bothovert hostility and simple indifference to returning soldiers increased thepostwar trauma for hundreds of thousands of veterans. Indeed, a totalaccounting of U.S. casualties during the conflict must include an unde-termined number of psychiatric cases that far exceed the total number ofwounded and dead from twelve years of war. One estimate placed thetotal number of long-term psychiatric casualties at approximately 15percent, for all forces who served in country:

The estimated lifetime prevalence of PTSD among American Viet-nam theater veterans is 30.9% for men and 26.9% for women. Anadditional 22.5% of men and 21.2% of women have had partial


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PTSD at some point in their lives. Thus, more than half of all maleVietnam veterans and almost half of all female Vietnam veterans—about 1,700,000 Vietnam veterans in all—have experienced “clini-cally serious stress reaction symptoms.” 15.2% of all maleVietnam theater veterans (479,000 out of 3,140,000 men who servedin Vietnam) and 8.1% of all female Vietnam theater veterans (610out of 7,200 women who served in Vietnam) are currently diag-nosed with PTSD (“Currently” means 1986–88 when the surveywas conducted).28

A major effect on the state of the American soldier during the Viet-nam War was the introduction of a pervasive drug culture. Estimates ofdrug addiction range as high as 40 percent for U.S. forces stationed incountry. The production of opium in northern Thailand and Burma, the“golden triangle,” led to the worldwide expansion of opiate use in theform of heroin and other derivatives. A tragic consequence for Americansociety was the introduction of opium-based drug use to American sol-diers. The drug culture that American soldiers acquired in South Viet-nam’s cities, as well as in Bangkok while on short leave had multipledeleterious effects. Drug use supported the deterioration of the U.S. mil-itary’s combat effectiveness, affecting morale and discipline in the theaterof operations and within the military worldwide. Further, the drug cul-ture spawned by the war made its way back to the United States, wherethe destructive effects of chemical addiction resulted in millions of ru-ined lives.

Heroin addiction, a devastating illness, ravaged not only the affectedGIs, but spread an extraordinary complex of social problems throughoutthe communities where the soldiers returned. The drug problem onlyadded ammunition to the burgeoning antiwar movement, which saw thedestructive effects of the conflict on both Vietnam and American society.In contemporary accounts of the war, drug use among Vietnam War vet-erans was linked directly to the psychiatric effects of combat involvingenormous stress and the highly questionable practices of U.S. counterin-surgency operations.29

Some observers and scholars of the Vietnam conflict have argued thatthe defeat of the United States was a result of the disintegration of theU.S. military as a fighting force in Indochina. Indeed, the enormous stressplaced on U.S. military institutions by the war, led to serious declines inoperational effectiveness. However, the effects of the war, over a decadeof active involvement, on American society, culture, politics and institu-tions, were so broad that it does not appear possible to differentiatecause from effect. The loss of civilian support resulted in the withdrawal


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of U.S. forces under less than favorable circumstances. However, the lossof domestic legitimacy was related directly to the results of U.S. militaryoperations in the combat theater. Those operations affected the state ofthe military forces, including its relations with American society. Whichcame first, the operational defeat of the military in the field, or the loss ofpublic morale for the conflict, cannot be discerned readily. In fact, overyears of mind-numbing bombing, search-and-destroy ground operations,social unrest and political dissent, both dire conditions, military and so-cietal, reinforced one another.30

CONCLUSIONS

This chapter surveyed some of the important areas for U.S. militaryoperations during the Vietnam War, and how they related to civilian so-ciety. Understandably, those operations were fraught with difficulties,whose sources were both internal and external to the institutions of thearmed forces. Strict political constraints on the use of force and an in-creasingly hostile domestic political environment limited the ability ofthe U.S. armed forces to achieve its authorized mission. Strategy wasbadly implemented because of those constraints, in addition to the inef-ficiencies caused by competing institutional interests between the fourbranches of the armed forces. Without unity of command, a badly ledand motivated ally in South Vietnam, and a wavering, often hostile re-sponse from civilian society, the chances of victory seemed poor. The en-emy, the Vietnamese communist party of both North and South Vietnam,relied on the enormous reservoir of political will that the Vietnamesemaintained to resist foreign occupations. They also relied on the doctrinalstrengths of Marxist-Leninism and Maoism as ideological systems for en-gaging in revolutionary war. Finally, the overt material support of the So-viet Union and the People’s Republic of China was vital to keeping thePAVN and PLA in the field against the formidable military assets of theUnited States.31


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MILITARY STRATEGY VERSUS CIVILIAN AUTHORITY

To reiterate, military operations during the Vietnam War were con-ducted in the context of the power relations between the military andthe civilian branches of government. U.S. civil-military relations werechallenged and defined by Vietnam. From the last year of the Kennedyadministration, to the second year of the Ford administration and thefall of Saigon, a span of twelve years, Vietnam was a central focus ofCold War strategy and the role and efficacy of the armed forces as aglobal military. Within the theater of operations, the primary source ofconflict related to the strategy and tactics of limited war. How thatstrategy affected the social and political fabric of the United States wasthe vortex of conflict and opposition between the uniformed servicesand the leaders of civilian society. The political leadership in Washing-ton placed strict limits on the intensity and the scope of the conflict.Despite continuous recommendations by the senior members of thearmed forces for expanded means and freedom of action, military so-lutions to the Vietnam War were directly opposed by the presidentialadministrations of John F. Kennedy (JFK) and Lyndon Johnson (LBJ).Both Democratic presidents viewed the professional officer corps withwariness. LBJ and JFK experienced the JCS as extremely aggressiveand politically tone deaf, whose recommendations during the 1962Cuban Missile Crisis were a sure path to a nuclear exchange betweenthe superpowers.1

4

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The oppositional relationship between the executive branch and themilitary changed with the election of Richard Nixon. Nixon, a tradi-tional Republican, viewed the military as a tool for projecting U.S.power around the world. In Vietnam, to a large degree, Nixon favored afar more Clausewitzian approach to the war, with expanded bombingand cross-border operations into Laos and Cambodia. He supportedthese policies, despite poisonous opposition from a sizeable number ofcongressmen and senators, and an ongoing battle for integrity and pres-tige from an increasingly cynical mass media.2

Despite Nixon’s promilitary inclinations, he understood that he had aclear mandate to end the war, not necessarily to win it. By 1969, at thestart of the Nixon presidency, the majority of the U.S. public no longer be-lieved categorically, as it did in 1965, in winning the war in Vietnam. Onthe other hand, the JCS could not conceive of fighting a war to lose. Defeatwas an extraordinary psychological blow to any military organization.The loss of Indochina, after the commitment of large U.S. forces, wasanathema to the professional armed forces. It challenged the legitimacy oftheir profession and fundamental tenets of military doctrine and culture.

MANAGERIAL INTERNATIONALISM

Through the entire operational phase of the ground war, from 1965to 1972, the United States was guided by a managerial perspective or ide-ology. Clearly, military doctrine and culture impressed itself on the Amer-ican military response. However, as I have noted earlier, the dominantinstitutional perspective on international affairs remained managerial ortechnocratic. Managerial internationalism informed all levels of analysisand action. Military officers designed operations and campaigns within theideological prism of military culture. They understood war in terms of theclassic principles of military doctrine that I have termed Clausewitzian. Onthe other hand, the culture and ideology of national security “managers,”which included most of the civilian leaders and analysts in the WhiteHouse, the National Security Council staff and other executive depart-ments, was more managerial than Clausewitzian. The managerial perspec-tive incorporated broad and varied political interests with militaryobjectives. Managerial internationalism defined the Vietnam War, creatingthe integrated political-military plans that for better or worse were exe-cuted over both the Johnson and Nixon administrations.3

MAJOR ESCALATION: 1965–1968

The escalation of the U.S.-led ground war began in 1965 andreached its height in 1968. The expansion carried out the plan agreed


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upon in summer 1965. Increasing numbers of combat battalions weredeployed throughout the South, designed principally to engage mainforce Viet Cong and regular North Vietnamese Army units. Althoughthe communist forces maintained the initiative in two-thirds or more ofthese military engagements, the overwhelming air- and land-based ar-tillery systems deployed by the United States made battlefield victoriesnearly impossible for Ho Chi Minh and his senior general, Vo NguyenGiap.4

The United States and South Vietnamese, reinforced by contingents ofAustralian, Thai, Philippine and South Korean troops, and the commu-nists, including the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) of theSouth, the North Vietnamese and thousands of Chinese and Soviet advi-sors and technicians, engaged in a long battle of attrition. Both sides hadthe same underlying strategy. Ironically, both thought the other wouldsuccumb to high levels of casualties. For the communist forces, casualtieswere eight to ten times higher on average than U.S. losses, and severaltimes those of the Republic of Vietnam forces.

Despite the massive losses in battlefield engagements, including thefateful 1968 Tet Offensive, Ho Chi Minh assumed he was winning.From his perspective, as long as American forces were sustaining sub-stantial numbers of dead and wounded, the sacrifices for his nation werejustified. In more than 2,000 years of the country’s history, Vietnam hadfought extended and clandestine war against vastly superior enemies, de-feating them with tenacity; and the martial spirit carried through Viet-namese history.5 At the same time, the United States had for nearly 200years fought long and costly battles all over the world. The Americanmilitary tradition, or way of war, was as formidable as that of the Viet-namese. To defeat the United States, Ho Chi Minh and his compatriotshad to wage a war of interminable length against an enemy with inex-haustible resources. The North Vietnamese could only win through po-litical and psychological success in a deadly war of attrition. TheVietnam War literature is correct in understanding the nature of the com-munist strategy, as well as the American.

For their part, the North Vietnamese military leadership was very re-alistic in their appraisal of the war and the performance of their soldiersagainst a formidable enemy. An assessment of the war in October 1969revealed extraordinary candor on the part of General Vo Nguyen Giap:

Even though we have fought the enemy with more vigor, we havenot been highly determined to wipe him out and expand our areas.

We are incapable of attacking (RVN) city areas.Our guerrilla warfare activities have become weaker and weaker.We have been unsuccessful in political and military proselytizing.

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The 10-point solution presented by the NFLSVN has not beenaccepted favorably (throughout the world).

The provisional Revolutionary Government was established forpropaganda. It is a new form (of government), but its members re-main the same (as before).

The fact that we controlled from three-fourths to four-fifths ofthe population is not accurate.6

The senior political leadership in the United States understood the chal-lenge posed by the North Vietnamese and their communist allies. Despitethe formidable task of waging a protracted land war against an enemywith a 2,000-year-old history of winning such wars, the leadership ac-cepted the attrition strategy proposed by the Army commander, WilliamWestmoreland, in summer 1965. Major civilian leaders, includingLyndon Johnson, Walt Rostow, Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk, be-lieved that General Westmoreland, given the assets at his disposal, wouldbe able to destroy the combat effectiveness of the communist forces, whilemilitary and civilian personnel, in cooperation with the South Vietnam-ese, would make progress winning the rural population to the side of theGVN. They also believed that the growing and increasingly effectivearmed forces of South Vietnam would stabilize the country, making it aviable nation-state. Finally, the graduated bombing of North Vietnamesesupply routes and military and industrial installations, would eventuallyforce the communists to the realization that they could not win the war.7

The American strategy was logical except for the expectation of suc-cess in a limited period of time. Members of the JCS had estimated acampaign of five to ten years with up to a million troops. The durabilityof the American ground war was the one variable that the United Statescould not overcome. The limited war envisioned by the Johnson admin-istration held South Vietnam together from 1965 to 1968, at consider-able cost in American lives, money and international prestige. Yet thecomplex, multileveled, multidimensional global war effort by the UnitedStates had its Achilles heel. A prolonged military campaign, fought underpolitical constraints defined by 1960s managerial internationalism, couldnot sustain domestic political support long enough to succeed. In the lastanalysis, North Vietnam’s attrition strategy, at enormous cost to them,was more effective than that of the Johnson administration.

OPERATIONS 1965–1966

The first year of major combat operations by U.S. forces involved sta-bilizing the military situation in the South. The case for combat troops


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was made by MACV in June 1965. During the first six months of theyear, PLA units attacked South Vietnamese military forces with increas-ing size and frequency. Holding the initiative in those engagements, theywere quickly destroying the ability of the RVNAF to secure any part ofSouth Vietnam. Prior to the introduction of major U.S. combat forces,many doves in the executive branch favored an enclave strategy. WilliamBundy and George Ball, among others, favored holding a small part ofthe country while they negotiated with the North Vietnamese for a set-tlement.8

The introduction of battalion-size Army and Marine units immedi-ately changed the balance of power on the battlefield. Instead of thepoorly led and motivated South Vietnamese forces, U.S. soldiers, backedby the overwhelming firepower of its forces, could engage and destroyeven numerically superior communist units. Beginning in summer 1965,for the first time since the first U.S. advisors came to Indochina in 1950,U.S. combat units fought both PLA and PAVN units. Overall, aided bydecisive technological superiority on the battlefield, they destroyed theiradversary. With the advantages of military force delivered by air- andsea-based aircraft, helicopter gun ships and the armored land vehicles de-ployed in the forests and swamps, U.S. Army and Marine battalionsforced tactical withdrawals of enemy forces throughout the South.9

The buildup of U.S. forces inside the country was impressive. In sum-mer 1965, MACV had less than a 100,000 soldiers in South Vietnam.Troop strength was at 184,300 by the end of 1965. By the end of 1966,some 400,000 troops comprised the allied expeditionary force in theSouth. In addition to U.S. troops, the Johnson administration was suc-cessful persuading the South Koreans, Australians, New Zealanders,Thais and the Philippinos to send troops. With the simultaneous strength-ening and expansion of the ARVN, the combined order of battle for thefree world looked like it outnumbered significantly the forces of its ad-versary. At the end of 1966, combined Viet Cong and North Vietnamesetroop strength was estimated at 282,000. U.S. and RVNAF authorizedtroop strengths were 385,000 and 631,000 respectively.10

As noted earlier, the dominant mode of land operations in Vietnamwas the search-and-destroy mission. William Westmoreland hoped todestroy the main force units of the enemy, and render their operationsin the South completely ineffective. The concept was quite simple andlogical. Combat units would sweep the deeply forested or swampedterrain of South Vietnam, looking for enemy concentrations. With supe-rior firepower, including enormous amounts of airpower from land-and sea-based fighter and bomber wings and thousands of helicopters,they sought to engage the largest and best PAVN and PLA forces. The


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Marines preferred the coastal enclave strategy of “clear and hold,” butwhen opportunity arose, they engaged the enemy in an integrated as-sault. Operation Starlight, August 1965, was the first large-scale combatoperation by the U.S. Marines. In a preemptive strike against a 1,500-man Viet Cong regiment, three Marine battalions, with substantial airand sea support, launched a powerful military strike. U.S. victory wasassured as always by overwhelming firepower. Using large artillery guns,Naval guns from two destroyers and several hundred sorties from Ma-rine fighter bombers, the U.S. destroyed the VC regiment. They recov-ered more than 600 enemy dead, while the Marines suffered only 45fatalities, and 120 wounded.11

The Army’s first major engagement was the battle of the Ia Drang Val-ley in November 1965. The First Battalion, Seventh Cavalry of the FirstCavalry division was sent into the valley in the Central Highlands ofSouth Vietnam, near the Cambodian border. They were sent to searchfor suspected enemy concentrations. As a testimony to the lack of accu-rate field intelligence, the airmobile unit was immediately surrounded bytwo North Vietnamese regiments. In the ensuing battles, the First Battal-ion, reinforced by two others from the Army’s most elite combat division,the First Cavalry, engaged several thousand crack PAVN regulars. Greatlyoutnumbered, but supported by the extraordinary and deadly firepowerof its helicopters, ground-attack fixed-wing aircraft and, finally, the dev-astating bombings from the Air Force’s B-52 Stratofortresses, the Armywon a decisive victory. At least 2,000 North Vietnamese troops werekilled, and the surviving forces withdrew, ceding the valley to the UnitedStates and the ARVN.12

The battle was the first major engagement and victory by the U.S.Army in Vietnam. It demonstrated the utility of airmobile warfare inthe Indochina theater, and dealt a material and psychological defeat to thecommunists. Nonetheless, it cost the lives of 305 American soldiers. Theloss of a single American soldier had political ramifications in the UnitedStates. Both the military and civilian leadership understood this, but thedilemma, the need to fight contradicted with the need to minimize casu-alties, was not resolvable in 1965 or for the ensuing years of the war’s es-calation.

In spring, two significant investigations—one an internal report by theU.S. Army known as the PROVN report, and the other a Senate ForeignRelations Committee hearings on the war, the Fulbright hearings of1966—challenged the conduct and the legitimacy of the war. PROVNwas an extensive and highly critical two-volume analysis of the conduct ofthe war. The analytical narrative traced the development of U.S. involve-ment from the 1940s through the beginning of 1966, when the report was


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sent for internal publication and distribution. In many respects, PROVNbears a striking resemblance to another internal report later declassifiedas the Pentagon Papers. What distinguishes PROVN from the latter re-port is a distinct air of urgency.

The first paragraph of the report’s executive summary is a blunt andclear disapproval of the conduct of the war. Succinctly, the authorsagree with many of the most strident public critics of the war in spring1966:

The situation in South Vietnam (SVN) has seriously deteriorated.1966 may well be the last chance to ensure eventual success. “Vic-tory” can only be achieved through bringing the individual Vietnam-ese, typically a rural peasant, to support willingly the Governmentof South Vietnam (GVN). The critical actions are those that occurat the village, district and provincial levels. This is where the warmust be fought; this is where that war and the object which lies be-yond it must be won.13

What the PROVN report emphasized was the formidable political-military organization that opposed the United States and its South Viet-namese allies. The United States stabilized the military situation, whichwas on the verge of complete collapse in 1965, but the NLF and thePAVN were expanding their operations throughout the South. MACVand CIA intelligence estimated the Viet Cong Infrastructure, or VCI, inthe range of 100,000 people. By 1967, the estimate of all communistforces in the South, including political cadres, main force Viet Congand North Vietnamese units, regional and local NLF and irregular or“part-time” soldiers, was in the range of 300,000 to 600,000. MACV’smost optimistic estimate was at the lowest end of this range, while theCIA’s most pessimist estimate was at the high end.14 Despite terrific vic-tories for the U.S. forces, such as the battle of the Ia Drang Valley, thestrength and morale of the communist forces remained undiminished.Without vigorous local-level efforts to weaken the political infrastruc-ture, PROVN concluded that the war was lost. This analysis was in-consistent with the dominant military ideology in the U.S. armedforces, which, as described, expected to defeat the Viet Cong and theNorth Vietnamese by destroying their main force units and breakingthe will of the North Vietnamese leadership to continue the insurgencyin the South.

While the Army suppressed the PROVN report, the Senate ForeignRelations Committee, under the leadership of Arkansas’ Senator WilliamJ. Fulbright, went ahead with a critical inquiry of the administration’s


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Vietnam policy. In five televised hearings on the Johnson administra-tion’s supplemental aid request for the war, Fulbright indicted the aims,logic and methods of the war. In a book published later that year, titledThe Arrogance of Power, the powerful senator who was a national au-thority on foreign affairs, denounced every aspect of the Johnson admin-istration’s war, blaming both a cultural belief in American superiorityand mission in the world and the militaristic tendencies of an advancedindustrial civilization.15

OPERATIONS 1967

In 1967, there was a general feeling among the military leadership thatthe tide was now turning in their favor. The United States now had morethan 400,000 troops on the ground, with a rapidly growing South Viet-namese military that was twice that size. Korea had sent some 50,000troops to support the war. Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and thePhilippines were also contributing in a broad-based, multipronged strat-egy to defeat the communists. At the height of the war, the Johnson ad-ministration had large-scale pacification strategies in place, including thecritical programs to develop the local and regional forces that fought theViet Cong on a daily basis.

The main ground war seemed to be going well. In battle after battle,main force North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces were dealt huge de-feats. MACV statistics showed that U.S. forces were killing 7,500 VCand PAVN soldiers per month. Combined with the South Vietnamesearmed forces, the enemy was taking well over 100,000 combat fatalitieson a yearly basis. This was considered progress, even though, with asteady infiltration of 6,000 soldiers from the North per month, the com-munists were still quite capable of replacing those losses.16

At the same time, U.S. theater fatalities increased dramatically dur-ing 1967, with more than 10,000 deaths for the year. The very favor-able “kill ratios” of more than seven to one in favor of the free-worldforces was not materially weakening the North Vietnamese and theNLF. At the same time, very forceful antiwar sentiment in the UnitedStates continued to gain strength and societal legitimacy. In particular,congressional anger at the cost in men and money, and the strategic ir-rationality of the conflict, worked as a daily pressure on the JohnsonWhite House. Despite major critiques in the press, academia and in theCongress, the commander of U.S. forces, Westmoreland, and many ofthe senior officers were confident in the overall strategy of attrition andpacification.17


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OPERATIONS 1968:TET AND POST-TET

The year 1968 was the war’s political turning point. From a purelymilitary perspective, the communist forces had suffered tremendous lossesand defeat. Direct military assaults on South Vietnamese cities were allrouted quickly by U.S. and ARVN forces. There was no mass uprisingagainst the South Vietnamese government, as many of the North Viet-namese strategists believed. Yet, the communists demonstrated a coordi-nated attack in every part of the country. Viet Cong units assaulted thepresidential palace and the U.S. embassy in Saigon. In Hue, several thou-sand progovernment civilians were killed by the PLA before U.S. andSouth Vietnamese troops recaptured the city in February. The scope of theattacks stunned and disheartened public opinion in the United States,which was heavily influenced by the portrayal of the offensive by the massmedia. Clearly, the Tet Offensive of 1968 was a transforming event in theVietnam War, and for U.S. civil-military relations during the conflict.18

In effect, the political defeat of the offensive was both national andglobal. The seeming inability of the huge free-world forces, over 1 mil-lion men under arms, supported with the extraordinary firepower of theAir Force and Navy and the almost limitless resources of the Pentagon,to fight a massive attack by guerrillas and light infantry from a ThirdWorld country became a crushing blow to the war’s legitimacy. The com-munists and especially the PLA suffered huge and irreplaceable losses.Estimates of 40,000 dead in February 1968 suggest that the VC experi-enced the destruction of many of its regular units as well as substantialnumbers of its officers and political cadres.

In response to the unexpected offensive, Westmoreland requested206,000 more troops to supplement the 500,000-plus expeditionaryforce it had in place. This was a perfectly reasonable request from thepoint of view of many senior military officers. One of the cardinal prin-ciples of war, which had long been ignored by the political leadership inWashington, was that success in combat required the concentration of allavailable resources to inflict a decisive blow on the enemy. Since the en-emy had suffered serious losses in its daring but failed offensive, mount-ing a powerful counteroffensive was absolutely consistent with theprinciples of war defined in modern times by Napoleon, Clausewitz,Jomini and so many other leaders and strategists of land warfare.19

Yet by the spring of 1968, the political basis for the war had evap-orated. The public began a historic shift away from support for thewar. Lyndon Johnson lost the New Hampshire primary to the antiwarcandidate Eugene McCarthy. Finally, the Clifford Task Force, a senior


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advisory group led by Clark Clifford, the secretary of defense who hadreplaced Robert McNamara, provided an internal critique that effectivelyended the escalation of the Vietnam War. The situation was grasped quitesuccinctly in a communication between General Wheeler, chairman of theJCS, and MACV Commander Westmoreland in March 1968:

C. It is fair to state that the combination of further troop deploy-ments and the critical fiscal situation has placed the government inas difficult a situation as I have seen in the past five years.

D. All of these things have, I judge, together with the gloom anddoom generated by the Tet offensive, affected heavily public sup-port for our war effort. The latest polls show that 69 per cent ofthose interviewed favored a phased withdrawal of our forces fromSEA. To put it succinctly and frankly, I am concerned by these de-velopments, and I believe that you should be aware of them. How-ever, I caution that you do not reveal to anyone that this is thesituation as I see it and is as serious as I believe it is.20

Two weeks later, LBJ announced in a televised speech his decision tonot seek reelection. Further, he called a halt to the bombing of almost allof North Vietnam and extended an invitation for peace talks. He desig-nated Averill Harriman, his ambassador at large and a leading figure inhis administration who favored a negotiated settlement, as his ambassa-dor to the “peace diplomacy.”

In operational terms, however, 1968 continued the large-scale groundwar. The siege of the U.S. military base at Khe Sanh in the Central High-lands by North Vietnamese divisions was another test of U.S. military re-solve. Once again, overwhelming aerial supremacy and logistical supportenabled the outnumbered U.S. garrison to survive the assault and encir-clement of their base. Even as the country moved anxiously to pressurethe Johnson administration for a negotiated end of the war, military op-erations continued as they had for the past three years. Search-and-destroy missions against PAVN and PLA units, and sweeps against localVC guerrillas, continued on a daily basis. The seemingly endless conflictmade 1968 the bloodiest year of the war. Over a thousand U.S. soldiersdied each month that year, with many thousands more sent home withserious battlefield wounds. For the North Vietnamese, fatalities weremore than eight times as high for a country with only one-tenth of thepopulation of the United States. The war of attrition continued at a furi-ous pace. The massive firepower deployed by the United States and theARVN resulted in the widespread depopulation of communist controlled


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rural areas, and constant attacks by both sides against fortified positionsand moving units.21

The political context of 1968 was a worldwide social, cultural and in-tellectual movement that challenged established authority. In Paris, stu-dents erected barricades to fight the gendarmes. They were revoltingagainst an authoritarian university system that they in the spirit of thetimes wanted to overthrow. April 1968 saw more than hundred race ri-ots in American cities, a response to the assassination of Martin LutherKing Jr. at a motel in Tennessee. In June, presidential candidate Robert F.Kennedy Jr. was assassinated in California, just after winning the state’sprimary. In August 1968, violent antiwar demonstrations at the Demo-cratic National Convention in Chicago shocked a worldwide audience.22

In this context, the war went on in Indochina with brutal regularity.U.S. commanders knew that the communists had suffered serious mili-tary defeats. The NLF had lost thousands of its most experienced fightersduring the Tet Offensive. The PAVN had taken huge losses during Tetand throughout the year. North Vietnamese society was suffering underthe huge burdens the war had placed on its population. The loss of life,food rationing and the constant fear of bombing was having an effect onthe country’s morale. Yet the U.S. military command knew that its ownforces had suffered serious losses too. The cost of the war had reached anintolerable level for a majority of the American public. Clearly, therewere constraints on the scope of the military’s operations that went be-yond the constraints imposed in 1965, limiting the possibility of Chineseinvolvement.

In the fall of 1968, the military and the political leadership began toprepare for the de-escalation of the war. All major presidential candi-dates including the segregationist George Wallace promised an end to thewar. The election of Richard Nixon, a Republican with strong conserva-tive credentials in foreign policy, heralded a conservative solution to U.S.disengagement and the end of the war.

VIETNAMIZATION AND DISENGAGEMENT: 1969–1973

Vietnamization simply meant turning the war over to the South Viet-namese. Once the United States had 500,000 troops in-country, plus airand seamen based in neighboring countries; virtually every aspect of thewar was being conducted by the U.S. government. Strategic and opera-tional planning was done in Washington, CINCPAC headquarters inHawaii and COMUSMACV headquarters in Saigon. In fact, the financ-ing, diplomacy, force and operational planning, intelligence and analysis


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were conducted by dozens of executive branch institutions around theworld. The Vietnamese people fought the war. They died, military menand civilians, by the hundreds of thousands, but the entire structure ofthe war, its decision-making system, remained almost entirely in Ameri-can hands.

The Nixon administration knew that had to change radically if SouthVietnam was going to survive. The massive scale of U.S. involvement wastemporary. This was a political constraint that the American publicplaced on its military and political establishment. Fourteen thousandU.S. soldiers lost their lives in the Indochina conflict in 1968. For a warthat had come to be seen as elective rather than vital for the UnitedStates, the level of combat mortality and injury was far above the rangeof toleration for a majority of the public. Even without the increasinglyviolent and extreme university antiwar movement of the first term of theNixon administration, there was no political viability for any policy thatkept many hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground on the distantbattlefields of Indochina.23

Richard Nixon knew this when he was running for office in 1968. Hewas deeply aware of this political constraint when he introduced his pro-gram of Vietnamization in 1969. The program invigorated the expan-sion of the RVNAF. From 1969 until the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, adetermined program to improve the war-fighting capabilities of theSouth Vietnamese armed forces was indeed effective. Combined with theaggressive expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos that seriouslydamaged the ability of the North to infiltrate forces into the South, theoverarching military strategy of the Nixon administration was success-ful. By 1971, the Phoenix pacification program, the interdiction of sup-ply and infiltration routes in Cambodia and Laos, and the enhancedperformance of all branches of the RVNAF, had created the conditionsfor the rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces. By the beginning of 1972, fewU.S. ground combat forces remained in action in South Vietnam.24

The political context for Vietnamization and U.S. withdrawal was abroad disengagement mandate from the Congress and the public.Whether or not the JCS and MACV viewed a continued U.S. militarycommitment as necessary for the survival of South Vietnam, Americansociety had made clear its inability and unwillingness to continue majorinvolvement beyond the minimum required.

OPERATIONS 1969–1972

Military strategy during the Nixon administration followed its politi-cal designs. Nixon and his chief foreign policy advisor, Henry Kissinger,had opened negotiations with the North Vietnamese, the Peoples Republic


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of China and the Soviet Union, in an ambitious attempt to end what theyinherited, that is, a large and potentially dangerous military engagementin Southeast Asia. Since the strategic and economic burdens of the warmatched the already formidable domestic political costs, Nixon was in-deed anxious to implement a strategy of disengagement, what he latertermed “peace with honor.”25

Operations during the Nixon administration followed a strategy ofaccelerated pacification, aggressive interdiction and destruction of enemylines of communication, continued search-and-destroy missions but anongoing transfer of military responsibilities to the ARVN and otherbranches of the RVNAF. The overriding objective was to change thecomparative balance of power between the North Vietnamese and SouthVietnamese forces. Once conditions on the battlefield favored the sur-vival of the Republic of Vietnam at least in the short term, the U.S. wouldhave the political context it needed to execute a successful disengage-ment from Indochina.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RVNAF

The development of the South Vietnamese armed forces was central toNixon’s exit strategy. In fact, the expansion of the operational capabili-ties and overall effectiveness of the ARVN, the regional and popularforces, the South Vietnamese Marines, Navy, Air Force and special oper-ations units, was an ongoing project for MACV and its predecessor orga-nization MAAG, from 1950 to the end of direct U.S. involvement in1973. Close evaluations of the South Vietnamese military by MACV an-alysts suggested that indeed very significant progress was made in devel-oping the force and combat abilities of the South Vietnamese.26

In the first years of U.S. combat involvement, 1965–1967, in purelystatistical terms, ARVN units were deemed on average only one-third toone-half as effective per troop as U.S. Army and Marine units. The com-parative superiority of the U.S. forces was attributed to better leadershipand better combat support. Nonetheless, South Vietnamese combatforces had kill ratios that often approximated the ratios achieved by U.S.Army maneuver battalions. Where the drop in effectiveness was mostpronounced was in the regional and popular forces in South Vietnam.With fewer and inferior weapons and poorly trained officers, regionaland local militias, not integrated into the national Army, found them-selves on nearly equal footing with the Viet Cong. As a consequence,these units had less favorable kill ratios in combat and, overall, avoidedcombat as much as possible. In general, the South Vietnamese forces wereshown to be not afraid to fight, but poorly led. Poor military leadershipfrom junior to senior level officers, led to hesitancy to engage the enemy.


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Lacking an effective officer corps, the South Vietnamese continued to bedependent upon U.S. combat forces to support them, even though theirproximity to enemy forces throughout the country exposed the RVNAFto intensive engagements, usually initiated by the enemy.27

The formal beginning of Vietnamization in 1969 accelerated the train-ing and development of the South Vietnamese military. Better weapons,lower levels of desertion and some improvement in the officer corps de-scribed the growth of the RVNAF through the early 1970s. MACV’scentral mission from 1970 onward was the development of the RVNAFas a military establishment capable of carrying on the war and defeatingthe enemy. To a degree, U.S. objectives were met. A combination of fac-tors drastically reduced the strength of the Viet Cong in South Vietnam.Gradual improvement, and far more effective pacification methods, com-bined with the drastic reduction in infiltration from the North after1970, created a more favorable situation for the South Vietnamese.Nonetheless, at no point was the ARVN considered capable of defeatingthe PLA and the PAVN as they were positioned south of the demilita-rized zone. Despite improvement, the South Vietnamese remained nomatch for the disciplined, highly motivated and well-trained North Viet-namese regulars, who in due time, would defeat the RVNAF.

Defeat, however, was not because of lack of sacrifice by South Viet-nam. The anticommunist South Vietnamese forces fought, and sustainedhuge numbers of casualties. By the end of the war, the RVNAF had suf-fered over a million casualties, including over 200,000 dead. These num-bers far exceeded U.S. losses in absolute terms. In relative terms, adjustingfor differences in population, South Vietnamese fatalities were fifty timesthat of the United States. Even this total, staggering as it was, dwarfedthe relative losses of the North Vietnamese and NLF.28

PACIFICATION

Along with the expansion of the size and capabilities of the RVNAF,and the interdiction and destruction of communist bases and supplyroutes in Laos and Cambodia, the other pillar of the war effort was paci-fication. The Department of Defense need a scientific measure of pacifi-cation. Beginning in 1967, MACV and the ARVN implemented ascoring system for all of the hamlets in South Vietnam. Every hamlet inevery district and every province was evaluated according to the degree itwas under government control. The first estimate of control or security,in January 1967, estimated that 62 percent of South Vietnam’s populationwas in “relatively secure” areas. Through the counterinsurgency pro-grams developed by the United States, South Vietnam and all other free


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world forces deployed in theater, the vast majority of South Vietnam’spopulation, both urban and rural, came under government control. Bythe end of 1971, after most of the rural population in the South had beenseparated from the NLF, MACV estimated that 97 percent of the popu-lation was now “secure.”29

Of course, these numbers were never accepted by antiwar critics, whoquestioned every aspect of counterinsurgency and pacification, from itsmorality to its efficacy. An historical evaluation of both U.S. and NorthVietnamese sources suggests that pacification methods in the South, in-cluding the destruction of the political infrastructure of the NLF wassuccessful in reducing the influence of that organization, but by nomeans was it eliminated entirely. Both the NLF’s military organization,the People’s Liberation Army Forces (PLAF), and its political cadres, sur-vived every program and operation designed to destroy it from the late1950s to the end of the war in 1975.

In the last analysis, pacification worked to the degree that large num-bers of rural South Vietnamese rejected the NLF. However, the extensivecivilian assistance programs implemented by the government never cre-ated a level of commitment and legitimacy among the South Vietnamesepopulation to defeat the communist armies that drove into Saigon andother major cities of the South in spring 1975. The war had to be won atmany levels: in the villages of South Vietnam, on the battlefields in allfour military regions in the South, in the air over all of Indochina, on theground in Eastern Cambodia and Laos and, in most important terms, inthe political arenas of international and domestic politics.

By the first month of the Nixon administration, a majority of the Sen-ate, including a growing number of vociferous critics of the war, had de-termined that the requirements for victory in Vietnam for the UnitedStates were impossible; that the only possibility for success was a speedywithdrawal from the country. Richard Nixon, however, had a differentperspective on the war. Even as he made plans for withdrawal, he becameconvinced by the military reports and analyses he considered, that heneeded to expand the geographic scope of the ground war, if only tem-porarily. To many conservatives, this was an act of eminent courage.However, to most liberals and moderates, the invasion of Cambodia wasreckless and irrational.

THE CAMBODIAN INVASION: 1970

On April 30, 1970, the Nixon administration announced that it hadauthorized the invasion of Cambodia by combined U.S. and South Viet-namese forces, and that U.S. troops for the first time had crossed into


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Eastern Cambodia. The action sent shockwaves throughout the countryand the world. Violent antiwar protests were mounted in the UnitedStates, and official protests were lodged by the Soviet Union, China andnumerous other countries including the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.In the Senate, antiwar senators led by William Fulbright, George McGov-ern and Mark Hatfield, offered legislation to cut off funding for the Cam-bodian operation. Those opposed to war feared the expansion of theconflict, at a time when the administration had promised withdrawal.30

The Wall Street Journal, a moderate antiwar voice in the mass media,had nothing but criticism for the Cambodian decision. “It can hardly beviewed as anything but the widening of the war,” the paper editorialized.“Americans want an acceptable exit from Indochina, not a deeper entrap-ment.”31 John T. Connor, a former secretary of commerce and the then-chairman of the Allied Chemical Corporation, denounced the invasion asprecipitating “a constitutional crisis of the most serious nature.” Finally,Roland Evans and Robert Novak, prominent conservative political colum-nists, suggested that Nixon’s “military gamble” in Cambodia was far lessthan the attending “political gamble” he faced in the United States.32

Indeed, while the Gallup Poll showed Nixon’s popularity at 57 percentafter his Cambodia speech, the country was almost in a state of armedsiege. On May 4, four students protesting the war and the invasion werekilled by national guardsmen at Kent State. In response, some 400 col-leges and universities suspended classes nationwide. ROTC buildingswere attacked at the University of Wisconsin, Case Western Reserve,Ohio University, the University of Nevada, the University of Alabamaamong others. State governors placed all National Guard units on alert.In Massachusetts, 1,500 faculty at five colleges signed a petition callingfor Richard Nixon’s impeachment. At Yale, the university presidentKingman Brewster led a student and faculty delegation to Washington todemand a halt on attacks by the national government on students. InNew York City, Mayor John Lindsay was quoted as saying the countrywas on the verge of a “physical breakdown.”33

Still, the invasion was widely praised by the administration and themilitary as a bold move that would reap enormous benefits. The MACVhistory for 1970 concluded that the Cambodian operation had had a dev-astating effect on the ability of the North Vietnamese to support its op-erations in the South. In fact, infiltration from North Vietnam, whichwas more than a hundred thousand men in 1968, declined to a tiny frac-tion of that number in the early 1970s. With the loss of most of its Cam-bodian and Laotian sanctuaries, the lines of communication with theSouth were greatly compromised.


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THE EASTER OFFENSIVE: 1972

The spring or “Easter” offensive of 1972 came just as Richard Nixonwas preparing to run for reelection. For three years, Nixon and Kissingerhad worked relentlessly to fashion a withdrawal strategy that would holdup to the antiwar pressure at home, while strengthening South Vietnamto the point that it could hold its own against the NLF and the NorthVietnamese. With the huge effort to strengthen all the elements of theRVNAF, and the successful effort to separate the NLF from the South’srural hamlets and villages, withdrawal had been rapid. By March 1972,few U.S. ground troops except those assigned to defend military installa-tions were deployed in theater.

The accelerated replacement of U.S. forces by the RVNAF was a di-rect result of the success of Vietnamization and pacification. In 1965, theNLF had grown in size and capability to the point that it directly threat-ened the survival of the Republic of Vietnam. Only the intervention ofU.S. combat forces saved the republic. By 1972, however, the NLF wasno longer an effective combat force against a vastly improved and largerSouth Vietnamese military. To win the war, the North Vietnamese lead-ership understood that a major offensive by the PAVN would be re-quired. U.S. intelligence reported 7,000 to 8,000 trucks with weapons,ammunition and other supplies massing at supply depots to drive souththrough the Laotian trail system.34

On March 30, 1972, just after midnight, Good Friday morning,40,000 crack North Vietnamese troops, three full combat divisions,along with elements already positioned in the South launched a massiveattack against the northernmost sector in South Vietnam, military regionone. Thousands of mortars, artillery and rockets were unleashed in a co-ordinated assault against the two main cities in the region, Quang Triand Hue. With only 9,000 South Vietnamese troops in place to defendthe coastal plain, the situation quickly turned into an emergency for theRVN.35 Simultaneously, PAVN units including heavy Russian-madetanks, struck in the Central Highlands near Plieku and farther south,communist forces attacked airfields and strategic towns north and north-west of Saigon, with the intention of cutting off the main highway con-necting Saigon to the rest of the country. The well-prepared, coordinatedattack was consistent with classic military doctrine. The North Vietnam-ese command, under General Giap, was attempting to win the war withone sweeping and decisive attack on the South. President Thieu, recog-nizing the gravity of the situation, went on national television calling forthe country to fight for its survival.36


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North Vietnamese objectives were centered upon driving the ARVNout of the Central Highlands and the delta provinces west and north ofSaigon so that the rural population that had been lost to the revolutionwould be regained. The South Vietnamese forces, with surprising deter-mination, fought off the best combat troops available to the PAVN andthe NLF, and over a period of three months survived the assault. Un-doubtedly, the aid of the United States, in particular some 2,000 B-52sorties against enemy concentrations, was critical for the failure of the1972 spring offensive. The United States combined its successful aircounteroffensive in the South with a massive new assault on North Viet-nam. At the beginning of May, nearly six weeks into the offensive,Nixon announced to the nation his intent of punishing North Vietnamfor its spring campaign. In addition to the air strikes in the South, whichhad increased dramatically in April and May, a new program of strategicbombing, later to be called “Linebacker I,” was begun. Further, for thefirst time in the war, the U.S. Navy was authorized to blockade the NorthVietnamese coast and mine Haiphong harbor. It seemed, after so manyyears of waging a limited war under successive presidential administra-tions, the Nixon administration had belatedly endorsed the wider, morefully Clausewitzian strategy, that the JCS had urged as early as the firstyear of the Kennedy administration. The Nixon administration refusedto concede South Vietnam to the North in 1972, as it made historicdiplomatic openings to North Vietnam’s benefactors, the Soviet Unionand the People’s Republic of China.37

LINEBACKER I AND II

Two of the most successful military operations during the entire Viet-nam War was the application of airpower against the North Vietnamese.Linebacker I, implemented in response to the 1972 Easter offensive, wasa critical campaign that saved the Republic of Vietnam. Linebacker II, amassive air attack aimed at strategic targets in Hanoi and Haiphong,forced the North Vietnamese to the conference table in January 1973,and the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. Both of these Air Force oper-ations inflicted highly significant damage on the North Vietnamese mili-tary and civilian population. The Linebacker operations were the closestimplementation of General Curtis LeMay’s strategic concept for air war,which was used against the Japanese mainland in 1945. In 1964, LeMayhad lobbied for an intensive strategic bombing campaign against the DRV.Always viewed as an extremist, willing to risk nuclear war, LeMay neverhad influence with either the Kennedy or the Johnson administrations.Nixon, a hawk and a conservative Republican, was far more sympathetic


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to the military’s view of war.38 In May 1972, with RVNAF forces fallingback against a surprise PLA and PAVN offensive, the unleashing of Amer-ican air assets was essential to rescue the South Vietnamese.

The political costs associated with Linebacker I were considerable.Once again, a formidable array of domestic antiwar critics denouncedNixon’s aggressive response to the communist offensive. His expandedbombing and associated naval operations threatened dangerous escala-tion, at least to an antiwar public with venomous relations to the Nixonadministration and the professional armed forces. Yet the unleashing ofB-52 bombers, AC-130 gun ships with 105-mm cannons and other com-bat aircraft in support of the ARVN saved the day. By August, the NorthVietnamese offensive in three military regions in South Vietnam hadbeen defeated. Massive attacks against the Ho Chi Minh trail and NorthVietnamese supply depots just across the DMZ had a major effect on theability of the PAVN and PLA to maintain its attacks. The devastatingbombing raids on their forces in the South left thousands of dead andmany abandoned headquarters.39

The military success of the spring and summer air war against theDRV was returned to again in “Linebacker II.” The new and even moreintensive air campaign was a response to the recalcitrance of the DRV. InDecember 1972, the North Vietnamese refused to accept the settlementterms offered by the United States. Nixon could not withdraw fromSouth Vietnam without the release of American POWs held in Hanoi’sinfamous prisons. Confronted with the uncompromising face of theNorth Vietnamese, Nixon felt cornered. The American public demandedan end to the war that had traumatized the country for nearly a decade.At the same time, he understood that neither the Soviet Union nor thePeople’s Republic of China would support the North Vietnamese in theirobdurate diplomatic posture. Without consulting the Congress, Nixonordered 129 B-52 aircraft to strike key military and industrial areas inthe Hanoi and Haiphong regions. The assault lasted only twelve days,ending on December 30, 1972. Two thousand strike sorties by the mostdestructive bombers in the U.S. arsenal brought wide protests, formaland informal, from around the world. The bitter denunciation of the mil-itary assault by the prime minister of Sweden resulted in a temporarysuspension of diplomatic relations between the two countries. In theUnited States, the familiar voices of antiwar protest denounced the newattacks as yet another form of aggression and even genocide.40

Nixon took the criticisms, domestic and international, without com-ment. The Linebacker II raids were costly in lives for both North Viet-nam and the USAF. The Air Force lost thirteen bombers and their crews,some of whom died, others became the war’s final American POWs. The


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North Vietnamese suffered more than 2,000 casualties and severe dam-age to roads, bridges, airfields, supply depots and industrial plants. Thebattering of the North was met with little overt criticism by North Viet-nam’s benefactors, who wanted an end to the war nearly as much as theUnited States. The end of the air offensive came when the North Viet-namese signaled their willingness to accept the peace terms offered bythe United States. A war that had been fought with gradualism for over adecade ended with a massive demonstration of strategic bombing, whichimposed very few constraints on the application of U.S. airpower.

CONCLUSIONS

U.S. military operations evolved through the major period of Ameri-can involvement. The United States deployed multiple parallel strategiesin Indochina, aimed at simultaneous nation building, counterinsurgencyand conventional military operations. The combined military strategieswere coordinated with a global political and diplomatic strategy neces-sary to support the war. The North Vietnamese and their communistallies followed a similar path. In accordance with Vietnamese and com-munist war doctrines, the DRV and the NLF pursued coordinated mili-tary, diplomatic and political strategies against the Republic of Vietnam,the United States and its allies. Both sides inflicted very significant casu-alties. The NLF lost combat effectiveness because of its enormous lossesduring and after the 1968 Tet Offensive, and by the sweeping actions ofthe ARVN and MACV to depopulate rural areas under NLF control.41

The North Vietnamese sustained extraordinarily high casualties aswell. Fighting superior U.S. forces from 1965 through 1972, the PAVNsuffered losses eight to ten times higher than the Americans. Even theARVN was able to effect kill ratios of between two and four to oneagainst Viet Cong and North Vietnamese units. Yet, despite the tremen-dous losses, the Vietnamese communists endured. Two years after thesigning of the Paris Peace Accords, with significant material supportfrom the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, they were ableto field a very well-equipped, well-trained and highly motivated Armythat was victorious against the RVNAF in spring 1975.

In operational terms, the United States had defeated the PLA and thePAVN decisively. Over the course of eight years of combat, U.S. militaryforces delivered a string of serious defeats and massive casualties on theiradversary. By the early 1970s, the Viet Cong was no longer an effectivemilitary force in the South. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong sus-tained over 1 million combat fatalities, including more than 200,000 deadin 1968 alone. In relative terms, the losses sustained by the communists


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were equivalent to those suffered by the Soviet Union during the SecondWorld War. Despite these catastrophic losses, and their ongoing opera-tional defeats, the communist forces won the war. This will be discussedin more detail in chapter 5. We should note here that superiority on thebattlefield does not necessarily translate into military victory because, asall the major theorists of war have communicated in their writings, waris by nature a political process.


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By the end of 1970, it was clear to almost all military observers that thePLA and the PAVN were defeated in South Vietnam. U.S. military esti-mates placed combined losses for the communists in 1968 at 289,000men. Whereas in the late 1960s, infiltration averaged as many as 10,000soldiers per month moving down the Ho Chi Minh trail system, by late1970, with the closing of most of the supply routes into the South, infil-tration had been reduced to a comparative trickle. Two years into theNixon administration, more than 90 percent of the civilian population inthe Republic of Vietnam was considered under government control. Fi-nally, the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI) was gradually being reducedmonth by month, through defections, captures and combat deaths. TheNorth had suffered huge casualties from deadly battles with the UnitedStates and other free-world forces. In North Vietnam, hundreds of thou-sands of tons of bombs over six years of air raids had produced seriousdamage and hardship for the civilian population. In operational, strategicand psychological terms, it appeared that the communists were defeated.1

Of course, this analysis ignored the essential political context of thewar, which was not determined on the battlefields of Indochina, but inthe broad arena of public opinion in the United States and the rest of theworld. As discussed in earlier chapters, in terms of U.S. politics, the warhad placed the Nixon administration in a precarious state. Even withmilitary success, the broad antiwar movement in the United States re-fused to accept the validity of any views of the war by the Pentagon, theWhite House or indeed any part of the executive branch.

5

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During the Nixon administration, the military found itself in similarpolitical and doctrinal positions to the White House. It believed it hadturned the tide of war and in fact was on the verge of victory. Yet, the po-litical legitimacy for the war had waned. Despite what it considered vic-tory, domestic political defeat at the hands of the antiwar movement inCongress and in the larger public, was forcing the military to reduce itsforce structure before it believed the RVNAF was ready to assume theconsiderable burden of defending South Vietnam from skilled and disci-plined forces of the NLF and the North Vietnamese. While the UnitedStates disengaged from Vietnam, the morale of the U.S. armed forcessuffered serious decline. While the communists had been defeated, theU.S. military had experienced the most serious decline in discipline andmorale since the Civil War.2

Throughout the war, from the Kennedy administration through theFord presidency, military observers expressed critical views of presiden-tial decision making. Some of the dissent was purely operational, criticiz-ing the tactics and methods of combat. However, the most trenchantcritiques were strategic, challenging the commitment of Kennedy, John-son and finally the Nixon and Ford administrations to victory in In-dochina. Finally, there were soldiers who dissented from both themilitary and civilian views of the war, and joined the larger antiwarmovement in American society.

STRATEGIC DISSENT

Strategic dissent began during the earliest years of the Kennedy ad-ministration and continued until the fall of Saigon during the Ford pres-idency. As noted in earlier chapters, the majority of military officerscritiqued the war from the right, arguing that the civilian controlled warviolated basic tenets of military strategy. Among the Clausewitzianhawks were Air Force General Curtis LeMay, U.S. Army General andJCS Chair Lyman Lemnitzer, CINCPAC Admiral Ulysses S. Sharp, re-tired supreme allied commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, former JCSchairman Maxwell Taylor, as well as a legion of other generals, admiralsand lower-ranking military officers, active and retired. In the Congress,leading hawks included retired military officers, Strom Thurmond andBarry Goldwater. Military dissenters to the left of center, who viewedU.S. intervention as misguided, included Army Generals Matthew Ridge-way and James Gavin and Marine Corps General David Shoup. RetiredLieutenant General James Gavin testified before the Senate Foreign Rela-tions Committee in 1967. He repudiated the doctrine and tactics of hisformer colleagues in the Pentagon:


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In my testimony last year I referred to the changing nature of mili-tary power. It is my belief that the advent of nuclear weapons hasbrought about a fundamental change in the very nature of war it-self. The Clausewitzian orthodoxy that war is a continuation ofpolitics by other means, for example, in my opinion, no longer ap-plies. The concept that if you destroy people and enough propertyyou overcome an enemy’s will to resist I believe to be as equally fal-lacious.

A corollary of this idea, of course, is that nation should use asmuch force as is necessary to win since in war there is no substitutefor victory. Actually, the nature of the conflict being what it is andthe danger of a nuclear holocaust being ever present, it is com-pelling that solutions less than total war be found. . . . We must re-alize that limited wars must be kept limited. This change in thenature of war is quite fundamental and it should be reflected in ourforeign policy and the military operations that mirror such policy.Otherwise we shall expend our national wealth and manpower innever-ending conflicts all over the world.3

Perhaps the most famous military dissenter was Pentagon planner andformer marine officer Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg, a key aide to Robert Mc-Namara, became famous for leaking the top secret Department of De-fense study on U.S. decision making on Indochina. His delivery to theNew York Times of what became known as the Pentagon Papers, hadmajor impact on the public critique of the war, as well as many futurestudies of the decision-making process.4

The left or antiwar dissent by senior officers critiqued the entire strate-gic and tactical doctrine of the U.S. military. A more radical critique, ledby former junior officers and enlisted men who served in Vietnam, wentbeyond the operational and strategic critique of the war and focused onthe conflict’s morality. For the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, mili-tary dissent meant a disavowal of the methods used by the U.S. to engagein war in Vietnam. For the last three years of U.S. intervention, antiwarVietnam War veterans accused the U.S. military of war crimes in In-dochina. Of all the military critiques, this was most damaging to the mil-itary as an institution.5

What conservative, moderate and radical military dissents showed wasthe ongoing crisis of civil-military relations during the Vietnam War, andthe loss of both combat effectiveness and political capital for the Ameri-can military during and after the Vietnam conflict. For the U.S. armedforces, the length of the war, and the tragic level of discord within themilitary, between the military and civilian institutions and cultures, was

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a nearly unmitigated disaster. By the early 1970s, combat readiness ofU.S. forces worldwide had reached unprecedented low levels. Drug andalcohol abuse were rampant in the U.S. armed forces. Insubordination,including unwillingness to go into combat, had become commonplace by1970. The U.S. armed forces were plagued by the disintegration in com-mand authority. After years of televised carnage, and the experience ofmillions of U.S. troops involved in inflicting casualties on Vietnamesecivilians, the moral legitimacy of the war, not only inside the military,but in American society as well, had reached very low levels.6

MILITARY DISSENTERS PRIOR TO THE GROUND WAR

There were two types of dissent in the military prior to the U.S.ground war. On the one hand, counterinsurgency specialists, such as Ed-ward Lansdale, viewed the operational tactics of the U.S. Army to be in-effective. The CI experts understood the task in Vietnam as one thatrequired unconventional warfare. From their perspective, to defeat theViet Cong required pacification methods, not major-unit warfare aspracticed by the main force structure of the Army. On the other hand,most military dissent involved just the opposite set of concerns. AirForce Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay’s dissent was very specific. The U.S.strategy against North Vietnam would fail because it lacked sufficientairpower against targets vital to the enemy’s war effort. His position re-mained unchanged throughout the war and postwar era, and had con-currence with many senior military officers.7

Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the JCS, was emphatic, as early asMay 1961, when he telegrammed his thoughts about Vietnam to his col-leagues at the Pentagon. He wanted to know what “we had to do to win”in Vietnam. In effect, the issue was quite clear to him. As a veteran oftwo major wars, and as the senior military officer in charge of a multi-million-man force, Lemnitzer recognized the essential and critical needof every military organization to achieve victory. Without victory, the in-stitutional memory of defeat could damage the military for decades,making future military victories far harder to achieve.8 In a November1961 meeting of the NSC, Lemnitzer was able to reiterate his hawkishsentiment about the value of Vietnam and Indochina, as well as his gen-eral position on the Cold War:

The President asked the Secretary of Defense if he would takeaction if SEATO did not exist and McNamara replied in the affir-mative. The President asked for justification and Lemnitzer repliedthat the world would be divided in the area of Southeast Asia on


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the sea, in the air and in communications. He said that Communistconquest would deal a severe blow to freedom and extend Commu-nism to a great portion of the world. The President asked how hecould justify the proposed courses of action in Viet Nam while atthe same time ignoring Cuba. General Lemnitzer hastened to addthat the JCS feel that even at this point the United States should gointo Cuba.9

The alternative military critique did not reject victory as an overar-ching objective. However, in the CI perspective, which had adherentsamong all the special forces deployed in Indochina, victory was not aquestion of overwhelming force. The destruction of North Vietnamwould not guarantee victory, because the enemy was a complex, nation-wide, clandestine military-political organization. No amount of bombingor search-and-destroy operations would by themselves uproot the en-trenched communist-led resistance movement in the South, supported bya communist population in the North, which was prepared to suffer un-limited casualties and destruction of infrastructure to defeat a foreignenemy, namely, the United States.

MILITARY CRITIQUE OF GRADUAL ESCALATION

In political terms, the gradual escalation of the Vietnam War was anecessary process. A limited war, arguably a war of choice, that in-volved rotating several million American soldiers through a very distantland with a culture that bore no resemblance to American culture, re-quired not only ideological orthodoxy, but an ongoing process of politi-cal legitimacy as well. Public diplomacy and domestic selling of the warrequired years of daily work. In lieu of a Pearl Harbor experience, themobilization for war began before the Gulf of Tonkin and continueduntil the last year of the Johnson administration. The White House hadthe authority to fight a war in Indochina, but the political context of thewar was that its scope was limited. The Vietnam War was, by politicalcalculus, a circumscribed, controlled engagement. The war was intendedto save South Vietnam, and hence, the integrity of the global contain-ment system, but the conflict had to avoid a direct military confronta-tion with North Vietnam’s powerful benefactors. The Republic ofVietnam, established under U.S. auspices during the Truman and Eisen-hower administrations, was a vital interest of the United States throughthe war’s conclusion in 1975. However, under no circumstances, asjudged by the war managers in the White House and the Pentagon, couldthe Vietnam conflict result in a nuclear or military crisis with either

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China and/or the Soviet Union. Kennedy alluded to this during the sameNSC meeting with Lemnitzer:

Mr. Rusk explained the Draft of Memorandum on South VietNam. He added the hope that, in spite of the magnitude of the pro-posal, any U.S. actions would not be hampered by lack of fundsnor failure to pursue the program vigorously. The President ex-pressed the fear of becoming involved simultaneously on twofronts on opposite sides of the world. He questioned the wisdom ofinvolvement in Viet Nam since the basis thereof is not completelyclear. By comparison he noted that Korea was a case of clear ag-gression which was opposed by the United States and other mem-bers of the U.N. The conflict in Viet Nam is more obscure and lessflagrant. The President then expressed his strong feeling that insuch a situation the United States needs even more the support ofallies in such an endeavor as Viet Nam in order to avoid sharp do-mestic partisan criticism as well as strong objections from other na-tions of the world. The President said that he could even make arather strong case against intervening in an area 10,000 miles awayagainst 16,000 guerrillas with a native Army of 200,000, wheremillions have been spent for years with no success. The Presidentrepeated his apprehension concerning support, adding that nonecould be expected from the French, and Mr. Rusk interrupted tosay that the British were tending more and more to take the Frenchpoint of view. The President compared the obscurity of the issues inViet Nam to the clarity of the positions in Berlin, the contrast ofwhich could even make leading Democrats wary of proposed activ-ities in the Far East.10

The military critique of this strategy was plain. Forcing the military tofight a war with incremental increases in strength, with the graduateduse of force against a determined enemy with virtually unlimited outsidesources of support, would result in a military stalemate. An inconclusivelimited war that produced a stream of casualties was not a viable strat-egy to win for a democratic and privileged society. During the 1950s, theAmerican public’s resistance to and fear of international communismsustained military budgets above 10 percent of GNP. In the 1960s thesame fear of global communism began to soften. The Stalinist SovietUnion was replaced by the rhetoric of “peaceful coexistence” and the be-ginning of what became known as détente. While Maoist China pro-claimed its commitment to world revolution, the backwardness of thatcountry made it far less imposing as a threat than the Soviet Union.


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Indeed, the threat of Communist Chinese invasion, so prominentamong Democratic leaders who demanded the constraints imposed bythe Johnson administration, was considered overblown by the JCS. Thegradual escalation of the war, involving the periodic announcement andpublic vetting of new troop commitments, diminished the ability of themilitary to win the war using its traditional methods. Bombing NorthVietnam was permitted under the rules of gradual escalation. However,Rolling Thunder, the program launched to deliver measured and precisedamage on the North Vietnamese military-industrial infrastructure, wasa limited bombing campaign. For three years, the U.S. Air Force andNavy bombed the North Vietnamese mainland. Yet the bombing was notcontinuous and placed critical targets including Hanoi and Haiphong offlimits. As a consequence, the limited air war allowed the enemy to adapt.The North Vietnamese dispersed their petroleum stocks. They built fac-tories underground and they did not have to worry about their supplylines from China and the Soviet Union, because the United States did notbomb them.

At the height of the war, November 1967, a comparison of civilianand military views on the war was compiled in a report by WilliamBundy, the assistant secretary of state for the Far East. The JCS favoredthree aggressive actions that were opposed by the State Department andthe Department of Defense: (1) The removal of bombing restrictions onall military significant targets in North Vietnam (2) The mining of NorthVietnamese deep water ports (3) The expansion of military operationsinto Cambodian territory. Other actions, far less aggressive, had the sup-port of the civilians, who in turn, had preponderant influence with thepresident.11

Throughout the war, the western border regions of South Vietnamwere critical sanctuaries for the communist forces. Through Laos andCambodia, a steady stream of men and supplies entered South Vietnam.Despite enormous losses on the battlefields in the late 1960s, the Ho ChiMinh trail system kept hundreds of thousands of communist troopsarmed and fed, with waves of fresh troops marching south, safe underthe self-imposed operational constraints of the United States. The waritself was being fought both as a conventional and an unconventionalone. While search-and-destroy missions went on continuously, oftenwith spectacular kill ratios of eight to ten to one, a pacification war con-ducted by MACV, the CIA and special South Vietnamese units alsowent on.

Yet many traditional military officers were disdainful of uncon-ventional or counterinsurgency war. The American “way of war,” as dis-cussed in earlier chapters, was founded on the principles of war shaped

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by classical military strategists. Of course, every service branch adaptedclassical military doctrine according to the respective missions, combathistories and institutional strengths and weaknesses of each armed force.The U.S. Marines have never focused on large-scale assault doctrines thathave defined U.S. Army doctrine from the Civil War of the 1860sthrough all the major wars of the twentieth century. Further, the AirForce had no institutional interest in a ground war in Indochina. Whiletheir strategic doctrine coincided with that of the other service branches,namely, they demanded the defense of South Vietnam, U.S. Air Force op-erational doctrine presumed that Vietnam could be won through the ap-plication of the enormous air assets at the disposal of the United States.Finally, the U.S. Navy viewed the war from the perspective of the PacificOcean, and the role of the U.S. as the world’s preeminent Pacific navalpower.

For the Army, however, the strategic and operational paradigm re-mained based upon the classical land warfare thinking of Carl vonClausewitz. Gradual escalation violated Clausewitzian doctrine. To wina war, according to Clausewitz, the enemy must be taken by surprise.His areas of vulnerability must be exploited at the earliest opportunitywith a concentrated use of force. The enemy had to be broken by over-whelming firepower, concentrated at the weakest points in his defenseline. Once this was done, quickly and decisively, the psychological im-pact on the enemy would affect the breaking of his political will. Oncean adversary’s political will was broken, a peace settlement that wouldresolve the underlying political conflict of the war would be imple-mented.

Applying Clausewitz to the gradual escalation strategies of LyndonJohnson, any student of war would notice glaring liabilities. Limiting theresources available to the military, and placing territorial and target lim-its on its operations violated the central principle of Clausewitzian strat-egy: the overriding objective of war is to break the enemy’s will throughthe overwhelming use of force. Further, other cherished principles of warwere cast aside by the Johnson administration. Announcing troop de-ployments months in advance eliminated the critical element of surprise.Allowing the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong to pick and choosetheir places of engagement, which happened most of the time, sacrificedthe time-tested military principle of maintaining the initiative. The dis-persal of combat units through hundreds of miles of difficult terrain vio-lated the law of concentration (of forces). Finally, the fragmentation ofmilitary command between the various branches of the U.S. armedforces, leaving MACV with only pro forma authority over military oper-ations, violated the concept of unity of command. Without surprise,


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initiative, mass or unity of command, the operational theory for U.S. en-gagement in Vietnam made the war very hard, if not impossible to win.12

From the perspective of military officers trained in main-unit warfare,the inability of Lyndon Johnson to obey the principles of war articulatedby Clausewitz and countless other historical observers and practitioners ofwar, was a deliberate “strategy for defeat.” Unable to defeat an adversarywilling to absorb millions of casualties, the deployment of over 500,000troops was a futile exercise. Under no circumstances could a rational mili-tary strategist expect an enormous commitment of national resources toprotect a less than vital national interest for an unlimited amount of time.During the 1960s, this was clear to the entire military establishment in theU.S. armed forces. The critique was made openly by some senior and re-tired generals and admirals. It was also made openly by the conservativeallies of the military in Congress and in American society.13

MILITARY CRITIQUE OF VIETNAMIZATION AND WITHDRAWAL

The essential critique of Vietnamization by the U.S. military was thatit was not very effective. Despite years of training, the ARVN and theother branches of the South Vietnamese armed forces remained lackingin skills, motivation and morale. The private recorded conversations ofCreighton Abrams, MACV commander from June 1968 to the end of thewar, suggest an open contempt for the ARVN by Abrams and other se-nior officers. Although the statistical evidence suggests considerable im-provement for the South Vietnamese from the mid-1960s to the early1970s, the very favorable kill ratios were considered more a product ofthe U.S. air and artillery support than anything else.

Prior to 1968, under Westmoreland, training the ARVN and support-ing pacification activities were clearly secondary to MACV’s primary mis-sion: the destruction of the main force units of the Viet Cong and thePAVN. With the change of leadership to Abrams, who was second incommand prior to his appointment, there was a marked change in the tac-tics of the U.S. military. Pacification became a major priority for MACV.Search-and-destroy missions, while still an active strategy, were supple-mented by a strategy of clearing and holding territory. In 1969, Viet-namization was announced by Richard Nixon as the defining exit strategyfor the United States. For the first time, large amounts of aid and militarymanpower was devoted to expanding the capabilities of the RVNAF.14

For the MACV leadership and for the JCS in Washington, the lack ofbroad public support for the war made Vietnamization problematic. Theoverwhelming pessimism of civilians dismayed General Earle Wheeler,

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who thought by late 1969 that the war was being won in the field, notlost, as nearly everyone in Washington thought. The mass media, antiwarmembers of Congress and indeed the Nixon administration had the low-est expectations for the state of the war, pacification and Vietnamization.Wheeler was frustrated with the thinking of President Nixon, and Na-tional Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, policy makers who initiatedVietnamization, but somehow did not believe in it.15

MORALE IN THE POST-TET MILITARY

A major crisis that gripped the U.S. military from the late 1960s to theend of the war was its morale. The extraordinary national divisions overthe war spilled over into the armed forces, as enlisted men for the firsttime felt they had been betrayed by the armed forces. With the loss of thewar’s legitimacy at home and abroad, discipline and morale disintegratedamong the enlistees and many of the junior officers. The horrific andseemingly endless search-and-destroy campaigns alienated young sol-diers who grew up in a liberal society, where free expression and otherbasic civil rights were considered a birth right.

The zeitgeist of 1968 was rebellion. This had no exception in the U.S.military, where rank insubordination became a common practice. Per-haps the most significant war resistance involved a future U.S. senatorand presidential candidate, John Forbes Kerry of Massachusetts. Kerry, aYale graduate, and a relation of the famous Forbes family, volunteeredfor the U.S. Navy in 1969. He served as a boat commander in river war-fare operations in the Mekong Delta. In his immediate post-Vietnamyears, he joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), and par-ticipated in the Winter Soldier congressional investigations of 1971.Those investigations implicated the U.S. military in wide-ranging warcrimes in Indochina. Those crimes included torture, murder and rape ofcivilians and prisoners of war. Kerry, a very effective public speaker inhis late twenties, impressed a national audience with his impassioned de-nunciation of the war’s conduct and morality.16

Critics of Kerry and the VVAW have asserted that the alleged warcrimes by the U.S. military were not authorized or condoned by thechain of command. Further, the extent of those atrocities were exagger-ated by the antiwar movement for political effect. While the famous MaiLai massacre of March 1968 resulted in the deaths of several hundredunarmed men, women and children, this was a unique and tragic cir-cumstance of the war. Thousands of U.S. combat veterans attested tonever participating or witnessing the atrocities committed at Mai Lai oralleged by the Winter Soldier hearings.17


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The truth lies somewhere between the antiwar and pro-war versions.Clearly, Mai Lai was an historical event. So too, were many other atroc-ities committed by U.S. and ARVN forces. It is also a matter of historicalrecord that massive air and artillery assaults by the U.S. and its allieskilled and wounded many hundreds of thousands of noncombatants inboth North and South Vietnam. Yet, at the same time, it is also a matterof historical fact that millions of South Vietnamese civilians supportedtheir government and fought bravely against invading communist armiesfor two decades. Atrocities, including grisly assassinations, were con-ducted on a daily basis by the Viet Cong and NLF from the early 1960sto the end of the war. Indeed, communist assassinations were a commoninstrument of terror, from the elimination of noncommunist rivals in1945, to the purging of pro-French Vietnamese during the IndochinaWar.18

Irrespective of the morality of the war, MACV and indeed the entireU.S. military worldwide suffered serious declines in morale and fightingeffectiveness beginning in the late 1960s. As Lyndon Johnson’s war esca-lated, the antiwar movement blossomed. The 1960s became a cauldronfor social, cultural and political revolution in the United States. The end-less war of attrition between the United States and the North Vietnamesewas filmed and documented by the U.S. mass media. Over years, thedaily carnage fueled intellectual critiques and mass-movement proteststhat focused on the morality of the war. With the loss of public legiti-macy, the institutional cohesion of the military weakened. A war thatcould not summon the deepest loyalty and patriotism of a nation’s citi-zenry became a conflict that could not sustain the morale and operationalintegrity of its military.

THE LOSS OF INDOCHINA

The loss of Indochina was incremental and, given the political contextof the war, seemingly inevitable. Military observers did not predict theloss of a major strategic asset to the United States. In fact, up until theend, the JCS and its political allies worked diligently to prevent the finalcollapse of the Laos, Cambodian and South Vietnamese regimes. Yet, nomatter the urgency and sense of responsibility, the national experience ofthe war was so scarring, so traumatic and wearying to the nation, whenthe fall came there was no political will left.19

The loss of the war started very early. Soon after Johnson made the de-cision to expand the war, senatorial critics of his policy went into action.Senator William J. Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign RelationsCommittee, was a key figure in the Senate’s antiwar block. In January

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1966, he convened special hearings on the Vietnam War, the first ofmany that critiqued the executive branch’s handling of the intervention.Fulbright’s committee never stopped criticizing the conduct of the war.For years, Fulbright and other staunch critics of the war challenged boththe Johnson and Nixon administration’s prosecution of the war. Theyand the larger antiwar movement that spread like wildfire throughout theliberal segments of American society rejected search-and-destroy mis-sions as barbaric exercises that only presented to the world how futileand authoritarian U.S. foreign policy had become. Instead of defendingfreedom, as pro-war Pentagon and State Department officials argued, thecounterinsurgency and strategic bombing campaigns were more akin tothe tactics of the fascists during the Second World War.

The antiwar Senate and House members viewed any and all informa-tion from the executive branch vis-à-vis Vietnam with profound and un-forgiving skepticism. Few war critics believed the Nixon administrationwhen it claimed that its pacification programs had met with great suc-cess. More characteristically, they viewed conventional military opera-tions as actions bordering on genocide. The pictures of severely burnedchildren from the napalm of U.S. warplanes convinced both Americanand international audiences that, indeed, the war was a cruel and sense-less attack on Asian peasants.

Throughout the period of the ground war, Congressional critics de-manded accelerated withdrawal and a negotiated settlement of the con-flict. The military requirements for more resources, soldiers, arms andtime, were refused by powerful Congressional leaders who saw nothingbut catastrophe in Vietnam. The morality of the war was seemingly inde-fensible. Whatever benefits a Western victory could achieve, from thepoint of view of liberal and moderate antiwar groups, the destruction ofSouth Vietnam, its peoples and its ecology, as well as the collateral effectson Cambodia and Laos, were beyond pale.20

No matter what progress the military and the executive branch couldclaim, and indeed, by 1970, the defeat of the Viet Cong as a militaryforce and the dismantling of a substantial amount of the Viet Cong po-litical infrastructure in the South suggested that the war was being won,the antiwar movement was not impressed. They refused to believe that amilitary solution was possible or even desirable. The cost to Americansociety could be measured in many ways. First, in the loss of young mensacrificed for no apparent reason. Second, in their physical maiming andtheir psychological injuries, which were indeed distributed broadlyamong Vietnam War veterans. Finally, the war shattered America’s cher-ished self-image. Destroying a peasant society, using the most formidableweapons of modern war, save the nuclear one, against the malnourished


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Vietnamese soldier wearing black pajamas, for no obvious purpose otherthan to protect the prestige of the United States as a great power, was anintolerable burden for American culture.

PARIS PEACE ACCORDS 1973

An argument has been made in the Vietnam War literature that thediplomatic agreements reached in Paris in January 1973 essentially con-ceded the region to ultimate communist control. Nixon and Kissinger,who had no patience for continuing the costly engagement, launched themassive Christmas bombing of North Vietnam during the last two weeksof December 1972. The overwhelming force of 2,000 sorties by a fleet of129 B-52 bombers brought Hanoi to the negotiating table in January. Yetthe final agreement gave the North Vietnamese an overwhelming advan-tage in the post-U.S. period. A counter-argument made by HenryKissinger was that he and Nixon negotiated the future of the Republic ofVietnam in good faith. They had not intended to abandon South Viet-nam, but would have continued to support them except for the unfore-seen changes, namely the Watergate scandal, that prematurely ended theNixon presidency.

From the point of the U.S. military, the peace agreement with theNorth Vietnamese was disingenuous. President Thieu was correct in re-jecting the accords as a betrayal of his nation’s future. With the continueddeployment of the PAVN in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam,and the effective safety of their supply system through Southern Laos andEastern Cambodia, the settlement made the continued viability of SouthVietnam as an independent nation-state a very dubious proposition.

The Paris Peace Accords of 1973 committed the United States to totalwithdrawal from South Vietnam, subject to the return of its prisonersheld in North Vietnamese prisons. The total absence of the formidableU.S. armed forces was not matched by any parallel withdrawal of NorthVietnamese forces to north of the DMZ. The accords left thirteen PAVNdivisions in the Central Highlands fully connected to the supply routes ofthe Ho Chi Minh trail. While the South Vietnamese government was leftwith one of the largest and best-equipped militaries in the world, theyhad to defend themselves against a better-trained and motivated militaryforce aided by large-scale Soviet and Chinese support and an indigenousnetwork weakened but still operational in the South. Without extensivemilitary aid, the vast armaments left to the RVNAF would degrade,while the capabilities of the PAVN would be rebuilt absent the pressureof American interdiction of their supply and the destruction of theirmilitary-industrial infrastructure.21

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President Thieu and his government were bitterly opposed to the ParisAccords, but they had no say in the matter. Thieu’s critical views of theanticipated settlement were pasted on the front page of the New YorkTimes days before Richard Nixon’s reelection in November 1972. Thedraft agreement that was signed less than three months later afforded nomilitary relief for South Vietnam, other than a ceasefire. Thieu under-stood the transparency of the document as merely a convenient exit forthe United States. The North Vietnamese had no intention of preserv-ing the independence of South Vietnam. Indeed, the DRV did not rec-ognize the existence of the Republic of Vietnam.22

The views of the South Vietnamese, which were thoroughly consistentwith those of the JCS, were not those of the Nixon administration. Twoweeks before the accords were signed, the departing secretary of defense,Melvin Laird, stated in his valedictory report that the war had concludedsatisfactorily for the United States. Irrespective of the signing of a peacetreaty between the parties, Vietnamization had been so successful thatthere was no longer any need for U.S. combat troops in South Vietnam.At the same time, congressional leaders expressed gratitude that the warwas finally coming to an end. As far as the communist world was con-cerned, the Washington Post reported that the Soviets and Chinese wereeager to end the conflict, because it no longer served their political inter-ests vis-à-vis the United States.

MILITARY’S ROLE AFTER PARIS

In the wake of the Paris Peace Accords, the U.S. military’s role in In-dochina came to an end. The massive air campaign of the previous De-cember or the coordinated response to Hanoi’s 1972 offensive would notbe replicated. Instead, MACV’s responsibilities were strictly one of finalwithdrawal from Vietnam. This process involved turning over all re-maining U.S. responsibilities to the South Vietnamese. By March 29,1973, the entire edifice of U.S. involvement in the Republic of Vietnamwas dismantled. The military organization MACV was discontinued. Inits place, the Defense Attache for the U.S. embassy had responsibility toreport to Washington on the needs and effectiveness of the RVNAF.

As noted, the RVNAF was left with one of the largest military infra-structures in the world. The standing armed forces of the Republic ofVietnam stood at over 1,100,000 men in spring 1973. The ARVN alonehad almost 900 operational helicopters, as well as more than 20,000 ar-tillery guns, 2,000 track vehicles and numerous other assets. Nonethe-less, the Paris Agreements left 170,000 PAVN troops deployed in SouthVietnam. Some 11 divisions and 24 regiments of PAVN regulars were al-


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lied with over 150,000 regular and irregular NLF troops. Further, an-other 100,000 North Vietnamese troops were deployed just over the bor-der in Laos and Cambodia. Although the RVNAF had a trained and verywell-equipped military force, they did not have control over the Republicof Vietnam’s borders, and a huge conventional and unconventional en-emy force was situated throughout the northern and central regions ofthe country. Immediately after the signing in Paris, huge truck convoysloaded with supplies moved along the Ho Chi Minh trail system.

Lacking the ability to cut off the supply system supporting theseforces in the South, and also deficient in the means of maintaining the ex-pensive military infrastructure it inherited from the United States, it wasonly a matter of time before a reinforced PAVN, supplied by its larger al-lies, would launch another major campaign to destroy the RVNAF andforce the surrender of the RVN government. This seemed inevitablewhen the Nixon administration forced through the Paris Peace Accordsof 1973, simultaneously ignoring the South Vietnamese, who bitterly op-posed the agreement, and the North Vietnamese, who were ruthlessly at-tacked until they agreed to return to the peace table.23

The driving force behind the Paris Accords was the overwhelming an-tiwar sentiment in the Congress. The U.S. Congress, supported by do-mestic and international public opinion, had demanded an end to the warwith increasing ferocity throughout Richard Nixon’s first term. In theend, Nixon was threatened with a unilateral American withdrawal by thecutting off of funds if he had not ended the U.S. involvement by treaty.As long as the POWs returned, the Congress and the Nixon administra-tion were satisfied with the end of U.S. intervention. The loss of SouthVietnam and of Indochina in its entirety would not favor U.S. interests.However, by 1973, the Cold War had changed markedly.

China had now opened a dialogue with the United States that culmi-nated in Nixon’s trip to Beijing in 1972, effectively ending the Cold Warbetween the two countries. The Soviets had also been visited by Nixon in1972. They, too, were eager for an end of the Cold War and the nucleararms race. They viewed the Chinese as much of a threat to their securityas the United States. For the Soviets and for the Chinese, the UnitedStates was a key relationship that they needed to balance the rivalry be-tween them. This became very apparent to China during the late 1970sand 1980s, when the opening of the Nixon years moved toward a defacto strategic alliance.

With the new relationship of détente with China and the SovietUnion, Nixon and Kissinger no longer feared the domino effect to theextent that they feared it in 1965. The loss of South Vietnam, if thatwere to occur, was of far less importance in January 1973. For the Amer-

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ican public and for Congress, the domino theory had no relevance at all.The loss of men and the deterioration of public authority in the UnitedStates had made the noble ideas of the early 1960s, to defend the freeworld in Southeast Asia, disregarded as contemptible myths.

This was not the initial position of the Nixon administration, who be-lieved firmly in their strategic planning for the war beginning in late1968, that the defense of South Vietnam was of no critical importance tothe United States. Indeed, during the first year of his administration,Richard Nixon had a previous internal memorandum written by LyndonJohnson’s national security advisor, Walt Rostow, circulated to his staff.The paper summarized the strategic importance of South Vietnam to theUnited States. One of the dire consequences predicted by Rostow and ac-cepted by Nixon was the loss of Asia, where, it was surmised, some 60percent of the world’s population would live by the year 2000.24

The core ideological validity of the domino theory did not end withthe Johnson administration. What did change was the extraordinaryforce of an antiwar movement that compelled Nixon and Kissinger towork toward a negotiated withdrawal, a “peace with honor.” The diplo-matic strategy that culminated in the Paris settlement was presaged uponthe salvaging of America’s international prestige. Clearly, Kissinger hadno illusions about the future when he wrote his famous “healthy inter-val” memorandum: “Therefore a negotiated settlement had always beenfar preferable. Rather than run the risk of South Vietnam crumblingaround our remaining forces, a peace settlement would end the war withan act of policy and leave the future of South Vietnam to the historicalprocess.”25

On August 15, 1973, less than seven months after the signing at Paris,President Nixon, already consumed by the Watergate scandal that wouldend his presidency, signed congressional legislation that permanentlyended all U.S. military actions in Indochina. Congress, in its determina-tion to ensure the end of U.S. military involvement, prohibited funds forany air and land combat operations by U.S. forces in the Indochina the-ater. At the same time, the North Vietnamese began an intensive supplyand reinforcement of its forces in the South. In 1973 and 1974, morethan 6 million tons of Soviet bloc aid, in the form of food, ammunitionand weapons, were supplied to North Vietnam.

In reality, the Paris Peace Accords was merely a legal agreement forU.S. disengagement. By the time Kissinger and his North Vietnamesecounterpart were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1973, morethan 40,000 South Vietnamese soldiers alone had died in the interim.The war continued for more than two years after Paris treaty, with theU.S. military’s role, after August 1973, purely advisory, without even a


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formal advisory force in place. Left largely to their own resources, withonly a fraction of the material support supplied by the United States inthe 1960s and early 1970s, the South Vietnamese fought on in a desper-ate war for survival.26

THE FALL:THE LOSS OF VIETNAM,CAMBODIA AND LAOS IN 1975

The narrative for the fall of the Indochina in spring 1975 is familiar.The failed anticommunist regimes watched helplessly as the communistarmies, the PAVN and PLA in Vietnam, the Pathet Lao and Khmer Rougein Cambodia, surrounded the capital cities of their respective countries.Quickly, the last resistance was overcome. Refugees, including almost allof the former government officials and their families, fled to wherever theycould find sanctuary. In Washington, the Ford administration was help-less. Indeed, they had tried one last time to avoid the collapse, a strategicblow to the United States, but there was simply no support in Congress orin the public. The American public’s indifference was more than transpar-ent. While the residual diplomatic and military personnel the UnitedStates maintained in the region worked desperately to see if somehowWashington could deliver some last-minute assistance, determined revolu-tionary armies marched into Saigon, Vientiane and Phnom Penh.

The massively resupplied North Vietnamese Army was able to over-come a numerically superior but dramatically weakened RVNAF. Priorto the end of U.S. involvement, MACV had dumped huge amounts ofweapons, vehicles and aircraft on the South Vietnamese. Most of it, how-ever, was not operational, without extensive training and maintenancethat the Republic of Vietnam could not afford. After 1972, U.S. militaryaid declined dramatically. For 1975, the last year of the war, Congresspassed a foreign aid bill that appropriated only $700 million. Even thisamount, a fraction of previous support levels, was eaten up by congres-sionally mandated overhead expenditures of $120 million. Without bil-lions of dollars in military assistance, which had been customary, thefundamental resources for engaging a resurgent North Vietnam were nolonger in place. North Vietnamese combat deaths were estimated at39,000 in 1973, but this was down from over a 100,000 per year thatthey averaged from 1966 through 1972. The expenditure of ammunitionby South Vietnam, peaked at 861,000 tons in 1972. The same year, theUnited States expended 1,000,000 tons in military operations in country.Only a year later, the RVNAF used only 348,000 tons, a drop of over 80percent from 1972. Finally, in 1974, the consumption figure dropped to248,000 tons.27

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Nonetheless, the North Vietnamese forces that launched its successfulcampaign to defeat the South in 1975 were still badly disadvantaged inarms and ammunition. The PAVN had a critical shortage of ammunition,limited supplies of petroleum and far fewer tanks and artillery piecesthan the RVNAF. The greatest advantage the PAVN had was its militaryleadership. Despite the lack of critical resources, the PAVN launched abold and brilliant assault on key ARVN defensive positions in the Cen-tral Highlands. The desperate shortfall in ammunition was solved by thecapture of large South Vietnamese stores, as the panicked and utterlysurprised ARVN forces ceded approximately half of the country to theNorth Vietnamese.

The collapse of the South Vietnamese armed forces came within amatter of weeks. From the middle of March to the end of April 1975,North Vietnamese and NLF units converged on Saigon, capturing dis-trict capitals, key roads, airfields and bases along the way. Profoundpleas for assistance to the United States received no response. As late asJanuary 15, 1975, President Ford, a staunch supporter of the war fromthe Gulf of Tonkin Resolution onward, told the media that he could notforesee any circumstances where U.S. forces would be reintroduced toIndochina. A supplemental military aid appropriation was pushed byFord and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, but the Congress re-fused to act, even as South Vietnam moved quickly toward surrender anddissolution.

In the aftermath of the fall of Saigon, hundreds of thousands ofrefugees were evacuated by the U.S. Navy, or flooded the South ChinaSea in their own boats. South Vietnamese Air Force jets and naval vesselsfled to the United States. A vast Vietnamese diaspora settled in NorthAmerica, Europe and Australia. Simultaneously, the fall of Laos andCambodia led to similar mass exoduses, as reprisals began against pro-government elements of the population. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rougebegan their three-year reign of terror and genocide. In the unfoldingtragedy, the role of the U.S. military was now as rescuer. No longer au-thorized to engage the enemy with B-52s, F-4 fighters or mobile combatunits, the U.S. Navy and Air Force had a primary mission to rescue thesurvivors of the war who had fought for the United States, and in subse-quent years, to save the ensuing waves of Indochinese who fled into theocean in whatever vessels they could acquire.

For the military, the loss of Indochina was a deep blow to the moraleand prestige of the armed services. The overriding legacy of the war wasa study in failure. The denouement had begun as early as 1965. The warhad been misconceived. Whether or not the conflict made sense accord-ing to strategic doctrine, the constraints on action proved a decisive


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weakness for winning the war. The combination of pacification, nationbuilding, Vietnamization, counterinsurgency warfare and conventionalwar had resulted in enormous casualties for the Vietnamese, but no vic-tory for the United States. Instead, the U.S. armed forces, a damaged in-stitution, retreated from Indochina, having lost the first war in Americanhistory.28

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As we have seen, the conduct of the Vietnam War was an extremely com-plex enterprise. It involved multiple strategies working in multiplespheres, at multiple levels within and outside the government. The resultsof these processes were decidedly mixed, and ultimately, they failed towin the war. What many historians and political scientists have askedabout the war concerns whether alternative means of waging the conflictwould have resulted in a more favorable outcome for the United Statesand its ally the Republic of Vietnam. In other words, were the strategiesemployed by U.S. special forces, diplomats, psychological warfare spe-cialists and other groups outside of the conventional military forces usedin the war capable of winning the war, either by themselves or with sup-port of the conventional military?

The alternative methods for fighting the war introduced in Indochinabecame part of American war capabilities during the post–Vietnam Warera. Overall, they were effective means of supporting the big-unit war.Whether they could have won the conflict by themselves, or if they werethe principal means of U.S. intervention, is a counterfactual question ofhistory. For U.S. civil-military relations, however, the alternative or un-conventional means were an important area of discussion. Naturally, thecivilian leadership, especially the antiwar leaders in the Congress, hadmore confidence in the unconventional than the conventional meansfor waging the war. In their estimates, the alternative means that in-volved nation building and small-arms warfare was far more acceptable,

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morally and politically, than the major form of modern war that was socostly to life, property and political capital.1

EFFECTIVE MILITARY STRATEGIES DURING THE WAR

As we have seen, the big-unit ground war and the search-and-destroy strategy employed by the U.S. Army had limited effectivenessagainst the combined forces of the NLF and North Vietnam. Withoutattacking the political infrastructure in the South, the Viet Cong wereable to continuously regenerate their forces. The casualties inflicted onthe communists were severe, but the supply of soldiers was plentifulwhether recruited in the villages of the South or sent by the North Viet-namese down the Ho Chi Minh trail system. The North Vietnamesecould always reconstitute forces destroyed by the United States and theSouth Vietnamese, all the while waiting for the political and diplomaticmodes of struggle to overcome their superpower opponent. Even themassive losses suffered by the NLF and the PAVN during the 1968 TetOffensive did not finish the endemic communist insurgency in SouthVietnam.

Beginning with Edward Lansdale’s famous dissent in the first year ofthe Kennedy administration, a parallel military strategy hoped to defeatthe communists through unconventional means. Lansdale’s central idea,which was the original concept of counterinsurgency warfare defined byU.S. special operations forces in the early 1960s, was to avoid large-unitwarfare, and focus on fighting the war at the village level. The smallarms, local approach to the conflict, adopted from counterinsurgencymethods developed in the Philippines and Malaysia during the 1950s,showed success in its first use during the Kennedy administration.Nonetheless, the new unorthodox approach to low-intensity conflict wasquickly overtaken by the classic maneuver warfare practiced by the U.S.Army beginning in the mid-1960s.

As U.S. intervention escalated in 1965 and 1966, counterinsur-gency warfare was characterized by the air-mobile assaults on VietCong–controlled villages. This type of aggressive and extremely destruc-tive counterinsurgency played a very deleterious role for the U.S. armedforces in both domestic and world opinion. Media images of burning vil-lages and wounded civilians had a devastating effect on the prestige ofthe United States and its armed forces around the world. A politically farmore palatable, and perhaps more effective, approach to CI was thevillage-based approach introduced by Lansdale, John Paul Vann andother key U.S. advisors.2


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COVERT OPERATIONS IN THE INDOCHINA THEATER

All military organizations desire and use covert or secret operations.To minimize the political costs of U.S. military operations, both domes-tic and international, presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all author-ized such secret operations for the Indochina theater. Most of theoperations involved special operations forces whose missions requiredpenetration of enemy-held territory for the purposes of sabotage and in-telligence gathering. The Vietnam War led to the development of U.S.special forces as a major adjunct to the main force units of the armedforces. Using both U.S. and South Vietnamese units, special operationsidentified major concentrations of VC and PAVN forces who were sta-tioned in Cambodia and Laos in staging areas for movement into themain areas of battle in South Vietnam.

The most aggressive use of covert operations was in the Nixon admin-istration. Nixon had no qualms authorizing secret military operations in-cluding the use of heavy bombers without the knowledge or consent ofCongress. Nixon believed passionately in the same doctrine that his pre-decessors did, namely, the domino theory. His paranoid personality, verywell documented in both primary and secondary sources at the end ofthis book, induced him to view the mass media, and much of the Wash-ington establishment as bent upon his destruction. His inherent mistrustof the press, Congress and foreign adversaries of the United States gavehim the motivation to authorize possibly illegal actions for the U.S. mili-tary. The military leadership followed Nixon’s orders, whether or notthey were consistent with national or international law.3

ORIGINAL CI OPERATIONS IN THE CENTRAL HIGHLANDS 1961–1963

Some of the documents produced by the U.S. government during theVietnam War were ethnographic studies of indigenous Malay-Polynesiantribes who lived in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Anthropologistsconnected with American University in Washington, D.C., were undergovernment contract to describe these tribes, their origins, languages, so-cial structures, cultural belief systems and, most importantly, ways thatU.S. military forces, the new special force groups trained in North Car-olina, could mobilize these non-Vietnamese peoples to wage war againstthe VC and the North Vietnamese.

The original concept of counterinsurgency had nothing to do withsearch-and-destroy missions. CI as taught at the Army’s special warfare

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school in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, had very little in common withtraditional military strategy that the U.S. Army had used in Europe dur-ing the First and Second World Wars. Beginning in 1962, CI training atFort Bragg involved a curriculum that bore more resemblance to gradu-ate school in the social sciences than combat training. In preparation forCI work in Vietnam, special warfare soldiers were taught basic knowl-edge about Vietnamese history, politics, geography and culture. Theylearned the structure and functions of the NLF and the VC, and methodsthey could use to organize native resistance to the communists.4

The original mission for U.S. special forces was to recruit, train anddeploy non-Vietnamese Montagnard tribesmen who lived in the CentralHighlands of South Vietnam. This program, known as the Civilian Irreg-ular Defense Group (CIDG), was a highly successful operation. In SouthVietnam, and later in Laos, U.S. unconventional warfare specialists livedwith, befriended and mobilized thousands of these indigenous tribal peo-ples to wage war against the NLF and the PAVN. They provided uniqueknowledge of the terrain in the remote areas where the communist forceswere deployed. The benefits were considerable, and were comparativelyinexpensive to the United States in both funds and troops.5

This form of counterinsurgency worked extremely well, until it wassuperceded by the conventional military approaches of MACV in 1963.The senior military officers in the Army and the JCS had little interest inirregular forces or unconventional warfare. The military leadership bothin Indochina and in Washington viewed war as an instrument for de-ploying large-scale conventional forces that would engage and destroythe conventional forces of an adversary. What the U.S. military soonlearned was that Vietnam was very different. The large-unit warfare fa-vored by a generation of officers who had experienced the Second WorldWar and Korea, overshadowed the undefined, seemingly quixotic meth-ods of such CI warriors as Edward Lansdale and John Paul Vann. Yet, asU.S. combat units began deployment to South Vietnam in 1965, the real-ities of irregular warfare became obvious even to conventionally trainedmilitary officers. To defeat an enemy like the Viet Cong that could mobi-lize, disburse and regenerate its forces in a completely clandestine man-ner, that lived off a very tiny external supply system and food suppliedby local peasants, the United States needed to deploy its own unconven-tional forces.

PHOENIX PROGRAM

There was no more controversial program during the Vietnam Warthan the Phoenix or Phu Hoang program. Begun during the Johnson


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Administration, by Robert Komer and William Colby, CIA field offi-cers, the program was the descendant of the “Cog An” program of the1950s. Diem’s original counterinsurgency program was ruthless but ef-fective in rooting out the Viet Cong infrastructure in the South. From1954 to 1959, Diem’s secret policy reduced the political cadres of theLao Dong party to fewer than a 1,000 individuals. The reactivation ofthe revolution in the South created the Viet Cong, who then began asystematic assassination program aimed at the Cong An or South Viet-namese police state in the rural areas of the South. In response to thenew insurgency movement, which protected the political cadres in thehamlets and villages, Diem attempted to relocate vulnerable villagepopulations into Agrovilles. This program, between 1959 and 1961,was abandoned for the Strategic Hamlet program of the Kennedy ad-ministration.6

The Strategic Hamlet program, inspired by the experiences of theBritish in defeating their own Malayan communist insurgency duringthe 1950s, was thought to be a great success. Thousands of hamlets in theDelta, the Highlands and along the coast appeared secure from VC at-tacks. This was an illusion, as the Johnson administration discovered inits first month in office. The VC were very successful in overrunning thehamlets after government troops had withdrawn from the area. Once thehamlet was captured, it was compromised and incorporated into the rev-olution’s support system, providing soldiers, spies and needed food andsupplies to VC units in the field.7

In 1967, after two years of war against the VC and PAVN units in theSouth, the CIA was tasked to rebuild the CI effort to attack the enemypolitical cadres. It had become very clear to the Johnson administrationthat without the defeat of the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI), the war ofattrition against the enemy in the South would never end. The NLF couldrebuild its forces almost indefinitely, while providing intelligence and lo-gistical support for the North Vietnamese Army in the South.

Just like its predecessor, the Viet Minh organization during the FrenchIndochina War, the NLF was built around vast numbers of small localcells. These political cells, at the hamlet and village level, organized theresistance in the rice paddies, where landless peasants resented theirpoverty, and where the provision of basic services such as education andhealth care were an opportunity to build the resistance movement in theSouth. At higher levels, district- and province-level cells coordinated theactions of the hamlet and village-level units. The clandestine politicalcadres, whose historical roots lay in millennia of underground resistancemovements to foreign invaders, were operational in nearly every village inSouth Vietnam and in the cities as well. The NLF or VCI had penetrated


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every segment of South Vietnamese civil society, and all levels of the gov-ernment, providing a steady flow of sabotage and espionage activity forthe revolution.8

Estimates of the size of the VCI ranged from 80,000 to 150,000 dur-ing the late 1960s. They were responsible for recruiting agents and sol-diers in the South, raising money through “taxes” and inflicting damageon the enemy through extensive covert actions, including espionage, as-sassinations, the destruction of military assets and the requisition of en-emy munitions and weapons. The intimidation and assassination ofgovernment officials and progovernment civilians was a critical functionof the VCI in the South. The liquidation of civil administration in the ru-ral areas enabled the NLF to take effective control of hamlets and vil-lages. Through intelligence work, sabotage, and the mobilization ofpeople and resources, the NLF was critical to the support of the VC. Inturn, the VC were critical for protecting the political cadres from de-struction by the local and regional militias, the ARVN and the variousallied forces under the command of the United States.9

The political and military divisions of the Vietnamese communistparty in the South supported one another. In turn, they were given criti-cal political, logistical and combat support from the much larger re-sources of the North Vietnamese. North Vietnam supplied its bestcombat divisions, supplies from both the North and the aid delivered byallied socialist countries around the world. Finally, the North providedglobal political warfare, through its worldwide propaganda effort tosupport the combined communist objective for liberating the fatherlandfrom the Americans and the noncommunist South Vietnamese. Just asthe American war effort was truly a global enterprise, so was the war ef-fort of the Vietnamese communist party. The North Vietnamese leader-ship were all ardent believers in Marxist-Leninism as a political andmilitary doctrine. They viewed the war as the culmination of more thana century of Vietnamese struggle to overthrow foreign domination, butalso as a cycle of history, where the forces of imperialism were opposedby the emerging class-consciousness of a global proletariat. In principle,there was nothing that the North Vietnamese would not sacrifice to winthe war, in terms of people or property.

Phoenix came under the institutional rubric of MACV’s Civil Opera-tions and Revolutionary Development Services (CORDS) program. Iden-tified by its Vietnamese name Phung Hoang in the 1971 CORDS advisorfield manual, the program’s purpose was the destruction of the politicalinfrastructure of the NLF for South Vietnam. The primary responsibilityfor Phung Hoang was the national police in the Republic of Vietnam.The activities of the South Vietnamese national police or special forces


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were under the supervision at first by CORDS and MACV. However, by1969, William Colby, CIA station chief in Vietnam, assumed adminis-trative responsibility.

The mission of Phoenix was to expose, and destroy, the VCI. From thelate 1960s, through the early 1970s, the damage done by Phoenixagainst the NLF was impressive. Using primarily U.S. special forces incommand of specially trained South Vietnamese units, tens of thousandsof VCI were neutralized, either through capture, surrender, defection tothe South Vietnamese side or death in close combat with Phoenix units inthe field. Critics of the program have identified Phoenix as a brutalmeans of counterinsurgency warfare that employed assassination andtorture of civilians as standard methods of operation. In fact, strong evi-dence from postwar oral interviews of Phoenix advisors suggests thattorture and killing were common among provincial and regional militiaunits. This was probably an inevitable outcome of the war at the locallevel. The war involved desperate Vietnamese peasants fighting one an-other for survival. In a civil conflict that pitted one group of impover-ished rice farmers against another group of the same, a cycle of mercilessretribution was to be expected. Atrocities were committed using allmanner of knives, guns and blunt instruments, as well as grenades,flamethrowers and whatever else could be devised.10

Despite the success of the pacification systems employed by CORDS,Congressional investigators remained deeply skeptical of the reported re-sults. Journalists, including major U.S. opinion makers such as the NewYork Times and the Washington Post, believed that pacification underthe Phoenix program was a Potemkin-like device designed to deceivepublic opinion in the same way that many other Vietnam operations werefound to be fraudulent and or illegal.

As with all U.S. government programs during the Vietnam War, mili-tary and civilian, they were evaluated according to social scientific meth-ods of analysis. CORDS advisors had strict guidelines for the observationand supervision of the pacification activities by the South Vietnamese.The Hamlet Evaluation System was a systematic, that is, “scientific” at-tempt to measure the effectiveness of pacification methods in South Viet-nam. Administratively, every hamlet, village, district and province inSouth Vietnam was under constant statistical evaluation by CORDS ad-visors and CIA analysts. In many respects, the control systems employedunder Phoenix as well as other pacification programs were analogous tothose found in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes around the world.The purpose of Phoenix was to identify and root out through capture,defection or physical elimination, the entire VCI in South Vietnam.Without the VCI, the war in the South would depend solely on the


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PAVN, a conventional military force, which in theory could be held incheck or defeated by the ARVN with the support of U.S. forces.11

The logic behind the implementation of CORDS and the Phoenix pro-gram in particular was impeccable. The results, five years of intensive ef-fort, 1967–1972, were impressive. By the end of direct U.S. involvement,the Viet Cong, as mentioned in chapter 5, were reduced to a shadow oftheir former strength. When the PAVN rode into Saigon on their tanks in1975, a substantial percentage of the Viet Cong soldiers in the field wereNorth Vietnamese soldiers recruited to keep up the façade that theSouthern movement still had a creditable military force.

Yet the fundamental weakness of the Phoenix program, as well asCORDS, MACV and the rest of the U.S. military operations in Indo-china, was the loss of public support in the United States. Despite suc-cess, the antiwar critics remained firm in their convictions that the warwas immoral, it could not be won with either conventional or unconven-tional military means and that it simply was not worth the enormouscost in lives, domestic unrest, federal money and the loss of internationalprestige.

CHIEU HOI—OPEN ARMS

A mode of CI warfare that was in fact not warfare at all might havebeen the most effective means against the VC and the North Vietnamese.An adjunct to the Phoenix program involved no brutality or combat bythe South Vietnamese or U.S. forces. This method of pacification relied onpurely psychological operations that attempted to bring the communiststo defect to the Government of Vietnam (GVN). The amnesty program ofthe GVN was undoubtedly the most cost-effective method of pacification.Observing results against resources used, government amnesty, which in-volved more than just accepting defection, was of immense value to mili-tary intelligence and to the general reduction of the military threat facingthe South Vietnamese government. The Chieu Hoi or “Open Arms” pro-gram was responsible for 145,000 defections by Viet Cong soldiers andNLF political cadres. The full name of the program translated as “Themovement to regroup” misled members of the resistance.12

The program was based on the simple idea that “Vietnamese are notjoiners. GVN and VC must propagandize, cajole, entrap and draft re-cruits.”13 Since the VC units were made up of reluctant followers, whofought for the revolution not because of a genuine ideological commit-ment but for very pragmatic reasons including their own safety and thatof their family, the Chieu Hoi program was designed to produce as manydefections as possible.


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In total program cost, this psychological warfare operation had stun-ning results. No other method approached the utility of persuading theVC to give up and defect to the government’s side. The program was la-bor intensive for the South Vietnamese, requiring endless propagandacampaigns in VC-controlled areas. However, for the United States, theprogram was virtually without cost—physical, psychological or bud-getary. To begin with, U.S. force participation numbered no more thanseventy individuals, half of whom were non-U.S. nationals. In fact, liter-ally a handful of U.S. military advisors were involved directly in HoiChieu. From the late 1960s through the early 1970s, scores of ARVNpsychological warfare teams known as APTs or Armed PropagandaTeams made recurring sweeps into communist controlled areas. Withloudspeakers, millions of pamphlets and many thousands of hours of lo-cal radio broadcast, the Hoi Chieu program deluged VC and PAVN unitswith entreaties to defect. Some 50 million pamphlets a month wereprinted in the Philippines by JUSPAO and shipped to ARVN propagandateams in the field. At its peak, more than 2,000 communist soldiers andcadres walked into Hoi Chieu centers set up in safe areas around thecountry. The defectors were debriefed and then led through a process ofreintegration into South Vietnam society that involved new identity cardsand the relocation of their families to new communities.14

In strategic terms, the Hoi Chieu program was an important opera-tional strategy that further weakened the political and military infra-structure of the NLF. It had virtually zero cost to the United States incasualties, and provided significant attrition without inflicting harm on adeeply wounded civilian population. Along with the Phoenix program,the expansion of regional and popular forces and the huge battlefieldlosses sustained by the VC units in combat against United States, ARVNand other allied forces, the southern resistance was largely defeated bythe early 1970s.

NATION BUILDING IN SOUTH VIETNAM

Chieu Hoi and its more aggressive counterpart, Phung Hoang, wereancillary to the central doctrines of Vietnamization. The Nixon adminis-tration had embraced Vietnamization as their exit strategy. However, thetheory behind Vietnamization was premised, as so much of the war plan-ning was, on the social science concept so particular to American intellec-tual culture since the Second World War. Pacification, Vietnamization andall manner of programs and terms under these rubrics were grounded onAmerican idea of modernization or nation building. Modernization has alonger pedigree in Western social science than post–Second World War


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America, but it was embraced at mid-century by a new world power try-ing to conceptualize how the world would be shaped according to itsown cultural, political and economic framework.

From the 1940s, U.S. social science and strategic doctrine convergedon the central concept of stabilizing and building the postcolonial worldto accommodate the United States. The domino theory articulated byPresident Eisenhower in 1954 was premised on the emerging social sci-ence literature on developing societies, which had been funded in part bythe new Cold War national security institutions. Eisenhower himself wasnot schooled in 1950s social science. However, the premise of his meta-phor was precisely that.

With apparent ease and honesty, he communicated the idea of fallingdominoes to a worldwide audience, suggesting that America faced a veryunstable and threatening world that required an active rather than pas-sive or isolationist approach in foreign affairs. Implicit in his folksy andvisual analogy was the idea that social revolution was fluid, unpre-dictable and transnational. A violent revolution in one country in the un-derdeveloped world could lead very quickly to the toppling of immaturepolitical regimes in quick succession. A long row of adjacent countries,their newly formed governments held together by the most tenuous localcoalitions, could all fall to the revolutionary forces of international com-munism. The victory of communism in one underdeveloped countrywould immediately catalyze insurgency in neighboring countries, makinga wave of totalitarianism in the Third World inevitable. The fear in Viet-nam, which was foundational to U.S. national security doctrine duringthe Eisenhower era, and remained so through the end of the Cold War,was the lightening effect of defeat. To insulate the West from defeat notonly in Vietnam and Indochina, but throughout Asia, Africa and LatinAmerica, the United States had to employ a systematic strategy of mod-ernization.

In Vietnam, U.S.-directed modernization was begun with the generouscivilian aid programs during the Diem regime. The U.S. government’scivilian agencies, namely, the State Department, the U.S. Agency for Inter-national Development, the U.S. Information Agency, and the Departmentof the Treasury had specific objectives mandated by the White House andthe Congress to modernize South Vietnam. A truly viable noncommunistand independent Republic of Vietnam had to engage in a rapid and effec-tive program of political, economic and social modernization.15

The U.S. military played a significant, if only supporting, role in thenation-building process. The modernization that most concerned MACVrelated to the military institutions of the South Vietnamese armed forces.The creation of prosperous and developing civil society was essential for


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the survival of the country. However, the need for security, produced bythe various branches of the RVNAF, was of primary concern to MACVand the JCS. Still, the exigencies of winning the war against one of theworld’s most tenacious foes required successful and wide-ranging nation-building activities.

DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS

American intervention was premised on the defense of American andglobal liberal democracy. The Republic of Vietnam was always con-ceived as a representative democracy modeled after Western democraticsocieties. With the exception of military regimes between 1963 and1965, South Vietnam functioned as a democratic society, albeit a deeplyflawed one. Liberal democracy was a major principle of U.S. foreign pol-icy in Indochina. In countless internal policy documents, as well as pub-lic speeches, U.S. government officials declared their commitment to ademocratic Republic of Vietnam. Nonetheless, despite considerable ef-fort, the legacies of a Mandarin culture occupied for nearly a century bya European empire made authoritarian government a natural choice.Over time, with U.S. sponsorship, generals and South Vietnamese auto-crats shared power with elected representatives. Parliamentary rule hadto cope with ethnic and local power factions, who used all manner ofcorruption and illegality to undermine it. Finally, democratic institutionswere impeded because the country was in a state of permanent civil war.With an indigenous guerrilla movement and a formidable Army from itsrival in the North, the South Vietnamese government was barely able tosurvive with a large American Army assisting it. Implementing a wide-ranging and open liberal democracy was not possible in wartime. Alterna-tively, an emerging democratic regime, tested by a totalitarian adversary,was possible.

Nonetheless, by 1970, with the NLF clearly in serious decline all overSouth Vietnam, the Thieu government with the help of U.S. advisors wasable to hold local elections throughout South Vietnam. The voting forcompetitive slates of candidates resulted in elected local governments for94 percent of South Vietnam’s population. Over 10,000 hamlets in morethan 2,000 villages were able to participate in the national elections thatyear, leaving only 77 villages with 665 hamlets without participation. Atthe district, province and municipal levels, councilmen and senators wereelected. With voter participation rates of over 80 percent and 90 percentin many provinces, and with multiple candidates and political parties par-ticipating in the elections, South Vietnam in 1970 represented an emerg-ing parliamentary democracy.16


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Characteristic of South Vietnamese parliamentary democracy, politi-cal parties and candidates represented the interests of diverse groupswithin South Vietnamese society. Candidates representing Catholics, Bud-dhists, Hoa Hao and Cao Dai, progressive and conservative nationalistsran for office in the elections of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Au-gust 1971, the number of candidates who ran for the lower house of theRepublic of Vietnam legislature was 1,297. Some 7 million registeredvoters in a nation besieged by a civil war chose from a range of politicalparties and independent candidates. Despite the wartime restrictions oncivil liberties and the dominance of the executive branch run by PresidentThieu, nothing in the documents from the period suggests that the coun-try was not progressing toward a genuine liberal democratic society.17

Once again, the creation of an emerging democratic society in theSouth did not affect the prevailing consensus in American public opinionthat by the mid-1970s had essentially written off South Vietnam. It didnot matter to the American public, which had suffered hundreds of thou-sands of casualties, and political and cultural warfare over its interventionpolicy for almost a decade, that the South Vietnamese were demonstrat-ing genuine aspects of Western democracy. The GVN was critiqued bythe left as a corrupt military dictatorship, ripe with cronyism. For anti-war critics, the moral issue of defending the South Vietnam from a NorthVietnamese invasion was obscene. Even for the most conservative seg-ment of American public opinion that had supported the war up until itsend in 1975, the moral obligation to defend South Vietnam as an allyand a democratic state did not warrant the reintroduction of U.S. mili-tary force, a requirement in spring 1975 if South Vietnam were to besaved.

For the U.S. military, South Vietnamese democracy was not a reasonto defend it, but its strategic place in the Cold War containment systemwas. Nonetheless, the JCS had no political influence in 1975 that couldforce the Congress to return to South Vietnam to protect its parliament,its free press and lively intellectual community. Without political will,the U.S. military was without a foundation to defend Indochina. As aninstitution it remained damaged by the war. Its morale was weakened bydefeat in Vietnam, and in the larger culture, its image remained undersiege by antiwar critics who focused on alleged war crimes committedduring the conflict.

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

The Eisenhower administration had the strongest interest in providingextensive foreign aid to modernize South Vietnam’s economy. Aid was


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furnished through the International Cooperation Administration (ICA),the predecessor organization to the USAID, as well as major private or-ganizations recruited by the government to assist the Diem regime. Thetwo private groups who were very prominent in economic advice and as-sistance were the Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group,composed of college professors from MSU who were experts in civil ad-ministration; and the American Friends of Vietnam, a private group withties to Diem and South Vietnam and the U.S. government.

A conference in March 1957 sponsored by the American Friends ofVietnam, brought a range of scholars, administrators, diplomats andbusinessmen together to discuss the ICA’s proposed development agendafor the Republic of Vietnam. The purpose of the conference was explicit:

Since achieving real national independence in 1954, the Republic ofVietnam has proven to be one of the United States’ most reliableand stable allies in Asia. . . . It has become increasingly clear sincethose first years of consolidation that for Free Vietnam, as for al-most every other newly-independent Asian nation, true indepen-dence and internal freedom are firmly linked with economicprogress. Indeed, in the view of many specialists, the economic de-velopment of Vietnam has, since order was restored, become theprimary need for the Vietnamese people and their Government.18

All major aspects of economic modernization in terms of capitalist de-velopment were discussed by forty-three invited roundtable members.The conversations included prominent development economists, politicalscientists specializing in Third World development, investment and com-mercial bankers, lawyers, accountants, economic sector specialists andprofessional diplomats from the State Department. The topics for analysisincluded Vietnam’s export and import policies, foreign exchange, fiscaland monetary policies including inflation control, technical manpowerneeds, transportation and agricultural development, prospects for heavyand light industry, mining and the development of electrical power. Inbroad terms, the conference sought to define a rational and very ambi-tious development plan to bring South Vietnam into mid- and late twen-tieth century as a mature, industrialized nation with the ability to sustainand grow its economic system independent of foreign assistance.

By 1960, the U.S. government had provided 1.3 billion dollars ineconomic assistance to South Vietnam. Active projects in the republicduring fiscal year 1960 included agricultural education, agrarian or“land reform” administration, rural and urban water supply develop-ment, highway and bridge construction, telecommunications, including


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the establishment of a national radio network, fisheries development,electric power, various programs to expand and develop public healthand education and various management training programs for public ad-ministration and community service.19

The 1972 AID report on South Vietnam showed that steady develop-ment progress had been made despite the serious effects of the war. Inspite of the war and a growing population, the country was self-sufficientin rice, producing more than 6 million tons in 1972. This represented asubstantial increase from five years earlier, when rice production was lessthan 5 million tons, prompting the government to import a substantialamount of food to make up for the shortfall. In other areas, including in-dustrial development, the government had numerous programs in placeto finance new industry. In general economic terms, the country wasprospering, although not booming in the way that other developingeconomies in East Asia were beginning to do. Given the burden of thewar, which required the majority of able-bodied males to enlist in thearmed forces, economic development was on a steady course at the endof the American ground war in the early 1970s.

LAND REFORM

Land reform was a major priority for U.S. and South Vietnamese offi-cials. It was well understood by intelligence analysts that a critical sourceof support for the insurgency in the South had to do with landlessnessand the odious terms of tenant farming. Under French colonial rule,plantations of 10,000 acres harvested rice, rubber and other tropicalproducts for the overseas market. As the population in Vietnam grew, theextent of landlessness became a severe social, economic and politicalproblem. The Viet Minh began their revolution by using the same meth-ods used by the communist party in China. The capture and distributionof land from French and wealthy Vietnamese landlords created a naturalbase of support for the revolution. Indeed in South Vietnam, the NLFhad built its revolution by focusing on the tenant farmers in the Southwho had little to lose from a peoples war against a regime owned by acorrupt urban elite and sponsored by a foreign country.20

While the Diem regime began an extensive land reform program in the1950s, it was never close to meeting the demands of more than half therural population for free land to engage in subsistence farming. The VietCong used the same land reform measures used during the French War.As they captured hamlets and villages, they confiscated all the land of thelandlords and the government for free distribution to the supporters ofthe revolution in their local areas. For those who resisted them, execution


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was a common fate. For those loyal to the NLFSV, entitlement to “liber-ated” land was expected and directed by the leadership in the South andthe North.

In response, CORDS and the Thieu-Ky government, which assumedpower in 1966, helped to implement a far more attractive and egalitarianland reform program. By 1970, the government had reduced individualland ownership in the densely populated Mekong Delta to no more than7.4 acres, with an average allotment of under 3 acres per family. In thecountry as a whole, the maximum ownership for a working farm was nomore than thirty-seven acres.21 This policy was very effective in winningpopular support among peasants who were at first reluctant to support acentral government that appeared to be on the side of landowning class.In response to the new land reform measures, the Viet Cong increasedtheir terror operations at the village and hamlet level to maintain theirpolitical infrastructure.

By the early 1970s, land reform was no longer a major revolutionaryissue in the South. The VCI could no longer recruit thousands of landlesspeasants to overthrow corrupt government officials who exploited themfor their labor and kept government aid funds to themselves. The UnitedStates through its CORDS program and USAID had sponsored a verysuccessful agricultural reform program by the Republic of Vietnam. As aconsequence, a major structural determinant of the communist insur-gency had been neutralized.

PUBLIC EDUCATION

Central components to nation building and modernization are the ba-sic public institutions that provide health care and universal education.These were priorities from the very beginning of the Republic of Viet-nam, for both Vietnamese and U.S. officials. From the mid-1950s throughthe mid-1970s, extensive reporting by MACV and other U.S. govern-ment agencies monitored and assisted in planning for both public educa-tion and public health administration in South Vietnam. The objective inthe South, as was also true in North Vietnam, was the development ofuniversal access to primary school education, vastly increased access tosecondary and postsecondary education, and a comprehensive nationalhealth-care system for citizens.

During the colonial period, education was considered primarily forthe elite. For the year 1939–1940, only 260,000 elementary school stu-dents were enrolled in what was to become South Vietnam. At the timeof French withdrawal, that number had only increased to 330,000.There were only twenty-nine public high schools in all of South Vietnam,


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with 21,000 students. Together with private high schools, there were51,000 high school students, which represented only 3 percent of the el-igible population. Higher education was limited to five colleges with en-rollment of a little over 2,000. Just four years later, all of these numbershad tripled. Elementary schools enrolled 873,000 students for 1958–1959.Public secondary school enrollment had increased to more 51,000, andthere were ten colleges and universities with 7,500 students.22

With extensive U.S. government aid, the expansion of South Viet-nam’s educational system continued at a dramatic pace, even while thecountry itself was engaged in a full-scale civil war. By 1967, secondary-school enrollment had jumped another 800 percent to 432,000 students.As of the 1969–1970 school year, more than 630,000 high school stu-dents were enrolled in the Republic of Vietnam, a 1,200 percent increasein just fifteen years. By 1970, 25 percent of high school–age students inSouth Vietnam were in secondary schools. The government’s goal was toachieve universal primary school education and 65–70 percent enroll-ment in high school by 1980.23

Finally, university education had begun a dramatic rise from the late1950s. The number of students had increased to nearly 50,000 with aprojected rise of 10,000 per year at least through the mid-1970s. By1971, Saigon University had over 34,000 students. This was up from justover 4,000 enrolled in 1957. The University of Hue, which had only 670students in 1957, had more than five times that number by 1970. Saigon,the largest and most important of South Vietnam’s five universities hadestablished professional schools in medicine, dentistry, pharmacy and ar-chitecture.24

HEALTH CARE

A 1963 Walter Reed Hospital Army medical publication provided adiscussion of the state of public health in the Republic of Vietnam. Onlyone-third of the country’s population had access to potable water.Sewage and waste disposal systems were rudimentary and only found inthe large cities. Malnutrition due to lack of protein in the diet was preva-lent in all areas of the country except the delta. Infant mortality, offi-cially 43 per 1,000 births, was estimated in actual terms as 255 per1,000 or 1 and 4 mortality during the first twelve months of life. Com-mon diseases among the South Vietnamese population included smallpox, which was epidemic every three or four years, dysentery, malaria,intestinal parasites, tuberculosis, rabies and tetanus and trachoma (eyeinfections). Finally some 15,000 cases of leprosy were officially regis-tered in the country.25


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In addition to these abysmal statistics, the ongoing war flooded hospi-tals with tens of thousands of civilian casualties every year. The improve-ment in public health, as well as the other areas of modernization, wasconsidered an essential project for the support of South Vietnam asan independent country. In 1968, the U.S. Agency for International De-velopment commissioned a four-volume study of provincial hospitalmodernization. The report recommended a ten-year program to buildfifty-eight provincial hospitals at a cost of 180 million dollars.26 By1972, according to the USAID, many advances in public health had beendone in South Vietnam. In 1953, there were only 10 dentists, 8 pharma-cists and 130 physicians in all of Vietnam. By 1972, with extensive assis-tance from the United States, South Vietnam graduated 225 newphysicians, 64 new dentists and 250 new pharmacists in that year alone.By the early 1970s, after nearly two decades of U.S. government andother international assistance, South Vietnam was able to provide family-planning clinics, physical therapy and rehabilitation medicine throughoutthe country. The Ministry of Health employed 650 full-time physicians, anumber large enough to allow the United States to withdraw its remain-ing medical personnel from civilian hospitals.27

VICTORY THROUGH ALTERNATIVE MEANS?

The available statistical evidence from the war period shows SouthVietnam as a modernizing nation-state, benefiting from the extensiveeconomic, technical and administrative assistance of the United Statesand other allied countries. Pacification, through the Phoenix, Hoi Chieuand other counterinsurgency programs had proven effective in reducingthe strength and capabilities of the communist insurgency. Vietnamiza-tion, while deeply imperfect in its implementation, had produced a viablemilitary force in the RVNAF. Given these historical estimates, a questionthat should be asked is whether the alternative methods of fighting thewar could have won it. In other words, could nation building and uncon-ventional warfare have been a more viable strategy for winning the con-flict than the standard military strategy employed by the U.S. military?

During the Vietnam War, the communists were “defeated” through al-ternative means. Nonetheless, it would appear that the defeat of the en-emy through weakening the revolutionary infrastructure in the South,developing the national economy and political system and strengtheningthe quality of the leadership and equipment of the South Vietnamesearmed forces were necessary but not sufficient conditions for victory.

No matter how more effective U.S. military and civilian assistancecould have been between 1954 and 1975, the adversary remained a


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highly motivated, disciplined and skilled military force. The most perfectprogram of modernization in the South would not have deterred ardentVietnamese in the north, committed communists and Vietnamese nation-alists, from mobilizing their society to defeat a foreign enemy and its per-ceived illegitimate regime. The North also engaged in impressive nationbuilding during the war, in spite of the massive attacks by the UnitedStates. North Vietnam benefited from extensive assistance from its so-cialist allies around the world, but in particular from China and the So-viet Union.

We may only conclude that if the United States had emphasized the newmethods of special or unconventional warfare in South Vietnam, theywould have enhanced the ability of both the South Vietnamese and theUnited States to win the war in concert with its conventional military forces.The best CI practices would have weakened the Viet Cong, but it still re-quired U.S. combat troops, artillery support and the massive air war to en-gage and destroy the crack North Vietnamese divisions that entered SouthVietnam in the mid-1960s, and who stayed to capture Saigon in 1975.

The civilian assistance programs under CORDS and AID to supportthe development and survival of the Republic of Vietnam always re-mained dependent on the conventional war fought by MACV, the RV-NAF and other allied country expeditionary forces. From the perspectiveof General Creighton Abrams, MACV commander 1968 to 1973, pacifi-cation was an essential mission to win the war. However, his weapon ofchoice was the B-52 bomber. With more B-52 sorties against VC andPAVN concentrations throughout Indochina, the enemy would be sub-jected to the most terrifying and effective weapon in the U.S. conven-tional arsenal.28 While building schools, roads, hospitals, universities,factories, ports, telecommunications, radio and TV stations, water andsewage systems, agricultural support centers, that is, the infrastructurefor a modern civil society was necessary and even vital for South Viet-nam’s survival, the sheer power deployed by the B-52 was also vital anda prerequisite to forcing the enemy to withdraw its troops from theSouth. While the degradation of the VCI in the South was vital and nec-essary to bring government control over the rural areas where 80 percentof South Vietnam’s population lived, only conventional military means,by well-trained and motivated Army divisions, and devastating airpowerused throughout Indochina, could engage and destroy the PAVN, depriv-ing it of supplies, base camps and the ability to threaten South Vietnam’scities. The alternative means premised on the best intentions of Ameri-can internationalism could not have won the Vietnam War for the UnitedStates and the Republic of Vietnam. As in all wars, victory required im-posing one nation’s will upon another.


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During the entire Vietnam War era, the defining description for all U.S.civil-military relations was adversarial. U.S. military operations, militaryinstitutions and leadership were constrained by every major avenue ofcivilian control. The Congress, the mass public and the principal civilianareas of the executive branch always imposed limits on U.S. military ac-tions. Through more than a decade of war that involved American mili-tary personnel, civilian society and institutions alternatively supportedand critiqued the use of force. Ultimately, the limits imposed on U.S. mil-itary action, combined with the general failure to achieve political andmilitary objectives, resulted in military defeat—a rare occurrence in thenation’s history.

At the heart of the adversarial relationship between the military andcivilian society was the role of war propaganda. The ability to mobilizepublic opinion to fight a war is perhaps the most important function ofpropaganda. In American history, critical events including the attack onFort Sumter by Confederate forces to start the Civil War, the destructionof the USS Maine which triggered the War with Spain, the sinking of theLusitania in 1915 and, of course, the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941were all events responsible for mobilizing American public opinion. Sim-ilar critical events were instrumental to war mobilization during theVietnam conflict. The Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964, the bombing ofU.S. military barracks at Pleiku in the Central Highlands in February1965 and Johnson’s escalation speech in July 1965, all served as forms ofpolitical theater for the mobilization of national will.

7

Propaganda and Rhetoric

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In response to war mobilization by the executive branch, the massmedia and the broadly based and diffuse antiwar movement expressed an-tiwar propaganda that mobilized antiwar sentiment, creating a counterpo-litical theater of disbelief, moral outrage, and at the extreme, activeresistance to the state. This chapter will illustrate the opposition betweenmilitary pro-war propaganda and its antithesis, the antiwar propagandaof major elements within American civilian society.

MILITARY AND CIVILIAN PROPAGANDA:USES AND MISUSES

Managing public opinion is perhaps the most essential job that theWhite House staff performs for any president. Without public support,no major policy initiative will survive for long. Public support is trans-lated into congressional support. With popular and legislative underpin-ning, a president could launch a major war or major domestic legislation.If the support was lost, then the White House needed to work desperatelyto see if it could restore that legitimacy before action would be taken byCongress to end material, legal and moral commitments.

After the ground war began in earnest in summer 1965, the WhiteHouse dealt with three serious moments of political crises regarding In-dochina. In 1968, the Tet Offensive fatally weakened a long-term com-mitment to protect Vietnam with U.S. forces. In 1970, the Cambodianinvasion added another layer of antiwar attachment to a now cynicalpublic. Finally, the fall of Indochina in spring 1975 focused the WhiteHouse on the likely loss of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and the impo-tence of the Ford administration to reverse a decade-long destruction ofAmerican political will to resist a communist victory in the region. Onceit began its decline, public support for the Vietnam War never returned.

PROPAGANDA AS A TOOL OF WAR

By necessity, propaganda has always been a tool of war. The purposeof war propaganda has always served several mutually reinforcing aims.The dissemination of real and/or false information designed to influencepublic opinion has worked to rally the home front, demoralize the enemyand influence allies and neutral parties to the conflict. Years before thestart of the American Revolutionary War, the so-called Boston Massacrewas publicized by Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty as a brutal ex-ample of British oppression. Later, the Boston Tea Party was designed toinfluence both American and British public opinion regarding the unjust-ness of British rule in the American colonies.

The examples of war related propaganda in American history alone


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are too numerous to cite. The Declaration of Independence itself was abrilliant example of propaganda aimed at American, British and Europeanpublic opinion. In every war of the nineteenth century, including the Warof 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War and the Indian Wars, governmentand private propaganda aimed to shape public opinion, to mobilize it, togather material as well as moral support and to establish permanent legit-imacy for the nation’s war aims.

In the twentieth century, propaganda in the form of pamphlets,speeches, books, radio and television broadcasts have been essential ele-ments in warfare. Propaganda was institutionalized during the First WorldWar with the formation of the Committee on Public Information (CPI), agovernment organization dedicated to the dissemination of U.S. war prop-aganda around the world. During the Second World War, the Office ofWar Information (OWI) was established in 1942 to replicate what the CPIdid so brilliantly during the First World War. In fact, all the major com-batants of the world wars had extensive propaganda operations aimed atinfluencing the perceptions of the war everywhere in the world.

The Cold War was no different from its predecessors. For decades, TheVoice of America and Radio Free Europe were major propaganda, that is,psychological warfare operations controlled by the Central IntelligenceAgency. The war for world opinion was quintessential to the bipolar con-flict. In addition to broadcasts aimed at “captive” populations in EasternEurope and elsewhere, U.S. propaganda was very concerned with the ac-tions of its own citizens, and how the country was portrayed by foreignmedia. In justifying his use of federal troops to integrate a high schoolin Arkansas, Eisenhower told a national audience that racial segregationin the South had a serious impact on the image and prestige of the UnitedStates in its global confrontation with communism.

It should be of no surprise that U.S. government propaganda, pro-duced by civilians and military organizations, was an essential part ofthe Vietnam War. In chapter 6, the Hoi Chieu program was discussed insome detail. South Vietnam’s amnesty program involved a massive prop-aganda campaign done jointly by the chief psychological operationsbranch of the U.S. military, JUSPAO, and its counterpart in the SouthVietnamese government. However, as noted, propaganda as a form ofpsychological warfare was a global enterprise during the Cold War, as itwas during both the First and Second World Wars.

MILITARY PROPAGANDA: BODY COUNTS AND PACIFICATION REPORTS

Military propaganda was aimed at multiple targets. For the Viet Congand the North Vietnamese, a full program of psychological warfare was

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aimed at encouraging defections and demoralizing the enemy. For theAmerican public, however, the military had to project a continuous im-age of progress, irrespective of the results on the battlefield. During theKennedy administration, MACV commanders reported steady progresswith the implementation of the Strategic Hamlet program. Taking the re-ports of the ARVN at face value, MACV representatives reported to thepress and to Washington that the war was being won. Only after the fallof Diem in November 1963, and after a major reassessment of the advi-sory effort in Vietnam was begun, was the truth revealed. In fact, theStrategic Hamlet program was an abject failure. South Vietnam, by theend of 1963, was in perilous shape.1

Military and executive branch propaganda was a major priority forthe war effort. During the Johnson administration, government reportsand documentaries portrayed a valiant ally in South Vietnam, fightingoff aggression from the North. Viet Cong terrorism was highlighted,while civilian deaths caused by U.S. and South Vietnamese military ac-tions were always considered collateral damage. Progress was always pre-sented as an ongoing feature of the war, even if there was virtually none.U.S. motives were always presented as altruistic. According to officialgovernment statements, the United States was in Vietnam to preserve thefreedom of the South Vietnamese people. While the truth was far morecomplicated, the essential message throughout the war, until its end inspring 1975, was the humanitarian focus of U.S. involvement in the war.The war was always an exercise in preventing the death of the free world.

PRO-WAR PROPAGANDA

For a significant period of U.S. involvement, the combined propa-ganda efforts of the military and the executive branch were successful inengineering a positive domestic public perception of the war. Without thesuccess of pro-war propaganda, the American ground war would neverhave been possible. Essentially, the extensive propaganda campaign,which was employed by thousands of U.S. government representativesthroughout the world, involved the projection of particular arguments.These arguments or themes were portrayed using statistics, analogies,visual images as well as detailed rational arguments.

War Is Moral Test for the Free World

A recurring theme in both military and civilian propaganda had to dowith the Vietnam War as a moral test for the nation. Kennedy said as muchin his 1961 inaugural address. Although he did not mention Vietnam


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specifically, his message was poignant and clear: the U.S. would fightcommunist movements everywhere in the world. The same theme wasexpressed by Lyndon Johnson in countless speeches. Among his most fa-mous Vietnam speeches were his address after the Gulf of Tonkin inci-dents in August 1964, his Johns Hopkins speech of April 1965 and hispress conference speech of July 1965. In all of these speeches, critical tothe process of war mobilization, Johnson portrayed South Vietnam as avictim of aggression. The country was a poor outpost of the free worlddeserving of its protection. Without a response by the United States todefend the Republic of Vietnam from aggression, the entire containmentsystem against international communism was in danger of collapse. Fur-ther, the loss of Vietnam and Indochina would break the promises ofAmerican presidents beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954.2

Communist Atrocities

An idea that reverberated in military and executive branch briefingson the war related to the methods of the Viet Cong and the North Viet-namese. MACV reported thousands of assassinations of village-level gov-ernment officials by Viet Cong troops. Village chiefs, school teachers andanyone else associated with the government were targeted by the NLFfrom the beginning of the resistance movement in the late 1950s to theend of the war in the 1970s. To strike fear into the hearts of rural vil-lagers, the VC would often make an example of particular local officials.There were many documented cases where the VC executed their victimsin front of hamlet populations.

On Augusta 23, 1961 two school teachers, Nguyen Khoa Ngonand Miss Nugyen Thi Thiet, were preparing their teaching lessonsat Miss Thiet’s home when two guerrillas entered the house andforced them at gunpoint to go to their school, Rau Ram School,Phong Dinh province. There they found two men, named Oanh andVan, local farmers, to whom the guerrillas read an execution order.Oanh was then shot and Van decapitated. Althought the teacherswere not certain why they had been forced to witness the execu-tions, they assumed that it was an effort to intimidate them andto discourage them from taking a pro-GVN attitude with theirstudents.3

Other atrocities included mass executions, as occurred in the city ofHue during the Tet Offensive. Several thousand progovernment individu-als were rounded up by the VC and killed in the sports stadium. Their


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bodies were found after Hue was retaken by ARVN and U.S. troops. TheViet Cong and PAVN forces were also guilty of shelling South Vietnam-ese villages and cities, resulting in thousands of civilian casualties. Fi-nally, through the course of the war, the VC committed countless acts ofrandom terrorism in government controlled areas, including bombingpublic places.

Communist assassinations were designed to systematically destroy thegovernment’s local infrastructures. To a degree, the assassinations were ef-fective, bringing thousands of hamlets under communist control. In thelong run, however, extensive countermeasures by the South Vietnamese, theUnited States and other allied forces mitigated the effects of these tactics.4

South Vietnamese Desire for Freedom

In speeches and testimony to Congress, as well as information dissem-inated to the public, U.S. government officials, civilian and military, em-phasized the desire of the South Vietnamese to be free from the communistforces attempting to overrun their country. From the 1950s onward, ex-tensive work had been done to promote democracy in South Vietnamwith mixed results. Nonetheless, by the time U.S. ground forces had de-parted the country in 1973, a working multiparty legislature was in-volved in passing laws that governed the country. A lively intellectualcommunity existed in Saigon prior to its occupation by North Vietnam-ese troops in 1975. The post-1975 Vietnamese diaspora attests to the vi-brancy and exile of that community after the communist victory.

To maintain critical political support for the war, the executive branchemphasized the genuine liberal beliefs of South Vietnamese elites. IfSouth Vietnam was not a model democracy, its tolerance of popular dis-sent, even in the face of an active civil war and a hostile army withinkilometers of its major cities, demonstrated the authentic pluralism thatexisted in the South. That pluralism, it was surmised, would be sacrificedby communist victory.

Loss of National Honor and Prestige

The theme of national honor and prestige was evident in speeches andeditorials in 1965. In the Pentagon Papers, John McNaughton, RobertMcNamara’s senior aide, wrote a policy planning document which at-tributed 70 percent of U.S. interest in defending South Vietnam to theprotection of American honor. The actual freedom of the South Viet-namese counted only 10 percent according to McNaughton’s ad hocanalysis. The final 20 percent of U.S. interest concerned the need to


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prevent communist expansion in Southeast Asia. U.S. honor, however,was the preponderant reason. Why was honor so important? Implied inthe concept of honor was the integrity of the entire global containmentsystem. If the United States withdrew from South Vietnam under dishon-orable conditions, the international prestige of the country would havebeen at grave risk. To Americans in the 1960s, a nation raised in a mili-tary culture defined by the memory of two world wars, the loss of na-tional honor meant disaster.5

During the presidency of Richard Nixon, the same concept of honorwas at the heart of American rhetoric. Nixon and Kissinger desired,above all else, “peace with honor.” For Nixon, as much as his predeces-sors, the desire for honor was to support the country’s defense posturevis-à-vis international communism. Even though his presidency wasmarked by the end of the Cold War with China, and détente with the So-viet Union, the concept of saving face as a genuine national security con-cern remained at the heart of Nixon and Kissinger’s belief system.

Treatment of U.S. POWs

An issue of deep importance to the American public was the treatmentof U.S. prisoners of war (POWs) by the North Vietnamese. Informationgleaned from visits by neutral representatives, celebrities and journalists,as well as the pictures of captured U.S. soldiers on North Vietnamesetelevision, suggested serious maltreatment. Indeed, the extreme condi-tions that the communists exposed U.S. POWs to was a galvanizing issuein the United States, especially for conservative communities who moreoften than not were the ones with POWs being held in Hanoi. The harsh-ness of communist military prisons, and the use of POWs for propagandapurposes, served to validate American involvement in the war. The spec-tacle of starved and beaten American prisoners hardened public and offi-cial attitudes toward the North Vietnamese, and mitigated some of thelegitimacy of the antiwar movement’s critiques of alleged U.S. war crimesin the conflict.6

The Domino Theory Is Valid

In addition to the moral arguments in support of the war, U.S. warpropaganda defended the conflict as a necessary strategic intervention. Thedomino theory, articulated by Dwight D. Eisenhower and defense analystsin the 1950s, continued to maintain its currency, at least with seniormembers of the executive branch, until the end of the war. In the mid-1960s, the concept of falling dominoes was unassailable to both civilian


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and military leaders and government analysts. The estimated consequencesfor defeat in Vietnam in 1965 were so severe that the JCS refused to con-template any possible action other than intervention. For Lyndon John-son and his senior advisors, the military view was correct, albeit extreme.Johnson could not contemplate withdrawal, nor did anyone suggest sucha strategy in summer 1965.

As the war continued, the domino theory became less and less appe-tizing as a rhetorical device. The antiwar movement challenged the theory,suggesting that it was a simplistic and unproven concept of how social rev-olution spreads. As the contradictions of the war grew in the public’smind, the domino metaphor was used far less as ideological underpin-ning of the intervention. Nonetheless, the idea persisted. If the loss ofVietnam would not result immediately in the fall of Thailand andMalaysia, the effect of defeat would reverberate, domino-like in the im-age of the United States as an ally.7

We Are Winning

The final argument for supporting the war was that it was being won.This was a very popular argument with the professional military. Themilitary command liked to believe that its policies were effective. Prior tothe fall of the Diem regime in 1963, the military believed that it was win-ning the pacification war against the communists. Nothing was furtherfrom the truth. Nonetheless, the belief in winning served an importantpurpose when the war had very thin support in the Congress.

At the height of the ground war in the late 1960s, U.S. military offi-cers routinely reported that the war was being won. By the late 1960s,MACV was reporting combined annual losses by the communists wellin excess of a hundred thousand dead. Despite the continued resistanceof enemy forces, the VC and the PAVN were taking huge numbers of ca-sualties, leaving most of their units understrength. In the countryside,the popular and regional forces of the RVNAF were pursuing vigorouspacification programs that were bringing most of the rural populationunder government control. By 1970, MACV and the Department of De-fense were reporting that over 90 percent of the rural population inSouth Vietnam was living in secure government-controlled areas.

As far as MACV and the White House were concerned, the war wasalways being won. The communists were deadly assassins who preyed onthe South Vietnamese civilian population, trying to force them into join-ing their movement or acquiescing in the control of the country and theoverthrow of the Republic of Vietnam. South Vietnam was a strugglingbut vibrant democracy according to U.S. government information. The


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communists wanted to overthrow this democracy, install a totalitarianregime and spread its movement to neighboring countries throughoutAsia. The only moral and strategic choice that made sense, according tothis argument, was to engage the communists, defeat them, save SouthVietnam, Indochina and possibly the rest of Southeast Asia.

ANTIWAR PROPAGANDA

For each and every pro-war argument ventured by military and civil-ian government officials, a countervailing and often better argument wasused by the ever burgeoning antiwar movement. The war was challengedon moral, legal and strategic grounds. It was deemed by various groupsand individual critics as genocide, ecocide, a grotesque failure, an irra-tional boondoggle, a product of economic imperialism, American racismand technocratic militarism. Capitalism, national hubris, the legacies ofthe American frontier, the preternatural racism of a Western superpowerand simply the failed leadership of successive presidents, all these argu-ments were given in retort to the war justifications provided by the exec-utive branch.

The more moderate arguments against the war emerged as supportersturned against the intervention. Those ideas related to the ineffective andunwinnable nature of the conflict. In the end, there were too many voicesagainst the war. Radical dissenters caused more harm from engaging inviolent means of protest than in the logic of their arguments. Liberal andmoderate dissent was more damaging to the war effort because thatopposition carried with it deep sources of support in public opinion. Theantiwar arguments, like the pro-war ones, settled around several domi-nant themes.

The War Is Immoral

Perhaps the most powerful concept behind the antiwar movement wasthe belief in the war’s immorality. Just as the morality of the war wasperhaps the strongest component of the government’s propaganda cam-paign, its antithesis served the same purpose for the diverse groups whorallied against the war between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s. Thewar’s immorality was based on a range of concepts, including mili-tarism, imperialism, and racism, as well as the more extreme charges ofecocide and mass killings. The issue of immorality and the Vietnam Warcut very deep. It mobilized extraordinary emotional responses among in-dividuals and groups who acted upon their beliefs and feelings, often inviolent confrontations with the government.8


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The War as a Product of U.S. Militarism

A common theme among antiwar critics attributed the war to theatavistic designs of American society. One line of argument that beganwith C. Wright Mills in the 1950s suggested American power was underthe control of a military-industrial complex. William J. Fulbright, a lead-ing critic of the war as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,believed in Mills’ institutional argument. A culture of militarism was fedby powerful industrial interests. Vietnam was appealing to a culture mil-itarized by decades of war and military preparation.

In countless Vietnam War “teach-ins” at U.S. colleges and universi-ties, the war was portrayed as a Pentagon–inspired attack on a ThirdWorld nation. The sheer power of the U.S. armed forces, with its heavybombers, antipersonnel cluster bombs, napalm, artillery guns and hugefleets of combat helicopters, was capable of destruction unparalleled inthe history of warfare. With so much military force, including ther-monuclear weapons, the propensity to solve political problems throughthe application of force seemed to many to be a fated response.

The destruction caused by U.S. military actions were far out of pro-portion to the enemy being confronted, namely, Southeast Asian peasantswearing black pajamas and armed with rifles. The strategic arguments forfighting the war were grotesque and ludicrous, from the point of view ofantiwar intellectuals and politicians. To many critics, including Ameri-can clergy, artists, writers and liberal activists, Vietnam was a harbingerof a darker horizon for American society. For many ardent protesters inthe 1960s, the war was a possible prelude to a nuclear conflict againstChina and the Soviet Union. The peace movement of the 1950s, whoseobjective was to end the nuclear arms race, became the platform for theVietnam antiwar movement that sprung to life on American campuses in1964 and 1965.

The War as an Act of Imperialism

A theme closely related to militarism was the idea that Vietnam wasyet another example of American imperialism. Noam Chomsky, the fa-mous MIT linguist, became one of the foremost antiwar intellectuals inthe mid-1960s. For Chomsky and others, including Marcus Raskin,Gabriel Kolko and Howard Zinn, the war was not only about the milita-rization of American society, but it also represented the cultural and eco-nomic imperialism of an advanced Western society. The war was not, asapologists argued, a defense of freedom. On the contrary, according tothe view of the American New Left, Vietnam was a calculated attempt toprotect American capitalism from the forces of revolution in the Third


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World and to protect the imperial interests of American corporations andtheir owners, the wealthy elites who inhabited Wall Street and all theother secluded and secular refuges of power and money.9

American imperialism, according to this view, needed to hold Viet-nam because it, and the rest of Indochina, was of extraordinary impor-tance to retaining Western control over the Third World. Without theresources and markets provided by the vast regions of decolonized Asiaand Africa, the engines of wealth that supported the power of Americanelite would be endangered.

The War as Racism

Yet another theme, closely related to militarism and imperialism,which found resonance in the antiwar movement, accused the UnitedStates of racism. From this perspective, Vietnam was an extension of theIndian Wars of the nineteenth century. The Viet Cong were unwilling tosubmit to the superior forces of a Western superpower. It appeared thata nonwhite people were challenging the United States for control of theirown land, just as some generations earlier, a younger American nationconquered nonwhite peoples and took their lands for themselves. Whilenever articulated by establishment elites, the spectacle of tall, muscled,clean cut white soldiers hunting through swamps and woodlands for anative enemy protecting his ancestral home seemed to beg the question ofracism. Among African American antiwar activists, Vietnam seemed likean obvious example of white power and white racism projected into adistant land. It was clearly a “white man’s war” for many black antiwarcritics. If it was a war for “the race,” then, clearly, to political liberalsand nonwhite citizens, the war was patently immoral. In 1966, JohnLewis, the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Commit-tee (SNCC), summarized a prevalent African American antiwar position:

We believe the United States government has been deceptive in itsclaims of concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese people, just asthe government has been deceptive in claiming concern for the free-dom of the colored people in such other countries as the DominicanRepublic, the Congo, South Africa, Rhodesia and in the UnitedStates itself.10

The War as Genocide

Perhaps the most damning antiwar argument was that the VietnamWar was so brutal and inhuman that its conduct approached genocide.The Mai Lai massacre of 1968 and the ensuing military trials brought


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this idea to the public. Antiwar activists accused both the Johnson andNixon administration of covering up war related atrocities. If there wasone Mai Lai, so the argument went, then there must have been many oth-ers that were hidden. The war resulted in many hundreds of thousands ofcivilian deaths, most of which were attributed to collateral damage. Theantiwar argument was that the war was fought with such brutality, withweapons of such destructiveness, that the inevitable result was tanta-mount to genocide.

The 1971 Vietnam War crime hearings in Congress, held by Repre-sentative Ronald Dellums, an African American congressman from De-troit, portrayed an American Army that was out of control. The Army,according to testimony from Vietnam veterans, was engaged in warcrimes on a daily basis. The same charges of war crimes were thrown atthe Nixon administration for its secret bombings of Cambodia and itsimplementation of the Phoenix program, which antiwar critics describedas an assassination program. Finally, the famous Christmas bombing ofDecember 1972 was attacked for its inhumanity by the government ofSweden, among others. The Swedish prime minister, Olaf Palme, com-pared the massive U.S. bombing raid on Hanoi to the punitive assaults bythe Nazi Germany that massacred civilians during the Second WorldWar.11

The War as Ecocide

Yet another dark view of the war was expressed by the new environ-mental movement of the 1960s. One of the methods used against theViet Cong was to defoliate the wetlands of the Mekong Delta as well asthe forests of the Central Highlands. A strategy of deliberate herbicidalwarfare was carried out in part to protect U.S. forces from enemy forcesthat used the dense grass and tropical forests as protective cover. Yet, thedestruction caused by Agent Orange, other herbicides and the massiveshelling and bombing from U.S. planes and artillery had a devastatingeffect on the ecology of Indochina. For the burgeoning antiwar move-ment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the ecocide in Vietnam, Cam-bodia and Laos added to the inhumane effects of the war on the nativepopulation.

The U.S. military had virtually no interest in protecting wildlife orvegetation in the combat areas. Of primary importance to the militarywas protection of its troops and the destruction of enemy units. Onceagain, this strict paradigm of conventional warfare brought charges ofwar crimes against the United States. The destruction of rural Vietnamby the war involved not only the brutal burning of villages with napalm


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munitions, the strafing of civilian populations and the removal of sur-vivors to “secure” areas, but it also involved the physical death of the en-tire environs of the countryside. Such a picture of war fought withoutmercy or regard for native people, for abstract strategic reasons thatexisted only in the minds of technocratic war planners on the other sideof the earth, suggested to antiwar critics that the military’s policies ofecocide were entirely consonant with the other immoral aspects of itswar strategy.12

The War Is Illegal under International Law

The final moral argument made by the antiwar movement was the en-tire conflict was illegal under international law. Richard Falk, a professorof international law at Yale, wrote a multivolume legal critique of thewar during the Johnson administration. His detailed analysis argued thatU.S. intervention in Vietnam was illegal. The war did not constitute aninternational conflict under the U.N. Charter. Under the 1954 GenevaAccords on Indochina, Vietnam was not two countries with sovereigngovernments, but one nation with two zones of temporary governance.Since South Vietnam was not really a country, and was not invaded, atleast at the time of Falk’s treatise, the United States had no legal right tointervene in Vietnam with military force.13

The legal argument against U.S. intervention paralleled the other ar-guments against the war proffered by many thousands of activists inpublic and private life. An immoral war was almost by definition illegaland vice versa. The legal argument against the war refused to recognizethe sovereignty and right of self-defense for the Republic of Vietnam. Itsadvocates argued that the National Liberation Front for South Vietnamhad as much right to represent the population of South Vietnam as thegovernment recognized by the United States. Finally, the antiwar argu-ment suggested that NLF was independent of North Vietnam, and thatNorth Vietnam’s aid to the NLF did not constitute an invasion of theSouth. In fact, the response of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam wasdirectly related to the illegal intervention by the United States.

The War Is Unwinnable

Along with the war’s immorality, antiwar propaganda was energizedby a set of beliefs that suggested the war could never be won. If the warwas inherently unwinnable, an idea that was current not only amongantiwar protesters but among sober realists inside the government aswell, then continuing to prosecute it appeared illogical, cruel and futile.


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The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Cannot Be Defeated

A common theme expressed by congressional doves as well as thelarger public antiwar movement was that the guerrilla movement inSouth Vietnam could not be defeated. For years, from the beginning ofthe Kennedy administration through the end of the Johnson presidency,it seemed that was true. No matter how many troops were deployed, orhow much money and ammunition was spent, or how high the bodycounts were, the VC appeared endlessly resilient.

As far as the North Vietnamese were concerned, news reports sug-gested that their civilian population was able to withstand the bombingcampaigns designed to demoralize them and reduce the North’s military-industrial infrastructure. Antiwar critics in the Congress pointed to whatthey considered the failures of pacification and the indomitable nature ofboth the VC and the PAVN. Even with enormous casualties, the enemyhad enough manpower to replace its losses while extracting a deadly tollfrom both the South Vietnamese and the United States.

Winning the War Would Be Too Costly

A very convincing argument for the antiwar public and Congress wasthe cost of prosecuting the Vietnam War to its conclusion. By 1968, with500,000 troops on the ground, General Westmoreland requested yet an-other 200,000 troops to bring maximum pressure on the enemy. At theheight of the war, American fatalities were over 300 men a week, in ad-dition to 1,000 wounded. In economic terms, the cost of the war far ex-ceeded the fiscal cost of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. With no end insight, antiwar critics believed simply that winning the war was far toocostly to pursue.14

The Johnson, and later Nixon, administration had declared the inde-pendence of South Vietnam as their primary war aim. However, guaran-teeing that result required the total defeat of the communist in Vietnam.This was a project that seemed politically impossible. Even the Johnsonadministration, when it launched the major ground war in summer 1965had great trepidations and doubts that achieving “victory” in Vietnamwas possible. Finally, when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger as-sumed the White House, it was quite apparent that victory as defined wasbeyond reasonable guaranty by the United States.

Winning the War Would Be Too Dangerous

As noted throughout this monograph, the vast majority of the seniorcommanders in the U.S. military believed the war was winnable if they


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were allowed to fight it on their own terms. This was a particular pointof contention for the antiwar movement. From the early 1960s onward,prominent U.S. senators warned Lyndon Johnson that an aggressive cam-paign to defeat North Vietnam risked war with China and possibly theSoviet Union. While the JCS had no problem with the idea of fightingChinese divisions entering North Vietnam to counteract an Americaninvasion of the North, senators Mike Mansfield, William J. Fulbright,Sherman Cooper, Frank Church, George McGovern, Richard Russelland many others were mortified.

Congressional opposition to the standard hawk position on winningthe war through massive bombing and/or invasion of the North, to forcethe communists to concede on U.S. terms, was argued in public and pri-vate as a prescription for World War III. The more radical antiwar move-ment among academics, students and liberal members of civil societythought the war was implicitly dangerous. They often did not distinguishbetween the moral argument against the national security state or the“warfare state” and the practical concerns of moderate and conservativeantiwar critics who viewed the war as a strategic debacle that was trulydangerous.15

The War Threatens to Destroy the Fabric of American Society

A final concern for the millions against the war had to do with its effecton American society. The war’s effects seemed to be deeply corrosive tocivil society. The psychological effects on millions of American GIs ex-posed to a deadly and interminable conflict in the Third World weredeemed a very high price for an unwinnable, immoral and strategically ir-relevant war. The GIs brought home both physical and psychologicalwounds that impacted millions of American families. They returned notonly with posttraumatic stress, but also with severe chemical dependenciesincluding addiction to heroin and other powerful and debilitating illicitdrugs.16

The war inspired radical political movements centered on major uni-versities in the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast. These movements,including the Weathermen, a domestic terrorist organization, representeda serious threat to public safety in a society that was already under seri-ous strain from race riots and surging crime rates in major urban areas.For many antiwar critics in the center of the political spectrum, the veryfabric of civil society, its schools, religious and political institutions, pop-ular culture and urban centers were inflicted by the poisonous effects ofthe Vietnam War.17

To continue the war meant the perpetuation of everything the war had


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brought to America. Respect for government had declined astonishinglyin a very short span of time. Social movements challenged public order,as not only blacks but Chicanos, Native Americans and feminists wereclamoring for political and social reforms. The war’s apparent immoral-ity for those opposed to it divided the nation into separate camps. Mod-erate and conservative supporters of the war had become enraged byeverything the left wing antiwar movement stood for. In sum, the war ap-peared to be shaking the fundamental terms of American civil society,inviting ever more divisive and destructive conflict in a country thatprided itself on just the opposite.

GULF OF TONKIN

From the perspective of political propaganda, the Gulf of Tonkin wastextbook example of effectiveness. In response to two alleged and rela-tively minor attacks against U.S. naval forces in the Gulf of Tonkin,some 100 miles off the coast of North Vietnam, both houses of the U.S.Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution of August 1964. Both thenational and world presses condemned the “aggression” against theUnited States. The informed public, to the degree that it knew of the in-cidents, supported Lyndon Johnson’s resolve to oppose the communistsin Indochina.

Only two U.S. senators, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernst Grueningof Alaska, voted against the resolution. This grossly underestimated theextent of opposition to major military action in Southeast Asia. Despitevoting for the resolution, a number of senators and congressmen wereopposed to a major ground war in Vietnam. Nonetheless, the propa-ganda of the resolution, very clear and unadorned, established a politicaland legal claim of authority for Johnson administration to escalate thewar in Indochina. In fact, the Johnson White House had been waiting forjust such a crisis that would allow the administration to publicly displayits anger and fashion legislation that would expand the political capitalthe president needed if he wanted to go to war in the region.18

ENTERING THE GROUND WAR: JULY 1965

The propaganda efforts behind the decision to enter the ground warin July 1965 were masterful. Extensive discussions at Camp David andat the White House provided Johnson with overwhelming, albeit tenta-tive, approval for his plan to begin the massive escalation of the U.S.commitment to South Vietnam. The legal basis of the war appeared tobe sound. The president’s course of action in summer 1965 was premised


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on international and domestic law. Domestic law and legislation, estab-lished by the Gulf of Tonkin resolution of August 1964, and the constitu-tional authority of the president under Article 2 of the U.S. constitutionallowed Johnson to go to war to defend the United States from aggression.Internationally, the 1954 SEATO Treaty pledged the United States to re-spond to South Vietnam’s request for military assistance. Finally, Article51 of the UN Charter gave the United States the inherent right to cometo the aid of any member of the international community under attack.19

The legal basis for intervention was reinforced by the moral interestsof the United States in keeping its “word” to an ally, and opposing an en-emy that was an agent of international communism, a totalitarian move-ment dedicated to the destruction of the free world. Finally, the dominotheory had impressive support among not only U.S. national security in-tellectuals, but to a large majority of the American people as well, whobelieved that the loss of South Vietnam could lead very quickly to the lossof most of Southeast Asia. Such a possibility was an intolerable strategicthreat to the United States.

After Johnson gave his press conference speech on July 28, 1965, pub-lic support for the war in the United States was very strong. Two-thirdsof the public in opinion polls voiced support for his plan of action inSouth Vietnam. Major U.S. newspapers, including the Washington Postand even the skeptical and dovish New York Times, believed Johnson’sactions were prudent given the risks to U.S. national security and theneed to find an honorable solution to a treacherous crisis.20

TET 1968: MILITARY VICTORY, POLITICAL DEFEAT

As discussed in earlier chapters, the 1968 Tet Offensive was a hugemilitary defeat for the PLA and the PAVN. Casualties were so severe forthe VC that never again would their main force units pose a seriousthreat to the ARVN. This analysis, reported by the Pentagon to themainstream mass media of television, radio, newspaper and magazines,was held in disbelief by important segments of the public. Despite thebest efforts of the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon,important editorial opinions suggested the war was now clearly un-winnable. Congressmen and senators frustrated with the huge casualtytolls and stunned by the ability of the enemy to strike everywhere inSouth Vietnam rejected the war propaganda from the executive branch.

Public opinion polls showed that the events of spring 1968 were a wa-tershed in American politics. Johnson saw his popularity in public opiniondisappear with the Tet offensive. Even as the communist armies were deci-mated by their massive attacks on U.S. and ARVN positions, a majority of


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the public became convinced that the war was a mistake and was probablyunwinnable. In February 1968, at the height of Tet, Johnson lost the NewHampshire democratic primary to Eugene McCarthy, the prominent andvitriolic antiwar senator from Minnesota. Despite the effective destructionof the Viet Cong as a fighting force in South Vietnam, Johnson’s stunningprimary defeat, combined with other critical events, prompted his with-drawal from the 1968 presidential race and the end of his presidency.21

After years of strong support for the war, the last year of the Johnsonpresidency saw the cumulative effects of the war taking a decisive toll onthe ability of the political establishment in Washington to support theU.S. military in its mission to defend South Vietnam and defeat the pre-scribed enemies. Public pronouncements of military success were nowuniformly held with deep skepticism. By 1968, government assessmentsfor progress in Vietnam, whether in attacking the main-force units of theViet Cong and the North Vietnamese, or improved numbers pacifyingthe hamlets and villages, all were held with little credibility by major na-tional newspapers, periodicals and TV news journalists. Public informa-tion campaigns to support the U.S. armed forces in the field had verymarginal results when luminaries like Walter Cronkite, the dean of U.S.television news, and the editorial pages of the New York Times and theWall Street Journal, expressed a profound fatalism about the war.22

CAMBODIA 1970: MILITARY VICTORY, POLITICAL DEFEAT

Just like the extensive military operations of spring 1968, the invasionof Cambodia by South Vietnamese and U.S. forces in April 1970 wasconsidered a brilliant military success. Like the Tet offensive of 1968,the Cambodian cross-border operation dealt a critical blow to the abilityof the communists to wage war in the South. The loss of the EasternCambodian sanctuaries did not cut off the North’s forces in the South,but it made the resupply effort, using both the Ho Chi Minh trail systemand the Sihanouk trail from the Cambodian coast, far less effective linesof communication. The ongoing raids against supply routes, combinedwith the highly effective Phoenix program in the South, had a serious ef-fect on the ability of the communists to sustain an effective military cam-paign in the South. By 1971, the military was confident that virtually allof South Vietnam’s civilian population, with the exception of perhaps nomore than a hundred isolated hamlets comprising less than 0.2 percentof the country’s population, was under some form of government con-trol. The war in practical terms was being won through Vietnamization,village level pacification and an expanded interdiction strategy againstthe North.23


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This optimistic view of the war, which was considered accurate bymilitary and CIA intelligence, obviated the most essential risk that theNixon administration faced. Despite victory in the field, the length andcost of the war in American lives and money exceeded the reasonable ex-pectations not only of the political left, which had actively opposed thewar from the mid-1960s, but also of the moderate and even conservativeelements of both political parties in the United States. While a solid baseof support remained behind continued military involvement in Indochina,years of violent antiwar protests had weakened the resolve of the politi-cal center.

The invasion of Cambodia in spring 1970 resulted in massive studentantiwar protests throughout the United States. The most damaging eventwas the Kent State Massacre in April, just after the invasion was an-nounced to the public. The deaths of four students, killed by NationalGuard soldiers’ rifle shots on the campus of Kent State University, sentshock waves around the country. The famous picture of the female collegestudent crying over the attack on a Midwestern college campus, other-wise the epitome of normalcy and mainstream Middle American culture,covered the pages of news magazines and the nation’s most influentialnewspapers. Once again, a military success, which Nixon told the publicof in detail, was overshadowed by the domestic tragedy of violent anti-war protests.24

In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger vigorously defended both the inva-sion of Cambodia and the bombing operations that were conducted from1969 onward. The projection of American power into Laos and Cambo-dia were recommended actions by most U.S. field commanders since thefirst years of the Kennedy administration. The Nixon administration’spro-military ideology affected operations that supported the military’sviews on how to wage the war. However, ironically, during the Nixonadministration, the military had lost the political leverage it had in theearly and mid-1960s, when it could protect its interest in defending In-dochina, in the face of withdrawal sentiments by neo-Wilsonian diplo-mats in the State Department. By 1970, Nixon and Kissinger dominatedVietnam policy in its entirety. The JCS and MACV had no countervailingpolitical capital against a conservative Republican administration thathad determined that military withdrawal was not just desirable, butmandatory.25

THE FALL, 1975: STRATEGIC AND POLITICAL DEFEAT

The military aspects of the fall of Saigon have been discussed in ear-lier chapters. In political terms, the military collapse of South Vietnam


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was preordained. The Paris Peace Accords of 1973 withdrew all U.S.military personnel from South Vietnam, while it allowed many hundredsof thousands of North Vietnamese and NLF troops to remain in place.By August 1973, the Nixon administration, under very heavy politicalpressure, signed legislation that prohibited the use of funds for U.S. mil-itary operations in the Indochina region, effectively making any such ac-tion illegal without the expressed consent of Congress. “None of thefunds herein appropriated under this act may be expended to support di-rectly or indirectly combat activities in or over Cambodia, Laos, NorthVietnam, and South Vietnam by United States forces, and after August15, 1973, no other funds heretofore appropriated under any other actmay be expended for such purpose.”26

The antiwar movement had fought long and hard to end U.S. involve-ment in Indochina, and in Spring 1975, the broad consensus withinAmerican society supported the central tenet of war critics. The strategicconsequences of the loss of Indochina were described as minimal by noless an authority than Henry Kissinger himself. Since the fall of Saigonoccurred some two years after the last U.S. troops were withdrawn, andin light of a significant thawing in Sino-U.S. relations during the first halfof the 1970s, the dramatic consequences predicted by the domino theorywere discounted.


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THE LEGACIES OF THE CONFLICT

After a decade of combat involving several million soldiers and some 200million American civilians as observers, protesters and supporters whatwere the consequences of the Vietnam War? Indeed, the longest war inAmerican history had wide-ranging, long-term effects on American soci-ety and institutions. Cultural and social historians of post-1945 Americasuggest the Vietnam War created a new culture and society in the UnitedStates. The war’s effects were transformative, helping to establish a newsocial and political order, where the concept of the individual’s relation-ship to the state and the military’s role with respect to the state were bothredefined.

In foreign relations, the public memory of the Vietnam War resonatedin the debate over the use of force. Vietnam was present as a part of col-lective memory during the 1980s, when the Reagan administration en-gaged itself in Central America. During the same period, the Russian warin Afghanistan appeared to mirror the U.S. experience in Vietnam, wherea powerful modern army fought an indigenous resistance aided by for-eign allies. In political debates, the issue of intervention in the ThirdWorld became a central focus of U.S. foreign policy. For the remainder ofthe Cold War and then afterward, the post–Cold War and post–September11 eras, the Vietnam War remained a prepossessing image warning policymakers and political actors on both the right and left of the ideological

8

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spectrum that fighting a war in a distant part of the Third World prom-ised entanglement and defeat.

For domestic society, the war’s memories appeared in the ordinarylives of Americans who lived through the period. The Vietnam War wasa generational experience that, like the Second World War and the GreatDepression, became a generational memory. For decades after the lastAmerican soldier left Vietnam, American popular culture could not for-get a war that had lasted more than ten years; a war that was experiencedby an entire country and indeed most of the world through the eyes oftelevision. Elites were far more deeply affected psychologically by thewar than the general public, who were less conflicted by its multitude ofstrategies and wearing political burdens. If the mass public rememberedVietnam as a trying experience from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s,the elites in government, the armed forces, academic institutions and themass media experienced the conflict as all-consuming and tragic but alsofoundational.

A CLASH OF CULTURES

Both military and civilian cultures learned deeply from the conflict.However, the schism between military and civilian cultures, and mostparticularly the opposing views of military elites and left of center civil-ian elites, widened both during and after the war. In a strong sense, noth-ing related to the underlying political/ideological tension betweenmilitary and civilian society was resolved by the Vietnam War. Most mil-itary officers and analysts had favored U.S. intervention but deplored thelack of basic commitment to the principles of warfare. In the final analy-sis, the dominant view of professional officers remained that the VietnamWar was lost by civilians. Given the commitment and the necessarymeans, they believed the conflict would have turned out very differently.1

Conversely, most civilian journalists, policy makers, elected officials,academics and community leaders opposed the Vietnam War by its end-ing. Whether they started their opposition early, in the middle or late,civilian opposition expressed in the cutting off of funds and denying theuse of U.S. military force, made their opposition felt directly and often inthe strongest of terms. For most civilians, the standard military solutionto Vietnam and Indochina, the sustained massive application of superiormilitary force on the ground, in the air and on the sea, would have beena recipe for World War III. For academic intellectuals and thoughtfuljournalists and politicians, the strategic doctrine for fighting the war waseither irrational to begin with, or obviated in the end by Nixon’s openingto China and his détente with the Soviet Union.


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The moral consequences of the war from the point of civilians werealso profound and nearly diametrically opposed to those of military offi-cers, pro-military intellectuals and public officials. Despite the victory ofcommunism in Indochina, the brutality of the war, its enormous loss oflife, its damage to the natural environment and its effects on Americansociety made the war a tragic and cautionary tale for future wars.

On the other hand, postwar analyses by military strategists and for-mer commanders continued the same theme that underrode contempo-rary military critiques, in both public and private dialogues. That themewas and still remains a critique of the civilian political leadership thatprosecuted the war. From the point of view of most military profession-als in the United States, the Vietnam War was lost precisely because ofthe political blunders of the Johnson and Nixon administrations. John-son’s strategy failed because he imposed serious operational constraints onthe U.S. military. His administration supplied the troops and the resources,air, land and sea assets, but he failed to allow the military leadership,namely, the JCS, CINCPAC and MACV to conduct the wide-ranging mil-itary actions in the Indochina theater that would have brought the war toa successful conclusion.

Likewise, the Nixon administration, although more pliant to thewishes of the armed forces, decided upon a determined schedule for de-escalating the war, without a commitment to winning it. In fact, militarycritiques suggest that both Nixon and Kissinger had concluded that thewar was unwinnable, and that only an organized withdrawal over severalyears would be able to salvage the international prestige of the UnitedStates. While Nixon bombed North Vietnam with the intensity that theJCS recommended, and ordered American troops into Cambodia andLaos in 1970 and 1971, despite the huge domestic political costs associ-ated with those actions, he also maintained a strict policy of withdrawalbefore the war was won.

When the Peace Accords were signed in January 1973, RichardNixon, despite his impeccable credentials as a president who was willingto authorize the maximum use of force on the battlefield, left South Viet-nam in desperate shape. If Nixon had not known, his most senior advi-sor, Henry Kissinger, knew that the South Vietnamese would not survivewith several hundred thousand enemy troops still in the field; and withextensive supply lines pouring men and supplies through Southern Laosand Eastern Cambodia into the heart of South Vietnam.

Nixon left his South Vietnamese allies with a huge military inventory,but not enough financial support to maintain the arms they were given.When the North Vietnamese had recovered sufficiently from their warwith the United States, aided by generous assistance from China and the

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Soviet Union, they launched the spring 1975 offensive that brought themvictory. In the end, the United States stood by and watched its failed pol-icy result in the complete loss of Indochina to a communist regime. Threeweeks before the fall of Saigon in April 1975, President Gerald Fordmade one final appeal to the U.S. Congress to aid South Vietnam:

A vast human tragedy has befallen our friends in Vietnam andCambodia. Tonight I shall not talk only of the obligations arisingfrom legal documents. Who can forget the enormous sacrifices ofblood, dedication, and treasure that we made in Vietnam?

Under five Presidents and 12 Congresses, the United States wasengaged in Indochina. Millions of Americans served, thousands died,and many more were wounded, imprisoned, or lost. Over $150 bil-lion have been appropriated for that war by the Congress of theUnited States. And after years of effort, we negotiated, under themost difficult circumstances, a settlement which made it possible forus to remove our military forces and bring home with pride ourAmerican prisoners. This settlement, if its terms had been adhered to,would have permitted our South Vietnamese ally, with our materialand moral support, to maintain its security and rebuild after two de-cades of war.2

From the perspective of military professionals, after twenty-five yearsof support initiated by five presidential administrations, the United Statesbetrayed a loyal ally. In the end, an inviolate principle of grand strategy,supporting an ally against a common enemy was indeed violated by thecivilian congressional leadership during the Ford administration. In thewar’s immediate aftermath, Kissinger, as secretary of state during the Fordadministration, viewed the impact of that betrayal as negligible. Fromthe perspective of the conservative wing of the Republican Party and theU.S. armed forces, the loss of face was a permanent scar on the integrityof the country and was morally reprehensible.

In the months and years after the communist victories in Indochina,over 1 million Indochinese refugees fled Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos,creating a diaspora on every continent. The refugees recounted stories oftorture, execution and repression that included the genocide of theKhmer Rouge against Cambodians, the desperate flight of Vietnameseand Hmong civilians from their homelands. The so-called killing fields ofCambodia represented the deadliest nightmare of communist victory inIndochina. The Khmer Rouge leaders were not mere peasants who seizedpower. Pol Pot and most of his colleagues were trained in Marxist-Leninist doctrine as university students in late 1940s France. When they


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finally achieved victory over the pro-American Lon Nol regime in 1975,their first action was to order the emptying of the national capital. Morethan a million people, regardless of their age or infirmity, were forciblyevacuated from the city. In three years, 1975 to 1978, Pol Pot succeeded inkilling between 1 and 2 million Cambodians. His radical ideology soughtto purge Cambodia of all Western influences, including any membersoutside of the Khmer Rouge elite who were educated in the West.3

Despite the postwar tragedies of Indochina, historical memories of theconflict continue to divide military and civilian antiwar critics. Just asthe military critics of the war have not changed their minds, neither havethe original antiwar critics of the Vietnam era. In hundreds of books,antiwar memoirs, oral histories and scholarly studies, the former stu-dents, protesters, journalists and public officials of the Vietnam War erahave repudiated the civilian leadership who conducted the war, and themilitary leadership that were its strongest supporters. Civilian leaderswho opposed the Vietnam War proudly made that point in their mem-oirs. They saw the disaster coming, like Clark Clifford and George Ball,high-ranking Johnson administration officials; or they both anticipateddisaster and fought furiously for years to end the war; such as GeorgeMcGovern, Wayne Morse, Ernst Gruening, Mike Mansfield and WilliamJ. Fulbright.4

By the end of the Nixon administration, the antiwar movement hadbecome so immense in scope that it was almost impossible to enumerate.It included individuals from every walk of life and every part of the po-litical spectrum. Now, some thirty years after the end of the war, Ameri-can civilian society remains largely convinced of the political critique ofthe Vietnam War. In the popular critique of the Vietnam War, present inearly twenty-first-century America, the war was indeed a foolish and im-moral action that wasted lives and money for no purpose. The war, fromthe dominant historical perspective of the public, and especially the gen-eration that lived through the Vietnam conflict, was a profound tragedyfor everyone involved.

THE INSTITUTIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE VIETNAM CONFLICT

America’s experience during the Vietnam War, along with the domes-tic civil rights movement that began in the 1950s, served as a major cat-alyst for social and institutional change in the United States. It is hard todelineate the parallel streams of social revolution. The antiwar movementreinforced the radical social change movements of the 1960s, which inturn provided the activists to fight the war. Nonetheless, we may conclude

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that the Vietnam War era created a liberated but anomic national cul-ture. The conformity that was part of Cold War America was broken asthe public lost faith in the state as a protective institution. The severity ofpolitical dissent resulted in a complex sweep of new social movements.The war tested every major institution in American society. All levels ofgovernment, universities, public schools, religious institutions as well asthe armed forces were challenged by the radical dissent and societaltrauma of the conflict. Institutional change in the United States was verybroad and very deep. Post-Vietnam America no longer conformed to theorthodox political and social norms of the early Cold War. In a sense,with the Vietnam conflict, America had lost its innocence.

In the decades immediately following the war, university faculties be-came far more diverse, culturally and politically. The presumption ofAmerican exceptionalism that characterized the teaching of U.S. historyand politics at both the secondary and postsecondary levels was lost withthe antiwar movement of the 1960s. New scholars, who came of ageduring the antiwar years, challenged the nature of American foreign pol-icy, its domestic institutions and its mass culture. Even with the restora-tion of conservative thought in the 1980s, the radical imprint of the warmaintained the new politically left structure of social and political in-quiry at the university level in the United States.5

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL EFFECTS

As noted, the broad societal effects of the war were profound. Mil-lions of American families had a direct connection to the war throughthe service of one or more family members. The nation as a whole expe-rienced the conflict as a media event for almost a decade. In living roomsand kitchen tables across the United States, from the mid-1960s throughthe early 1970s, Vietnam was a living experience, seen nightly through theeyes of television. American journalists, in the print media as well as televi-sion and radio, scoured Indochina for information about the war. Thepublic was informed daily of the wrenching policy debates in Washing-ton as well as the deadly effects of the war on Indochina. The critical na-ture of the media’s reportage slowly had its effect on a public that feltmoral responsibility for the conduct of the war. The mass media pro-duced hundreds of thousands of news items related to the conflict. Tensof millions of politically informed Americans were gripped by thetragedy of the conflict, including its testing of morality. Since the strate-gic argument for entering the war was challenged, as well as the efficacyof the U.S. war effort and the viability of the South Vietnamese regime,the public was infected with a sense of national tragedy.6


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Intuitively, there was an organic connection between the individualand familial trauma of Vietnam, and the social and political changemovements that coincided with the war. As mentioned, from an histori-cal perspective, the Vietnam antiwar movement was inextricably con-nected to the domestic civil rights movement, and the burgeoningmovements for liberation that characterized the 1960s and early 1970s.During the period of the ground war, 1965 through 1972, the countrywas transformed by the social change movements known as the “Six-ties.” Out of the period came the modern feminism, the sexual revolu-tion, the counterculture, the environmental movement, and all the othercollective actions for ethnic, sexual and group liberation.

The trauma of the war served to catalyze the liberalization and demo-cratization of American society. The orthodox script that had stabilizedpost–World War Two America in the 1950s unraveled in the 1960s and1970s. It would appear that the extraordinary social change of the pe-riod was a direct result of the de-legitimating process of the VietnamWar. Vietnam challenged the moral authority of the state, in the sameway that the black civil rights movement had. However, the challengeof Vietnam was deeper, more visceral for many Americans, becausethousands, indeed, hundreds of thousands and even millions of lives,Vietnamese and American, were sacrificed for the cause. The antiwarmovement presented U.S. involvement in Vietnam as one of the most de-structive actions in modern history. Contending with those claims on adaily basis for nearly a decade, and over decades of cultural memory ofthe war afterward, was a profound burden for American society.

CULTURAL MEMORY OF THE WAR

Vietnam, by virtue of its length and intensity, etched itself upon thepost–Second World War American psyche. Into the twenty-first century,the conflict remains a very recent cultural and historical memory. Mil-lions of Vietnam War veterans, and in total more than 100 million livingAmericans, remember the war as a life experience. The present livingmemory of the conflict makes Vietnam as much a part of the present asit does the past. In both subtle and explicit ways, the war maintains aplace of central importance in America’s cultural memory. As with othermilitary conflicts in American history, Vietnam represents a collection ofimages and meanings. Indelibly etched in the minds of the post–SecondWorld War generation who fought, protested and lived through the war,are the singular images of the conflict that shaped their perceptions of it.

For the baby boom generation, adolescence and young adulthood wasdefined by television images, dinner table debates, protests and marches

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that went on for years. For those in the generation who went to Vietnam,and experienced the war as combatants, the intensity of their memoriescannot be understood by those who were not there.7

The war is memorialized in scores of feature films that have exploredits many different perspectives and dimensions. Major cinematic treat-ments depict the sheer brutality of the conflict and its traumatizing ef-fects on the American soldier. Particular scenes that are emblematic ofthe war genre involve the massive explosions of napalm on either villagesor enemy troop concentrations. In the burning of rural villages, sur-rounded by jungle or rice paddies, Hollywood movies have presented acentral meaning of the war to American culture: that a technocratic warfought against Third World peasants was a moral disaster. The over-whelming power of U.S. weapons symbolized in the village immolationssuggested not only the war’s immorality, but also its stupidity; if the en-emy was only a peasant in black pajamas, why was it necessary to fighthim at all?8

Since the end of the conflict in the 1970s, the overwhelming culturalrepresentations have portrayed a war that is inconsistent with the per-ceptions of most senior officers who fought it. While Hollywood, witha few exceptions, have portrayed the war as immoral and a failure ofcatastrophic proportions, the institutional memory of the armed forcesremains nearly diametrically opposed to this popular motif. For the pro-fessional military, the war was lost by the civilian leadership, which re-fused to give the armed forces the means to win a war against anadversary who could have been defeated. While the Vietnamese commu-nists have been treated with respect in Hollywood, as a determined andirascible foe, the military in its image of its adversary did not conflateauthentic Vietnamese nationalism with Vietnamese communism.

Still, the cultural memory of the Vietnam War remained that of a clas-sic and enduring tragedy in American history. For the past three decades,the war has been a cautionary tale of noble purpose turned to ignobledeeds and ends. The military has been viewed alternatively as a villainand a victim of the tragedy, produced by civilian policy makers, but in-fluenced deeply by the political and ideological interests of the armedforces. In terms of public policy, the cultural memory of the war pointsto the limits of American power, its fallibility and its dependence uponthe will of the American public.

PSYCHIATRIC PROBLEMS OF VETERANS

When calculating the human cost of a war, the most overlooked factorsare the long-term psychiatric casualties of the conflict. As noted in an


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earlier chapter, the psychiatric casualties of the Vietnam War were a majorlegacy that has been studied at length. All wars by their nature produce in-juries that are only apparent in the postwar behavior of the afflicted. TheVietnam War has demonstrated a particular legacy of psychiatric disabilityamong its veterans. Vietnam veterans have been shown to have experi-enced long-term trauma related to the experience of combat in a distantand foreign land, where the destructive effects of modern weapons hadstrong negative effects on many of the soldiers. A 1990 National VietnamVeterans Readjustment Study (NVRS) found that 15 percent of Vietnamveterans, over 450,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen, suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) severe enough to require long-termpsychiatric treatment. In addition, an estimate of 50 percent more, or 1.5million in-country veterans, suffered from various levels of PTSD.9

These were the direct psychiatric costs to the U.S. military for fightingthe Vietnam War. It does not include the millions of immediate relativesimpacted by the psychiatric traumas experienced by their sons, brothers,husbands and fathers. In calculating the cost of a war in lives, the officialcasualty count has always underestimated the true human damage of theconflict. With the Vietnam War, this was especially true. The relativelyminor death toll of 57,000 over twelve years, ignores the upward of amillion with serious wounds, physical and psychiatric, that described thefull cost of the war to the United States.

POST-VIETNAM: DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT OF THE U.S. MILITARY

For post-Vietnam U.S. foreign relations, the legacy of the war hasbeen elemental. For three decades, the standard comparison for all Amer-ican interventions has been Vietnam. Fear of a repetition of the Vietnamexperience colored the use of force and especially the deployment ofground forces, in every presidential administration from Gerald Ford toGeorge W. Bush. Since 1975, the standard tests for the use of force inU.S. foreign relations have been its probable cost in American lives, andthe ability of the government to affect an exit strategy. This was true dur-ing the first Gulf War, when half a million soldiers were deployed to lib-erate Kuwait. The number of casualties and the need to remove theforces as quickly as possible were deemed politically vital parameters.The same principles held true for the second Gulf War, although theirimplementation has, as of this writing, failed to achieve these essentialtests. Above all else, the political cost of combat deaths and the exposureof large numbers of troops to the risk of mortality became the standardlimiting factor in U.S. intervention overseas.

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THE END OF THE DRAFT AND THE RISE OF THE VOLUNTEER ARMY

Partly to mitigate the political risks of a conscripted military exposedto casualties, the military draft ended with the Nixon administration andVietnam. Over time, the transition to an all-volunteer armed forces hada dramatic effect not only on the readiness of the military but on the con-text of the military’s role in American society as well. Without a nationaldraft, the armed forces are freed from the political liabilities incurred bysending draftees to fight on foreign soil for strategic but not essentiallynational security purposes. This has provided some protection fromthe draft resistance which inspired the antiwar movement, that in turnfueled the political collapse of the military’s war plans during the Viet-nam conflict.10

The replacement of the selective service system, a direct outcome ofthe Vietnam War, has enhanced the force readiness and professionalismof the armed forces. In post-Vietnam deployment, the all-volunteer mili-tary has worked expertly with well-motivated and professional troops.By the first years of the twenty-first century, a U.S. president had no dif-ficulty deploying large numbers of troops abroad in Afghanistan, andthen in Iraq, under serious combat conditions where they received sub-stantial casualties. In a sense, this part of the war’s legacy may be viewedpositively by the senior leadership of the U.S. military.

Conversely, the end of the draft contributed to the division in Ameri-can society between civilian and military cultures. With the end of uni-versal conscription, military service became the province of particulargroups within American culture. The culture of military elites centeredat the service academies and in military communities became increas-ingly insular to the urbane liberal culture that informs so much of mod-ern U.S. society. This separation between military and civilian elites hasresulted in mutually antagonistic attitudes between these groups. In thelate twentieth century, military professionals continued to cultivate aninsular and contemptuous view of a secular and cosmopolitan civiliansociety centered on consumerism and self-fulfillment. The mutual antipa-thy was represented almost in geographic terms, as California and NewYork–based culture, dominated by the most current trends in liberalthought, did not promote the military values most identified with Amer-ica’s rural and industrial heartlands. Instead of self-actualization andcosmopolitanism, the values most valuable to the military remained pa-triotism, conformity and self-sacrifice. In post-Vietnam America, evenpost–September 11 America, military and civilian cultures remained di-vided by values and ideological orientations that were traceable to theVietnam War and the 1960s social and cultural revolutions.11


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A POST-VIETNAM WORLD

The immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War was a very differentCold War. The People’s Republic of China, perceived as a dangerous ad-versary in 1965, was no longer a strategic threat in 1975. Indeed, thedeath of Mao Zedong in 1976 led to the purge of his orthodox Maoistregime. By the late 1970s, China and the United States had establishedformal diplomatic relations and an informal alliance against the SovietUnion. Instead of being Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s vital ally, as itwas for all of the war against the Americans, as well as the previous waragainst the French, China and Vietnam returned to the historical enmitythat characterized Sino-Vietnamese relations for some 2,000 years. Mao’ssuccessor Deng Xiaoping confided in President Carter before he launcheda border war against Vietnam in 1979. Deng referred to Vietnam as anAsian version of Cuba. An aggressive country that he believed had to becontained in the interests of both the United States and China.12

Indeed, the Cold War was alive and well after the American defeat inIndochina. However, the global conflict had clearly returned to bipolar-ity. The Soviet Union took advantage of the strategic retreat of theUnited States by extending its influence not only in Indochina butthroughout Africa, parts of Latin America and the Middle East as well.Soviet advisors poured into Vietnam, who now relied on the Russians foreconomic and military aid as well as protection from the Chinese. TheSoviet Navy took over Da Nang, giving it a valuable strategic position tochallenge the U.S. Navy in the Southern Pacific. The Soviets sent advisorsand Cuban troops to half a dozen newly independent African countries,as the former Portuguese colonies became doctrinaire Marxist regimes.Soviet influence was evident throughout Central America, as liberationmovements in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua were assisted bythe Soviet Bloc. Pro-Soviet groups were active in South America and inthe Caribbean. Briefly, the small island republic of Grenada had a pro-Soviet government in the early 1980s, before it succumbed to a U.S. in-vasion.13

The strategic consequences of U.S. defeat in Indochina were impor-tant. Soviet power was resurgent in Europe, the Middle East and ulti-mately throughout the world. Along with the growth of Marxist regimesin the Third World, the Soviet maintained an enormous program toexpand its nuclear capabilities. The nuclear forces of the USSR grew dra-matically in the 1970s. Whereas, in the early 1960s, the Soviets hadbarely a handful of operational ICBMs, by mid-1970s, those numberswere now in the thousands. With its huge armored divisions deployed inCentral Europe, with many thousands of heavy tanks, and its ever-growing nuclear arsenal, capable of destroying all regions of the free

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world, the Soviets appeared as a daunting threat. By the end of the 1970s,the cascade of Soviet expansion and the growth of anti-Western Marxistregimes suggested if only for a short time, that the United States was indanger of being overtaken by the USSR as a global power.14

By the time Ronald Reagan reached the presidency in 1981, the UnitedStates looked like a declining world power. Its economic dominance ap-peared to be under serious challenge from both Japan in East Asia and theCommon Market countries of Western Europe. German and Japanese eco-nomic power and Soviet military ascendancy suggested the comparative de-cline of the United States. In the Third World, anti-Western ideologies wererampant. With the Iranian revolution of 1978, and the subsequent Iranianhostage crisis of 1979–1980, American prestige and ideology appeared un-der serious threat from a new and very violent form of Islamic fundamen-talism. The new Islamic threat looked as if it could sweep through theMiddle East, just as burgeoning communist movements were surgingthrough Central America, the Caribbean, Africa and Southeast Asia.

The European powers had experienced strategic decline throughoutthe middle decades of the century. Now in the 1980s, the decade afterVietnam, the United States appeared to be experiencing a similar declinein military as well as economic dominance. In this post-Vietnam world,the shadow of the Indochinese wars was unmistakable. After Vietnam,there were clear limits on the use of American power set by its publicopinion and national memory. Not until the end of the Cold War, andSaddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, did the United States con-sider a limited war against a very determined adversary.

The first Gulf War was opposed by most of the senior officers in the U.S.military. Even the commander of CENTCOM, Norman Schwarzkopf, wasdeeply nervous about launching a ground war against the Iraqi Army. BothSchwarzkopf and Colin Powell, the chairman of the JCS, were combatveterans of the Vietnam War. Both men viewed the possibility of a landwar with deep reluctance, unlike an earlier generation of Army generals,who saw Indochina as a proper battleground. The memory of the Viet-nam War, with its daunting images of a costly and unwinnable proposi-tion, framed the thinking of military commanders twenty years later.

Sitting alone with Powell in his Pentagon office, Hine asked himhow he saw the Gulf crisis and was struck by his extreme cautionon the use of military force. Powell was making the case for relyingon economic sanctions. War with Iraq, Powell argued, would bepolitically damaging to Western interests in the Middle East. It wasnot clear where it would lead; you could win the victory and losethe peace . . .


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Surprised by Powell’s arguments on behalf of economic sanc-tions, Hine asked the chairman if he would be willing to waittwelve to fifteen months to see if the sanctions would work . . .Powell indicated he would.15

LESSONS LEARNED

The Vietnam conflict had broad long-term effects on the institutionsof the armed forces. “Lessons learned” or institutional memory created atemplate for future military officers as they undertook the tasks requiredof the U.S. armed forces. The war has been studied intensively by mili-tary historians employed by the various service branches. The intergov-ernmental decision-making process has been the subject of a five-volumestudy that to date runs into many thousands of pages. Over the course ofmore than a generation since the end of the Vietnam War, the militaryworked to make sure that the “lessons” of the Vietnam were inculcatedinto the training and doctrine of all its services.

Nonetheless, as recent military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraqhave shown, the complexities of counterinsurgency warfare, as well theequal complexities of intergovernmental relations have shown that evenwith the most rigorous understanding of the failures and successes of theVietnam War, the same patterns of ineffective operations and incoherentstrategy once more repeated themselves. One lesson of the war concernsthe complex and politicized nature of the national security system. Thebest plans and intentions of field commanders may be compromised bythe bureaucratic system that they operate within.16

International wars are extraordinarily uncertain and labyrinthineevents. Uncertainty always exists on the battlefield, as well as within thedecision-making circles of international actors all over the world. TheVietnam War was a global conflict, involving domestic and internationalactors, individuals, groups, organizations and nation-states who workedoften independently of each other for their own purposes. The same be-wildering mix of countervailing forces present during the Vietnam Warwere experienced in post-Vietnam conflicts. To a large degree, the un-predictable and uncontrollable nature of international wars are a realitythat cannot be learned, only endured.

Nonetheless, important lessons were learned from the Indochina con-flicts. After Vietnam, the military’s senior officer corps understood thecritical failure of the war was political. During the post-Vietnam era upuntil the present, military elites consistently opposed large-scale overseasdeployments, unless the nation’s political will was mobilized to supportfull-scale military action. In broad strategic terms, for the military to

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back a major engagement with sincerity, the JCS had to be assured thatthe application of force would be decisive, and that the country wouldsupport its actions irrespective of the results.

Admiral Ulysses S. G. Sharp, CINCPAC during the period of thewar’s escalation, summarized his beliefs in the lessons learned from theconflict.

The aims or objectives of an international political strategy mayquite reasonably and legitimately be limited, as were ours in Viet-nam, but the actual application of military force required to achievethose aims cannot and must not be tactically limited. Our civilianleadership has the awesome task of deciding when the United Statesshould resort to armed force to gain its objectives, limited or other-wise. Once the decision has been made to wage war, that leadershipmust permit the war to be engaged expeditiously and full bore, nothalfway.17

The lessons of Indochina were learned with American blood. Theywere impressed on the minds of junior and senior officers who fought theconflict at the eye level. After Vietnam, all of the fatal flaws of the warthat could be avoided were avoided. High military casualties were nolonger an option in wars that were not directed for the defense of theAmerican homeland. In future wars, the post-Vietnam military would re-quire necessary forces and rules of engagement to win. These generalprinciples were followed in both Gulf Wars, the Afghan intervention andin the two Balkan conflicts of the Clinton administration. In the Balkans,casualties were kept astonishingly low by resorting to only air poweragainst the Serbian forces. The Afghan war against the Taliban was alsofought largely in the air by U.S. and allied forces. In Afghanistan, only avery small elite group of special forces were used to direct the air warand assist the native Afghan armies who were our allies. In both GulfWar I and Gulf War II, allied casualties were strictly limited by design.However, the use of formidable U.S. firepower from all four servicebranches was a priority.

In practical terms, the military achieved most of its objectives not torepeat the experiences of Vietnam. As noted, the first Gulf War was notsupported by the JCS, in the same way that the Vietnam conflict was lob-bied for by a military determined to protect vital U.S. strategic interestsin Indochina. On the contrary, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait inAugust 1990, the expert opinion of the highest ranking military officer,Vietnam veteran Colin Powell, chairman of the JCS, was to containrather than attack Iraqi forces. Viewing the Middle East with respect to


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his experience as a combat officer in Vietnam, Powell was deeply averseto sending 500,000 U.S. troops against an entrenched enemy. He pre-ferred to keep his forces in the Saudi Arabian desert, feeding them fueland food for many months if not years, to contain Iraq’s land Armyrather than attack it.

However, when the war was ordered by the White House, the cam-paign was fought according to the principles of war. The First Gulf War,defined by the administration of George H. Bush as a limited war, wasfought under Powell’s Clausewitzian doctrine of “invincible force.” Thedeft use of its massive firepower and the total avoidance of making theUnited States an occupying Army limited U.S. casualties during the FirstGulf War to only a few hundred.18 This result, which was trumpeted asproof that the United States had finally overcome the “Vietnam syn-drome,” was in stark contrast to hundreds of thousands dead and woundedduring Vietnam. Instead of ten years of agonizing occupation and attri-tion, the war to liberate Kuwait lasted forty days. An invasion of Iraqwas never considered, precisely because such a strategy would contradictthe fundamental rules that governed post-Vietnam wars.

In later conflicts, the same parameters defined by Vietnam were keptin place. During the Clinton administration, a number of limited warswere fought to support limited strategic and political objectives. U.S.forces were dispatched to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo in smallconflicts with mixed results. The Clinton national security team had tocontend with the emerging threat of Al Qaeda, but its military responsewas always very limited. With the end of the Cold War, the shadow ofVietnam required strict constraints on military force. In Somalia, adeadly engagement in the capital city left a score of elite U.S. Armytroops dead. Yet, Clinton had no appetite for war. He ordered his troopswithdrawn.

The legacy of Vietnam made both the military and the civilian man-agers of the national security system deeply sensitive to the role of publicopinion in war. Through structural design, the mass media was managedintensively by Pentagon officials during both the First and Second GulfWars. If any lesson of Vietnam carried weight with executive branch itwas the critical need for controlling the images and perceptions of warthat were fed to a world audience. It was imperative to both military andcivilian professionals in national security affairs that the political basisfor any military engagement had to be maintained, or the policy faceddisaster.

After the events of September 11, 2001, the country’s and the military’scommon aversion to fighting wars in the Third World was suspended.In quick fashion, U.S. air power and special forces were dispatched to

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Afghanistan. The success of the Afghan war, brief and with vast multi-national support, can be compared with the Second Gulf War of 2003.This second war on the Arabian Peninsula did not have the immediatebacking of the JCS. Iraq was not considered an immediate strategicthreat to the United States in the early 2000s. On the contrary, the coun-try was contained. Nonetheless, civilian authority demanded a war, andthe military complied.19

Unlike the Vietnam War, the ensuing years of counterinsurgency war-fare in Iraq have not placed a moral burden on the U.S. military. Respon-sibility for the war and its aftermath was placed squarely on the shouldersof the presidential administration in Washington. The prisoner-of-warabuses connected with the operation of an offshore prison in Cuba, andthe sensational sexual tortures connected to Abu Ghraib prison duringthe second Iraq War, have done far more damage to the image of the BushWhite House than to the U.S. military. Unlike previous eras, the U.S. mil-itary after Vietnam and the Cold War was no longer considered a separatepolitical force in international affairs. The military, it has been assumed,only follows orders. As a consequence, during the post-Vietnam war era,and now post–September 11 era, the military has gained a depth of politi-cal legitimacy it had not enjoyed since the 1950s. To serve in the armedforces, in the early twenty-first century, has become the ultimate act ofpatriotism. As a cultural icon, the military has regained the status it hadwhen President Eisenhower identified it as one of the “pillars” of Ameri-can society.

The Vietnam experience embedded in the institutional culture andmemory of the armed forces the necessity of maintaining political legiti-macy. The extensive use of special forces and counterinsurgency methodsdeveloped the role of small arms and unconventional or “asymmetric”warfare for future conflicts. After Vietnam, the military had a far broaderconcept of the nature of war. In addition to the strategic level of warfare,which was not forgotten, the disbursed guerrilla conflicts of the latetwentieth and twenty-first centuries presented the Vietnam War as afounding experience for the military. War not only concerned conven-tional and nuclear arms, but also the very hard and particular concernsof local wars that were an amalgam of military and political conflicts.With the end of the Cold War, the unconventional and asymmetric bat-tlefields so familiar in Vietnam became truly the U.S. military’s battle-field for the indefinite future.20

For the U.S. military, the ultimate lesson of Vietnam remained ele-mental. The basic truth of all armed conflict was the fundamental politi-cal nature of war. For senior military officers, analysts and theorists, theessential political definition of war required a deep understanding of


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how the military as an institution or institutional system must manage itspolitical environments, in the same way that the civilian institutions ofthe executive branch have done with skill.

The use of force by any country requires as a political basis, strongsupport within the bureaucratic departments of the government. Duringthe Vietnam War, policy was a global enterprise that required consulta-tion between the White House, the National Security Council, the StateDepartment, the Pentagon, the Congressional leadership, allied govern-ments and the U.S. armed forces in the field. Somehow, all the stake-holders in the management of the war had to make effective a workablestrategy that satisfied both elite and mass public opinion in the UnitedStates and overseas. The political environments to be managed were in-ternal, domestic and international. Any large and long-term engagementof U.S. forces must have the full political support of the American pub-lic. The use of force must be aimed at particular objectives that can beachieved with the resources that will be committed to the task.

Above all else, the deployment of U.S. forces overseas to engage incombat operations must be carefully and conservatively weighed as aproper use of the armed forces. The military must be able to win all en-gagements it is ordered to execute. If the U.S. military is to maintain themorale and readiness of its forces, they cannot afford to sustain seriouscasualties and ultimately not win a conflict. The military’s effective de-feat in Indochina weighed deeply on an officer corps whose institutionalhistory had never suffered defeat in an entire campaign.

Without victory in Vietnam, the political parameters for using forcewere changed. After Vietnam, the professional officer corps, which hadbeen eager to use force in Indochina, changed its strategic ideology. Forthe generation of young military officers who experienced Vietnam War,future conflicts had to be different. The painful memory of Vietnam hadmuch to do with the opposition of almost the entire senior officer corpsto the First Gulf War in 1990. It remained an operational constraint forthe use of force during the recurring Balkan crises in the 1990s.

The ghost of Vietnam haunted American intervention after September11. In Afghanistan, no more than a few thousand elite troops were de-ployed on the ground in the successful overthrow of the Taliban regimein 2001–2002. During the Second Gulf War, a powerful AmericanArmy, supported by a small contingent of British troops, occupied acountry as foreign and as complex as Vietnam and Indochina were in the1960s. The ensuing loss of life through the Iraqi insurrection has re-turned the military and American society to the Vietnam War era. Adeadly war of attrition against an elusive enemy consumes the nation ina similar way to Indochina some three decades in the past.

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Lessons were learned and, in the case of Iraq, lessons revisited. Thepolitical context of war, its essential embedded nature in the dynamics ofpublic opinion, institutional and group interests, and international poli-tics make it more than simply the technical application of military powerto a particular field of operations. Modern U.S. international history hasonce again proven Clausewitz correct. War by its nature is politics car-ried out by other means. This was true in Vietnam, and afterward.


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CHAPTER 1:THE CONTEXT OF CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS

1. Some important works on this topic include Jeffrey J. Clarke, Advice andSupport: The Final Years, 1965–1973 (Washington, DC: Center of Military His-tory, United States Army, 1988); Harry G. Summers Jr., On Strategy: A CriticalAnalysis of the Vietnam War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995); Robert Buz-zanco, Masters of War, Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam War Era(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); H. R. McMaster, Dereliction ofDuty, Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and theLies That Led to Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997); and Or-rin Schwab, Defending the Free World: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson andthe Vietnam War, 1961–1965 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998).

2. Acheson to Truman, Memorandum for the President, Washington, DC,February 2, 1950, in The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History ofDecisionmaking on Vietnam, ed. Mike Gravel, 5 vols. (Boston: Beacon Press,1971), 1:64–1:65; Henry Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War: A History ofAmerica’s Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War (New York:Simon & Schuster, 2003), 532–555; Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold L. Schecter,Palace File (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 276–332.

3. For the history of Vietnamese to foreign occupation, see David G. Marr,Vietnamese Anti-Colonialism, 1885–1925 (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1971); Joseph Buttinger, The Smaller Dragon: A Political History of Viet-nam (New York: Praeger, 1958); Keith Weller Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Stein Tonnesson, The Vietnam-ese Revolution of 1945, Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh and De Gaulle in a World atWar (London: Sage Publications, 1991); David G. Marr, Vietnam 1945: TheQuest for Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

Notes

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4. Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, 250–301; Buttinger, The Smaller Dragon,67–110.

5. Buttinger, The Smaller Dragon, 21.6. Marr, Vietnam 1945, 402–462; Tonnesson, The Vietnamese Revolution

of 1945, 362–407; Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, Vol. I:From Colonialism to the Viet Minh (New York: Praeger, 1967), 320–339.

7. Marr, Vietnam 1945, 520–539.8. William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War:

Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships, Part 1: 1945–1960 (Prince-ton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 17–22.

9. Ibid., 34–63; Marr, Vietnam 1945, 491–493; Ronald Spector, The UnitedStates Army in Vietnam, Advice and Support: The Early Years (Washington,DC: Center of Military History, 1985), 105–121.

10. National Security Council (hereafter NSC), “The Position of the UnitedStates with Respect to Asia,” December 23, 1949, Foreign Relations of theUnited States (hereafter FRUS), vol. VI (Washington, DC: GPO, 1969),1215–1220; Andrew Rotter, The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the AmericanCommitment to Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987);Gibbons, U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, 1:71–1:78.

11. Pentagon Papers, 1:28–1:52.12. Gibbons, U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, 1:64–1:120; Arthur J.

Dommen, The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans, Na-tionalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam (Indianapolis: Indi-ana University Press, 2001), 113–171.

13. USAID, “United States Assistance to South Vietnam, October 14, 1975,”unpublished paper, pp.23–47, Vietnam Archive, Lubbock, TX. Available onlineat www.star.vietnam.ttu.edu.

14. The Domino Theory was first articulated during the Truman administra-tion in NSC 48. See Gibbons, U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, 1:66;Pentagon Papers, 1:82.

15. Leslie H. Gelb and Richard K. Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The SystemWorked (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1979), 181–200;Schwab, Defending the Free World, 204–210; Lloyd C. Gardner, Pay Any Price:Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1995),201–218.

16. Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of theNational Security State, 1945–1954 (New York: Cambridge University Press,1998), 265–314; John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (New York:Oxford University Press, 1982).

17. NSC, National Security Policy, Arms Control and Disarmament, Wash-ington, May 5, 1958, FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. III (Washington, DC: GPO,1996), 98–116, 101.

18. The CIA was created as part of the National Security Act of 1947. Its fullunclassified text is available at www.intelligence.gov/0-natsecact_1947.shtml.The Defense Intelligence Agency came into existence in October 1961 as part ofthe reorganization of national security under the Kennedy administration. See

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Deane J. Allen and Brian G. Shellum, eds., At the Creation, 1961–1965: Origi-nation Documents of the Defense Intelligence Agency (Washington, DC: D.I.A.History Office, 2002).

19. The idea of a script for the collective behavior of groups and nation-stateswas developed in my previous work. See Orrin Schwab, Redeemer Nation:America and the World in the Technocratic Age: 1914 to the Present (Salt Lake:American Colleges and Universities Press, 2004), 33–82; Schwab, Defending theFree World, 1–36; Hogan, A Cross of Iron, 1–22.

20. Goldwater was an air-power enthusiast. Reflecting his Air Force training,he rejected, like General Douglas MacArthur, a ground war on the Asian main-land as too costly. He praised the president for initiating the bombing of supplyroutes and smugly declared in April 1965: “Today, the U.S. is moving firmly anddecisively on a foreign policy course charted straight out of the Republican cam-paign of 1964.” Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1995), 244.

21. Schwab, Redeemer Nation, 41–46; Schwab, Defending the Free World,166–168.

22. There is now an extensive literature on the “Munich analogy.” See JeffreyRecord, Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Usesof Force from Korea to Kosovo (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003);Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and theVietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

23. In his memoirs, Dean Acheson regretted the insinuation of his famousJanuary 1950 press conference speech that Korea was not part of the Americandefense perimeter. He suggested that he was merely quoting the national securitydoctrine defined by Joint Chiefs of Staff and General Douglas MacArthur, whichdefined Japan and its outer islands as the strategic line of defense for the UnitedStates in East Asia. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years at the StateDepartment (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969), 355–358.

24. George Bush Sr.’s famous “line in the sand” statement regarding the 1990invasion of Kuwait was emblematic of the Munich syndrome. Conversely, the re-sponse of his generals as well as the Congress to the prospects of a new land warwas symptomatic of the Vietnam syndrome. A similar dichotomy existed duringthe Second Gulf War.

25. Karl Von Clausewitz, On War (Washington, DC: Infantry Journal Press,1950).

26. Ibid., 124.27. This was a major theme of my previous work. See Schwab, Defending the

Free World, 153–210.

CHAPTER 2: INTERVENTION

1. State Department, “Memorandum for the Record, Washington, January19, 1961,” FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. XXIV: Laos Crisis, docs. 8–9. www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/kennedyjf/53950.htm; Defense Department, Memorandum:Nitze to McNamara, Washington, January 23, 1961, FRUS, 1961–1963,

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vol. XXIV, doc. 10; Joint Chiefs of Staff, Memorandum of Conference withPresident Kennedy, January 25, 1961, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. XXIV, doc. 12.

2. Ibid. The military advice by the JCS on Laos was primarily ad hoc. It re-flected divergent service strategies that were uniformly aggressive:

The Attorney General asked where would be the best place to stand andfight in Southeast Asia, where to draw the line. Mr. McNamara said hethought we would take a stand in Thailand and South Viet-Nam. The At-torney General asked whether we would save any of Laos, but the majorquestion was whether we would stand up and fight. Admiral Burke saidthat we could hold Tourane, and General Le May observed that we coulduse our air power back as far as necessary, letting the enemy have all of thecountryside but that the PL could be stopped by air power. . . .

Admiral Burke pointed out that each time you give ground it is harderto stand next time. If we give up Laos we would have to put US forces intoViet-Nam and Thailand. We would have to throw enough in to win—perhaps the “works.” It would be easier to hold now than later. The thingto do was to land now and hold as much as we can and make clear that wewere not going to be pushed out of Southeast Asia. We were fighting forthe rest of Asia. State Department, Memorandum of Conversation, Wash-ington, April 29, 1961, 9:05 a.m.–9:50 a.m., doc. 67.

3. JCS, JCSM-170-61, JCS to Secretary of Defense McNamara, Washington,March 17, 1961; National Security Policy, doc. 24, enclosure at www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/kennedyjf/viii/32070.htm; JCS, CM-190-61, Lemnitzer to Mc-Namara, Washington, April 18, 1961, doc. 25; JCS, JCSM-252-61, JCS to Mc-Namara, Washington, April 18, 1961, doc. 25 (attachment) in FRUS,1961–1963, vol. VIII; Schwab, Defending the Free World, 22–25.

4. In response to what he perceived as the sluggish and inept Vietnam policyof the Kennedy administration, Lemnitzer made his views explicit to his fellowofficers and to the civilians in the Defense Department:

In view of the very real enemy threat in Vietnam and the fact that in theeyes of the world, and particularly in the Far East, the international pres-tige of the U.S. is literally at stake, I feel that we must avoid the marginaland piecemeal efforts that too often have typified the nest and build intoour program sufficient support in men, material and money to definitelyassure that we do not lose Vietnam.

Lemnitzer to the JCS, Telegram, Seoul, May 8, 1961, 2:39 p.m., FRUS,1961–1963, vol. I: Vietnam, 1961, doc. 47, at www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/vol_i_1961/e.html.

5. Jeffrey Clarke, U.S. Army in Vietnam, 49–60; U.S. Army, Joint Staff,Command History, Military Assistance Command Vietnam, 1964, published inCarr’s Compendium of the Vietnam War—Set 1 (DCB Software Testing Inc.,2004), ADA955106.pdf.

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6. Pentagon Papers, 2:128–2:159; State Department, Memorandum, Hilsmanto Forrestal, Washington, January 25, 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. III: Viet-nam, January–August 1963, doc. 19, at www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/kennedyjf/iii/6158.htm.

7. State Department, Final Report of the Vietnam Task Force, Washington,July 1, 1962 in FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. II: Vietnam 1962, doc. 233, at www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/vol_ii_1961–63/t.html; Gibbons, The U.S.Government and the Vietnam War, 2:104–2:107; Pentagon Papers, 2:139–2:143.

8. JCS, The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Joint Chiefs of Staff andthe Vietnam War, 1960–1968, Part 1, 4:4–4:28. No date. Declassified U.S. Gov-ernment Document. Published DCB Software Inc. 2004.

9. JCS, CM-117-62, Taylor to McNamara, Washington, November 17,1962, FRUS: Vietnam 1962, doc. 319; State Department, Harriman to Nolting,Washington, October 12, 1962, FRUS: Vietnam 1962, doc. 300.

10. Pentagon Papers, 2:150–2:157; JCS, JCS Team Report on Vietnam, Jan-uary 1963, FRUS: Vietnam, January–August 1963, doc. 26; Schwab, Defendingthe Free World, 53–58.

11. White House, Memorandum of Conversation, Washington, September10, 1963, 10:30 a.m., FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. IV: Vietnam, August–December1963, doc. 83, www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/kennedyjf/iv/12647.htm. Comparethe simultaneous reports by Marine Corps General Victor Krulak and civilianUSIA Officer Joseph Mecklin; USIA, Memorandum, Mecklin to Murrow, EnRoute to Washington, September 10, 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. IV, doc. 81,and JCS, Report, Krulak to JCS, En route to Washington, September 10, 1963,FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. IV, doc. 82.

12. CIA, Memorandum, Cooper to McCone, Washington, December 6, 1963,FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. IV: Vietnam, August–December 1963, doc. 349,www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/kennedyjf/iv/12675.htm; Defense Department, Memo-randum, McNamara to LBJ, Washington, December 21, 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963,vol. IV, doc. 371.

13. CIA, Report, TDCS DB-3/655, 301, Washington, June 28, 1963, FRUS:Vietnam, January–August 1963, doc. 190; State Department, Telegram, Lodgeto Rusk, Saigon, August 24, 1963, 6 p.m., FRUS: Vietnam, January–August1963, doc. 275.

14. NSC, Memorandum for the Record, Washington, August 26, 1963,noon, FRUS: Vietnam, January–August 1963, doc. 289; NSC, Memorandum,Forrestal to JFK, Washington, August 27, 1963, FRUS: Vietnam, January–August1963, doc. 302; NSC, Memorandum of Conference with the President, Wash-ington, August 27, 1963, 4 p.m., FRUS: Vietnam, January–August 1963, doc.303.

15. White House, Memorandum of Conference with the President, August29, 1963, noon, FRUS: Vietnam, August–December 1963, doc. 15; State De-partment, Telegram, Rusk to Lodge, Washington, August 29, 1963, 5:03 p.m.,FRUS: Vietnam, August–December, doc.16; ibid., Telegram, JFK to Lodge,Washington, August 29, 1963, doc. 18.

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16. Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, 2:209–2:279.17. Schwab, Defending the Free World, 95.18. Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, 2:282–2:332;

Schwab, Defending the Free World, 81–113.19. Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, 304; Robert

David Johnson, Ernst Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition (Cam-bridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 252–254.

20. Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, 330–332, 343–357;Pentagon Papers, 3:187–3:194; Schwab, Defending the Free World, 117–131.

21. Pentagon Papers, 3:434–3:452; JCS, Telegram, Westmoreland to theJCS, Saigon, June 7, 1965, 11:35 a.m., FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. 2: Vietnam,January–June 1965, doc. 337, www.state.gov/www/about_statem/history/vol_ii/336_340.html.

22. JCS, Telegram, Wheeler to Westmoreland, Washington, March 4, 1965,11:54 a.m., FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. II: Vietnam, January–June 1965, doc. 180.

23. Ibid., Pentagon Papers, 3:423–3:424.24. Between February 9 and April 14, 1965, Lyndon Johnson was present at

twelve of fourteen congressional meetings where the prospects of Chinese inter-vention were discussed, in the event of an American ground and air war.Schwab, Defending the Free World, 172.

25. JCS, JCS History of the Vietnam War, 1:13–1:14.26. The JCS views of military strategy vis-à-vis Vietnam in 1965 were pre-

sented in the Goodpaster Report. See NSC, Memorandum, Bowman to Bundy,Washington, July 21, 1965, FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. III: Vietnam, June–December1965, www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/vol_iii/060.html; George Mc-Garrigle, The U.S. Army in Vietnam: Combat Operations, Taking the Offensive,October 1966 to October 1967 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History,1998); U.S. Marine Corps, Force Requirements, and Long Range Estimates forI Corps Republic of Vietnam, unpublished document, October 1966, TTUArchive, Lubbock, TX; John Schlight, A War Too Long: The USAF in SoutheastAsia, 1961–1975 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1996).

27. United States Navy, Information Release: Professional KnowledgeGained from Marine Corps Experience in the Republic of Vietnam, April 19,1966. Vietnam Archive, Lubbock, TX.

28. Donald Mrozek, Air Power and the Ground War in Vietnam, Ideas andActions (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 1988), 3–26; General WilliamW. Momyer, Airpower in Three Wars (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press,2003), 1–40.

29. Schlight, A War Too Long, 82–112; Ronald B. Frankum Jr., Like RollingThunder: The Air War in Vietnam, 1964–1975 (New York: Rowman & Little-field, 2005), 133–183.

30. Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp, Strategy for Defeat, Vietnam in Retrospect(Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1978), 3.

31. Schwab, Defending the Free World, 13–14, 206–210.32. Ibid., 167–168; Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War,

Part III, January–July, 1965, 199–201; Pentagon Papers, 3:352–3:353.

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33. Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, Part IV, July1965–January 1968, 32–42.

34. JCSM-457-65, JCS to McNamara, Washington, June 11, 1965, FRUS:Vietnam, January–June 1965, doc. 346; JCSM-652-65, JCS to McNamara,Washington, August 27, 1965, FRUS: Vietnam, June–December 1965, doc. 130.

35. White House, Memorandum, Mansfield to LBJ, June 9, 1965, FRUS:Vietnam, January–June 1965, doc. 341.

CHAPTER 3: OPERATIONS: PART I

1. General George S. Eckhardt, Vietnam Studies, Command and Control,1950–1969 (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 1991), 27–63.

2. Pentagon Papers, 3:408–3:483, 4:277–4:538.3. The height of the war was an extraordinary example of civil protest. See

Charles Bennedetti, An American Ordeal; The Antiwar Movement of the Viet-nam Era (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 141–276; Tom Wells,The War Within, America’s Battle Over Vietnam (Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 1995), 115–286.

4. Henry Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War, A History of America’s In-volvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War (New York: Simon &Schuster, 2003), 81–85; James Wilbanks, Abandoning Vietnam, How AmericaLeft and South Vietnam Lost Its War (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press,2004), 5–66.

5. Wilbanks, Abandoning Vietnam, 122–162.6. Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor, Nixon, Kissinger and Betrayal in

Vietnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 265–273; Nguyen Tien Hungand Jerrold L. Schecter, The Palace File (New York: Harper & Row, 1986),303–349.

7. Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (New York:Ballantine Books, 2004); Wells, War Within, 297–403; Berman, No Peace, NoHonor, 240–264.

8. Arthur Egendorf, Healing from the War, Trauma and Transformation Af-ter Vietnam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 137–245; Myra McPherson,Long Time Passing, Vietnam and the Haunted Generation (Bloomington: Indi-ana University Press, 1985), 177–278; Phillip Jones Griffith, Agent Orange: Col-lateral Damage in Vietnam (London: Trolley Press, 2003).

9. The health effects alone were terrible. A National Academy of Sciencesstudy concluded dioxin exposure due to Agent Orange placed a huge healthburden on Vietnam:

April 17, 1995. Researchers have found that during the spraying of AgentOrange in southern Vietnam, dioxin levels in human tissue were as high as900 times greater in Vietnamese living in southern Vietnam than those liv-ing in northern Vietnam where Agent Orange was not used. Even now, al-though dioxin levels are at their lowest since the war ended, the studyfound that dioxin levels are as high as 50 times higher in Vietnamese living

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in southern Vietnam than those living in northern Vietnam. These findingssuggest that citizens in southern Vietnam may be at a greater risk of can-cers, adverse reproductive and developmental effects, immune deficiency,and other adverse health effects due to their exposure to Agent Orange.

Quoted in Lindsey Arison, The Herbicidal Warfare Program in Vietnam,1961–1971: Executive Summary, at http://members.cox.net/linarison/orange.html.

10. An early seminal study on the Viet Cong was Douglas Pike, Viet Cong,The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of SouthVietnam (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966).

11. BDM Corporation, A Study of Strategic Lessons Learned in Vietnam,Volume I, 5:12–5:42. March 1981 in Carr’s Compendium.

12. Here is how one historian describes the “Hue massacre” of the Tetoffensive:

Residents gradually began to speak more freely of what they had seen andheard. Over weeks, months and even years, the earth yielded up the evi-dence from schoolyards and parks, coastal salt flats and jungle creekbeds—the bodies of 2800 victims of the occupation shot to death, bludg-eoned or buried alive in the most extensive political slaughter of the war.

In Don Oberdorfer, Tet! The Turning Point in the Vietnam War (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 201. The Tet offensive has been studiedextensively by all sides. See The Military Institute of Vietnam, Victory in Viet-nam: The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954–1975(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002), 217–227; David Elliot,Revolution and Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975, 2 vols. (London:M.E. Sharpe, 2003) 2:1036–2:1122; Pham Van Song, The Viet Cong 1968 TetOffensive, RVNAF, Intelligence Division, unpublished document, pp.276–296,1969, TTU Archive. Lubbock, TX.

13. Summers, On Strategy, 21–32; Sharp, Strategy for Defeat, 125–132,259–271.

14. Mark W. Woodruff, Unheralded Victory: The Defeat of the Viet Congand the North Vietnamese Army, 1961–1973 (Arlington, VA: Vandemere Press,1999), 9–48, 182–194; Lewis Sorley, A Better War, The Unexamined Victoriesand Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (New York: HarcourtBrace, 1999), 305–371.

15. The Military Institute of Vietnam, Victory in Vietnam, 449.16. Barry M. Goldwater and Jack Casserly, Goldwater (New York: Double-

day, 1988), 202.17. White House, Memorandum, Mansfield to LBJ, Washington, July 27,

1965, FRUS: Vietnam, June–December 1965, doc. 96.18. Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970);

Wells, The War Within, 139–143; James William Gibson, The Perfect War:Technowar in Vietnam (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986).

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19. Schwab, Redeemer Nation, 205–285; Gibbons, The U.S. Governmentand the Vietnam War, 4:799–4:839, 924–942.

20. Gerald C. Hickey, Shattered World: Adaptation and Survival amongVietnam’s Highland Peoples During the Vietnam War (Philadelphia: Universityof Pennsylvania Press, 1993); Francis J. Kelly, U.S. Army Special Forces1961–1971 (Washington, DC: Department of Army, 1973).

21. Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, 4:267–4:352.22. U.S. Air Force, Unconventional Warfare Part II: Psychological Warfare,

December 1962, unpublished monograph, Vietnam Archive, TTU, Lubbock, TX;Ibid., MACV, JUSPAO, Psych Ops in Vietnam, Indications of Effectiveness,Saigon, Vietnam, May 1967, unpublished; MACV, JUSPAO, Introduction toPsychological Warfare, Saigon, Vietnam, September 1966, unpublished.

23. Department of the Army, A Program for the Pacification and Long TermDevelopment of South Vietnam (PROVN), March 1966, ch. 3:47–3:67 inCarr’s Compendium.

24. MACV, 1972–73 Command History, 1:A-32-4, July 15, 1973. Carr’sCompendium.

25. Chester L. Cooper, The American Experience with Pacification in Viet-nam: Volume 3: The History of Pacification (Washington, DC: Institute for De-fense Analyses, March 1972), 199–301. Carr’s Compendium.

26. U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Problems of War Victims in In-dochina, Part 3: North Vietnam, 92nd Cong., 2nd Sess., August 16 and 17,1972; Problems of War Victims in Indochina, Part 4: North Vietnam, September28, 1972; Detailed statistics on Vietnam War military and civilian casualties arefound at Statistical Data on the Vietnam War, www.ausvets.powerup.com.au/vietnam/vietstat.htm.

27. Vietnam War Statistics at www.militaryhistory.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm; Murray Polner, No Victory Parades, The Return of the Vietnam Vet-eran (New York: Holt Rhinehart & Winston, 1971), 24–28.

28. Richard A. Kulka et al., Trauma and the Vietnam War Generation:Report of Findings from the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study(New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1990) cite at www.ncptsd.va.gov/facts/general/fs_epidemiological.html. These are startling numbers, considering that only 10 per-cent of U.S. ground forces in Vietnam were considered combat troops; ArthurEgendorf, Healing from the War: Trauma and Transformation after Vietnam(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985).

29. Duncan M. Stanton, “Drug Use in Vietnam: A Survey among Army Per-sonnel in the Two Northern Corps,” Archives of General Psychiatry 26 (March1972): 279–286; L. H. Ingraham, “The Nam and the World: A Description ofHeroin Use by U.S. Army Enlisted Men Serving in Vietnam,” Psychiatry 37(May 1974): 114–128; Brent B. Benda, “Predictors of Re-hospitalization of Mil-itary Veterans Who Abuse Substances,” Social Work Research 25:4, 2001,pp.199–204.

30. Shelby Stanton, The Rise and Fall of an American Army: U.S. GroundForces in Vietnam, 1965–1973 (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1985), 294.

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31. Military History Institute of Vietnam, Victory in Vietnam, 436–450;William J. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam (Boulder, CO:Westview Press, 1996), 352–360.

CHAPTER 4: OPERATIONS: PART II

1. The JCS approach to the missile crisis was captured in contemporarytranscripts and tape recordings of the extensive crisis meetings:

Air Force chief of staff General Curtis LeMay, argues forcefully that theblockade and the political talks without accompanying military action willlead to war. He concludes that the Soviets won’t take Berlin if we act inCuba but will take it if we fail to act [8:30]. “This is almost as bad as theappeasement at Munich. . . . I just don’t see any other solution except di-rect military intervention right now.” [9:30] JFK cites the fact that nationsautomatically expel diplomats if their own diplomats are expelled and con-cludes that if we take military action the USSR will have to as well.[10:25] Several members of the JCS argue for military action and expressfears that the blockade alone is a weak response which could lead to nu-clear blackmail. [14:25] [Source: JFK Library release notes prepared bySheldon M. Stern] The Cuban Missile Crisis, October 18–29, 1962, atwww.hpol.org/jfk/cuban/.

2. Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence: University of KansasPress, 1998), 146–176; Dale R. Herspring, The Pentagon and the Presidency:Civil-Military Relations from FDR to George W. Bush (Lawrence: University ofKansas, 2005), 176–196.

3. Schwab, Defending the Free World, 13–14, 206–210; Schwab, RedeemerNation, 254–282.

4. The extent of difficulties facing the North Vietnamese and Viet Congforces were revealed in captured enemy documents where Giap critiqued the wareffort of each individual military unit. MACV, Captured Enemy Document: As-sessment of Situation in SVN by (NVA) Senior General Vo Nguyen Giap andVarious Officials of COSVN and SVNLA, June 11, 1970. Accession no.2121212007, Vietnam Archive, Lubbock, TX.

5. Military History Institute in Vietnam, Victory in Vietnam, 206–233.6. MACV, Captured Enemy Document, p.2.7. Secretary of Defense, Memorandum, FRUS, Vietnam, June–December

1965, July 20, 1965, doc. 67.8. George Ball, “Cutting Our Losses in South Vietnam,” Washington, June

1965, FRUS: Vietnam, June–December 1965, doc. 26; George Ball, “A Com-promise Solution For South Viet-Nam,” Washington, June 1965, FRUS: Viet-nam, June–December 1965, doc. 40; William Bundy, Memorandum, “A‘Middle Way’ Course of Action in South Vietnam,” Washington, July 1, 1965,FRUS: Vietnam, June–December, doc. 41.

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9. Woodruff, Unheralded Victory, 63–148; George L. MacGriggle, UnitedStates Army in Vietnam: Combat Operations, Taking the Offensive, October1966 to October 1967 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, U.S.Army, 1998).

10. Clarke, The Final Years: 1965–1973, 145–148.11. William C. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (New York: Plenum Press,

1976), 155–156; Harry G. Summers Jr., Historical Atlas of the Vietnam War(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 102–103.

12. Woodruff, Unheralded Victory, 68–87; Summers, Historical Atlas of theVietnam War, 104–105; Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War,4:100–4:103.

13. U.S. Army, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff Military Operations, AProgram for the Long Term Development and Pacification of South Vietnam(PROVN) (Washington: U.S. Army, March 1966), 9; Carr’s Compendium of theVietnam War (DCB Software Testing Inc., 2004).

14. Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, 4:525–4:529;Thomas C. Thayer, ed., Forces and Manpower: A Systems Analysis View of the Vietnam War, 1965–1972, 12 vols. (Washington, DC: Pentagon, SoutheastAsia Intelligence Division, February 18, 1975), 2:1–2:78, in Carr’s Com-pendium.

15. William J. Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (New York: RandomHouse, 1966); William Berman, William Fulbright and the Vietnam War: TheDissent of a Political Realist (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1988),76–78.

16. Thayer, A Systems Analysis of the Vietnam War, 1965–1972: Casualtiesand Losses, 6:1–6:31; ibid., Forces and Manpower, 2:6–2:30.

17. White House, Report, Maxwell Taylor, Comments on Viet-Nam, Wash-ington July 1, 1967, FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. V: Vietnam, 1967, doc. 1, at www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/v/13137.htm; MACV, Westmoreland toWheeler, Saigon, January 2, 1967, FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. V, 1238Z, doc. 2.

18. Lloyd C. Gardner, Pay and Price, Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Viet-nam (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1995), 409–458; Well, The War Within, 240–262.

19. The principles of war in relation to the Vietnam conflict is the subject ofSummers’ work, On Strategy; Russell W. Glenn, No More Principles of War?Parameters, Spring 1998, 48–66.

20. Telegram, Chairman of the JCS (Wheeler) to the Commander, MACV(Westmoreland), Washington, March 16, 1968, 2045Z, FRUS: 1964–1968,Vietnam, vol. V, January–August 1968, doc. 136, online edition, 2002.

21. Elliot, The Vietnamese War, 2:1126–2:1207; Ronald Spector, After Tet,The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 1993), 279–294.

22. Wells, The War Within, 223–285; Bennedetti, An American Ordeal,238–274; Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked The World (New York:Ballantine Books, 2004), 261–286.

23. Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War, 49–107; Wells, The War Within,287–340.

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24. MACV troop levels declined from 139,000 on January 1, 1972, to27,000 on December 31, 1972. MACV, United States Military Assistance Com-mand, Vietnam, Command History, 1972–1973, vol. 2, F-17, unpublished doc-ument, August 31, 1973, Carr’s Compendium.

25. Berman, No Peace, No Honor, 47–60; “But now at last, we have the endof the American role in this war clearly in sight. And we are ending our involve-ment with honor, in a way that will discourage new aggression and contribute toa lasting peace in the Pacific and in the world.” Richard Nixon, Remarks to theCorps of Cadets at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York.May 29, 1971, Public Papers of the President, Richard Nixon, XXXVII,1969–1974, at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php.

26. Wilbanks, Abandoning Vietnam, 122–162.27. Clarke, Final Years, 1965–1973, 109–194.28. Postwar assessments by Vietnam report 1.1 million combat related deaths

for all communist forces. This was five times the number of South Vietnamesefatalities (223,000) and nearly twenty times the absolute losses for the UnitedStates. In relative terms, as a percentage of national population, communist fatali-ties were 200 times greater than those of the United States. See www.rjsmith.com/kia_tbl.html.

29. Thayer, ed., A Systems Analysis View of the Vietnam War, Population Se-curity, 9:258–9:282.

30. Spencer Rich, “Antiwar Senators Open Public-Support Drive,” May 9,1970; Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, 210–223; Wells, The War Within,419–452.

31. “On Into Cambodia,” Wall Street Journal, April 30, 1970, 18.32. Frank C. Porter, “Business Leaders Support Offensive in Cambodia,”

Washington Post, May 9, 1970; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “Nixon’sPolitical Gamble Appears More Perilous than Military One,” Washington Post,May 6, 1970, A25.

33. Robert C. Maynard, “Widening Protest Closes 400 Colleges,”Washington Post, May 8, 1970, A16; Haynes Johnson, “U.S. Braces as ProtestsGain Force,” Washington Post, May 8, 1970, A1.

34. John A. Doglione et al., Airpower and the 1972 Spring Invasion (Wash-ington: Air University, 1976), 3.

35. Ibid., 4.36. Ibid., 9.37. “Transcript of President Nixon’s Address to Nation on His Policy in Viet-

nam War,” New York Times, May 9, 1972, 18.38. As a contemporary observer, Curtis LeMay stated his views on Vietnam

in his 1965 biography:

The military task confronting us is to make it so expensive for the NorthVietnamese that they will stop their aggression against South Viet Namand Laos. If you make it too expensive for them, they will stop. They don’twant to lose everything they have.

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There came a time when the Nazis threw the towel into the ring. Sameway with the Japanese. We didn’t bring that happy day about by sparingwith sixteen-ounce gloves. . . .

We must throw a punch that really hurts.For example, we could knock out their oil. They don’t have oil of their

own; it has to come into the country; so there are rich targets, in storageareas sprinkled around.

Knock them all out. This immediately brings a lot of things to a halt:transportation and power particularly. It would be the simplest possibleapplication of strategic bombardment, and you could do the job with con-ventional weapons. You wouldn’t have to get into a nuclear fracas.

Curtis E. LeMay and MacKinlay Kantor, Mission with LeMay, My Story(New York: Doubleday, 1965), 565.

39. John A. Doglione et al., Airpower and the 1972 Spring Invasion, in AirWar—Vietnam, ed. Drew Middleton, (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1978),99–206; Wilbanks, Abandoning Vietnam, 145–152; Kimball, Nixon’s VietnamWar, 302–308.

40. Middleton, ed., Air War—Vietnam, 277–290; Wilbanks, AbandoningVietnam, 180–184; Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, 364–366.

41. Woodruff, Unheralded Victory, 48–60; William Colby, Lost Victory, AFirsthand Account of America’s Sixteen Year Involvement in Vietnam (Chicago:Contemporary Books, 1989), 227–290, 323–356.

CHAPTER 5: DENOUEMENT

1. Wilbanks, Abandoning Vietnam, 122; Woodruff, Unheralded Victory,160–168; MACV, MACV Command History, Vol. I, 1970, 3:70–3:74, Carr’sCompendium.

2. Terry H. Anderson, The Sixties and the Movement (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1996), 166–167, 229–230, 319–322; Richard Stacewicz,Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War(New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), 188–251.

3. U.S. Senate, Statement of General James Gavin (U.S. Army Retired), Feb-ruary 21, 1967, in Hearing, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 90(1) (Wash-ington, DC: GPO, 1967), 3.

4. Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets, A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers(New York: Viking, 2002), 299–381.

5. Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 233–313; Gerald Nicosia, Home to War, AHistory of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement (New York: Crown Publishers,2001), 56–97.

6. Benedetti, An American Ordeal, 312–347; Wells, The War Within, 471–532.7. Richard H. Kohn and Joseph P. Harahan, eds., Strategic Air Warfare: An

Interview with Generals Curtis E. LeMay, Leon W. Johnson, David A. Burchi-nal, and Jack J. Catton (Washington, DC: U.S. Air Force, 1988), 119–131.

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8. JCS, Telegram, Lemnitzer to JCS, Seoul, May 8, 1961, 2:39 p.m., FRUS:Vietnam 1961, doc. 47.

9. NSC, Notes on the National Security Council Meeting, Washington, No-vember 15, 1961, 10:00 a.m., FRUS: Vietnam 1961, doc. 254.

10. Ibid.11. State Department, Report, William Bundy, Washington, November 20,

1967, FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. V: Vietnam 1967, doc. 408, at www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/v/13163.htm.

12. Schlight, A War Too Long, 47–62; Summers, On Strategy, 112–150;Sharp, Strategy for Defeat, 159–175.

13. Hanson Baldwin, “U.S. Expected to Limit Build-Up, but Generals Say atLeast 4 More Divisions Will be Needed in Vietnam,” New York Times, May 1,1967; Fred J. Cook and Barry Goldwater, Extremist of the Right (New York:Grove Press, 1964), 183; Editorial, “A Necessary Action in Cambodia,”Chicago Tribune, April 30, 1970; Frank C. Porter, “Business Leaders SupportU.S. Offensive in Cambodia,” Washington Post, May 9, 1970; Max Frankel,“Johnson Confers with Eisenhower, Briefs Him on War,” New York Times,February 19, 1968.

14. Clarke, Advice and Support, 341–359; Wilbanks, Abandoning Vietnam,5–42.

15. Kissinger was highly skeptical of Vietnamization as a total solution to thewar. See Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, 180–183.

16. Wilbur J. Scott, The Politics of Readjustment: Vietnam Veterans since theWar (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1993), 22; Elliott L. Meyrowitz and Ken-neth J. Campbell, “Vietnam Veterans and War Crimes Hearings,” in Give Peace aChance, Exploring the Vietnam Antiwar Movement, ed. Melvin Small andWilliam D. Hoover (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 129–140.

17. B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley, Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Gen-eration Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History (New York: Verity Press,1998), 109–137.

18. Michal R. Belknap, The Vietnam War on Trial, The Mai Lai Massacreand the Court-Martial of Lieutenant Calley (Lawrence: University of Kansas,2002), 59–97; Over 20,000 Viet Cong political cadres were killed or assassi-nated by South Vietnamese provincial revolutionary units (PRU) between 1967and 1972. See Ralph McGehee, CIA and Operation Phoenix in Vietnam,www.shss.montclair.edu/english/furr/phoenixmcg.html; It has been estimatedthat the Vietnamese communists committed 36,000 assassinations over a periodof twenty years. Here is one account:

May 22, 1966—Viet Cong terrorists slaughter 18 men, a woman and fourchildren late at night in attacking a compound of canal workers in theMekong Delta Province of An Giang. The defenseless families were shot intheir beds.

The Viet Cong boasted that the cold-blooded action was deliberatemurder for revenge. Survivors quoted them as saying they were retaliatingbecause the 60 canal workers and other residents of An Giang Province

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had been supporting the Government of Vietnam by giving informationabout the Viet Cong.

“We are doing this now to teach you a lesson,” one Viet Cong cadreswas reported as saying, just before he pulled the trigger. Most of the 23victims were shot in the head. At least 12 others in the compound werewounded. The slayings occurred in Vinh Han Village, 160 kilometerswest-southwest of Saigon.

United States Mission in Vietnam, A Study: Viet Cong Use of Terror, March1967, Saigon, Vietnam, 3, Vietnam Archive, TTU, Lubbock, TX.

19. Hung and Schecter, The Palace File, 276–317; Wilbanks, AbandoningVietnam, 256–288.

20. Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, 213–266; Berman,William Fulbright and the Vietnam War, 105–149.

21. Sorley, A Better War, 357–386; Wilbanks, Abandoning Vietnam, 199–255.22. Craig R. Whitney, “Thieu Condemns Draft Accord as ‘Surrender to

Communists,’ ” New York Times, November 1, 1972.23. Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, 364–371; Sorley, A Better War,

353–365; Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War, 408–446; Wilbanks, AbandoningVietnam, 180–198.

24. W. W. Rostow, Briefing Paper, no date, ca. 1969, excerpts in JeffreyKimball, The Vietnam War Files, Uncovering the Secret History of the NixonEra Strategy (Topeka: University of Kansas Press, 2004), 44.

25. Memorandum, Kissinger to Nixon, September 18, 1971, in Kimball,Vietnam War Files, 197.

26. Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War, 503–562; Wilbanks, AbandoningVietnam, 213–276.

27. U.S. Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Vietnam Aid—The PainfulOptions, February 12, 1975 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1975), 6–7.

28. “An entire American army was sacrificed on the battlefield of Vietnam.When the war was finally over, the United States military had to build a new vol-unteer army from the smallest shreds of its tattered remnants.” Stanton, TheRise and Fall of an American Army, 368.

CHAPTER 6: ALTERNATIVE MEANS

1. Robert W. Komer, The Impact of Pacification on the Insurgency in SouthVietnam, September 1970, Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, VietnamArchive, Lubbock, TX; U.S. House of Representatives, Report, United States In-volvement in Southeast Asia, July 6, 1970, 91st Cong., 2nd Sess. (Washington,DC: GPO, 1970).

2. Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Viet-nam (New York: Random House, 1988), 269–386; Cecil B. Currey, EdwardLansdale, the Unquiet American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988).

3. Richard Reeves, Nixon’s biographer, captured his paranoid nature per-fectly:

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Richard Nixon did not like “our Jewish friends” or “New York Jews” or“the fucking Jews”—phrases he regularly used in private, projecting arhetorical anti-Semitism not uncommon to Republicans of his time,though in his case more vulgar. He sometimes called Kissinger “Jew-boy”or “my Jew-boy,” usually when his associate in foreign policy was not inthe room, but occasionally when he was. He had already told his nationalsecurity adviser that the one area of the world where Rogers would haveprimary authority would be the Middle East.

Richard Reeves, President Nixon, Alone in the White House (New York: Si-mon & Schuster, 2001), 42.

4. U.S. Army, Program of Instruction for Military Assistance Training Ad-visor Course (MATA), April 2, 1962, U.S. Army Special Warfare School, FortBragg, NC, unpublished document, accession no. 15630101001, VietnamArchive, Lubbock, TX; MATA, U.S. Marine Corps, FMFM 8-2, OperationsAgainst Guerrilla Units, December 14, 1964, Washington, DC, accession no.1070916001. Vietnam Archive, Lubbock, TX.

5. U.S. Army, Report, “Participation in the CIDG Program 1961–1970,” nodate, Center for Military History, Washington, DC, in Vietnam War: AfterAction-Lessons Learned Reports, www.Paperlessarchives.com; MACV, Report,The GVN CIDG Political Action Program, March 3, 1965, Saigon, Vietnam,accession no. 2120419003, Vietnam Archive, Lubbock, TX.

6. Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow,1990), 9–42; Elliott, The Vietnamese War, 1:163–1:280.

7. Elliott, The Vietnamese War, 1:350–1:430.8. Pike, Viet Cong, 212–268; Thayer, ed., A Systems Analysis of the Viet-

nam War, Vol. X: Pacification and Civil Affairs, 58–112.9. SEATO, Report, The Viet Cong Political Infrastructure in South Vietnam,

October 31, 1972, accession no. 2310507002, Vietnam Archive, Lubbock, TX.10. Ibid.; MACV, RF/PF: Advisors Handbook, January, 1971, accession no.

2171811002.11. Thayer, ed., A Systems Analysis of the Vietnam War, Vol. IX: Population

Security, 151–246.12. J. A. Koche, The Chieu Hoi Program in South Vietnam, Washington, DC,

Advanced Research Projects Agency, January 1973, p.20, accession no.2171412002, Vietnam Archive, Lubbock, Texas.

13. Ibid., 21.14. Ibid., 59–88.15. Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science

and “Nation Building” during the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 2000), 151–208.

16. U.S. Embassy, Vietnam, The Way of the Free, Viet-Nam Bulletin, Viet-Nam Info Series 37 Elections, Local (10–70) 2–4, Saigon, Vietnam, VietnamArchive, Lubbock, TX.

17. C.I.A., Outlook for the August 28, 1971, Lower House Election in SouthVietnam, Saigon, August 1971, Vietnam Archive, Lubbock, TX.

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18. The American Friends of Vietnam, The Economic Needs of Vietnam, un-published, March 15, 1957, Vietnam Archive, Lubbock, TX.

19. USAID, U.S. Assistance to South Viet-Nam, 1954–1975, unpublished,October 14, 1975, p.41, accession no., Vietnam Archive, Lubbock, TX.

20. Roy L. Prosterman, Land Reform in Vietnam, SEADAG DiscussionPaper, Asia House, NY, April 24, 1970, Vietnam Archive, Lubbock, TX.

21. Ibid., 15.22. American Friends of Vietnam, Activities of the Department of Education

of the Republic of Vietnam, 1954–1959, no date, Vietnam Archive, TTU, Lub-bock, TX.

23. USAID, Record Enrollment for Secondary Education in Vietnam, Viet-nam Feature Service, May 1970, pp.8, 22, Vietnam Virtual Archive, TTU, Lub-bock, TX.

24. U.S. Agency for International Development, Decade of Expansion forHigher Education in Vietnam, Vietnam Feature Service, April 1971, pp.11, 41,Vietnam Virtual Archive, TTU, Lubbock, TX.

25. Walter Reed Army Medical Institute, The Republic of Viet-Nam, HealthData Publications, November 1963 (Washington, DC: Walter Reed Army Hos-pital, 1963) passim, Vietnam Archive, TTU, Lubbock, TX.

26. Cited in Accession List No. 28, Vietnam Research and Evaluation Center,unpublished, p.7, Vietnam Archive, TTU, Lubbock, TX.

27. American Friends of Vietnam, Health Achievements in the Republic ofVietnam Since 1954, p.7, unpublished, 1959, Vietnam Archive, TTU, Lubbock,TX; USAID, Report to the Ambassador 1972, Saigon, 1973, pp.31–34, VietnamArchive, TTU, Lubbock, TX.

28. Lewis Sorley, ed., Vietnam Chronicles, The Abram Tapes, 1968–1972(Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2004), 142.

CHAPTER 7: PROPAGANDA AND RHETORIC

1. CIA, Memorandum, Cooper to McCone, Washington, December 6,1963, FRUS: Vietnam, August–December 1963, doc. 349; Defense Department,Report on the Situation in Long An Province, Saigon, December 20, 1963,FRUS: Vietnam, August–December 1963, doc. 369.

2. Lyndon Johnson, Radio and Television Report to the American PeopleFollowing Renewed Aggression in the Gulf of Tonkin, August 4, 1964; LyndonJohnson, Address at Johns Hopkins University: “Peace Without Conquest.”April 7, 1965; Lyndon Johnson, The President’s News Conference of July 28,1965. All three are available at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/index.php.

3. Pike, Viet Cong, 247.4. Ibid., 246–252; Elliot, The Vietnamese War, 952–965, 1211–1288.5. Defense Department, Memorandum, McNaughton to McNamara,

March 24, 1965, in Pentagon Papers, 3:694–3:695.6. U.S. House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Hearings, American Prisoners

of War in Southeast Asia, 1970, April 28, May 1–6, 1970, 91st Cong., 2nd Sess.(Washington, DC: GPO, 1970).

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7. JCS, JCSM-221-68, JCS to Secretary of Defense (Clifford), Washington,April 10, 1968, FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. X: National Security Policy, doc. 202,at www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/x/9101.htm; NSC, National SecurityAction Memorandum (NSSM) One, March 1, 1969, “The Situation in Viet-nam,” Part 2, p.2, accession no. 2120107001, Vietnam Archive.

8. Wells, The War Within, 195–222; Jeremy Varon, Bringing the WarHome: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and RevolutionaryViolence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press,2004), 74–150.

9. Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970)and American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Vintage Books,1969); Howard Zinn, Vietnam, the Logic of Withdrawal (Boston: Beacon Press,1967); Ralph Stavins, Richard J. Barnet, and Marcus G. Raskin, WashingtonPlans an Aggressive War (New York: Random House, 1971); Marcus G. Raskinand Bernard Fall, eds., The Vietnam Reader, Articles and Documents on Amer-ican Foreign Policy and the Viet-Nam Crisis (New York: Vintage Books, 1965);Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the ModernHistorical Experience (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).

10. Quoted in Nicholas Kozloff, Vietnam, the African American Communityand the Pittsburgh New Courier, The Historian 63(3) (2001): 521.

11. Swedish Comment Brings U.S. Protest, New York Times, December 26,1972, 12; “Premier of Sweden Says He’ll Continue to Criticize the U.S.,” NewYork Times, December 30, 1972, 5; Myerowitz and Campbell, “Vietnam Veter-ans and War Crime Hearings,” in Give Peace a Chance, Exploring the VietnamAnti-war Movement, ed. Melvin Small and William D. Hoover (Syracuse: Syra-cuse University Press, 1992) 129–140; Eric Norden, American Atrocities in Viet-nam; Richard A. Falk, Gabriel Kolko and Robert Jay Lifton, eds., Crimes ofWar: A Legal, Political-Documentary, and Psychological Inquiry into the Re-sponsibility of Leaders, Citizens, and Soldiers for Criminal Acts in Wars (NewYork: Random House, 1971), 265–284.

12. Barry Weisberg, ed., Ecocide in Indochina, The Ecology of War (SanFrancisco: Harper & Row, 1970); J. B. Neilands et al., Harvest of Death, Chem-ical Warfare in Vietnam and Cambodia (New York: Free Press, 1972).

13. Richard Falk, “Six Legal Dimensions of the United States Involvement inthe Vietnam War,” in The Vietnam War and International Law, ed. Richard A.Falk, 4 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 2:216–2:250.

14. MACV, Telegram, Westmoreland to Wheeler, Saigon, February 9, 1968,1633Z, FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. VI: Vietnam, January–August 1968, doc. 63, atwww.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/vi/13691.htm; NSC, Notes of a Meeting,Washington, February 27, 1968, FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. VI, doc. 89; JCS,Memorandum, Wheeler to LBJ, Washington, February 27, 1968, FRUS,1964–1968, vol. VI, doc. 90; JCS, Report, Analysis of COMUSMACV Force Re-quirements and Alternatives, March 1, 1968, FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. VI, doc.96; Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, 4:607–4:664.

15. Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, 264–265.16. Scott, The Politics of Readjustment, 27–63; R. A. Kulka, W. E. Schlenger,

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J. A. Fairbank, et al., Trauma and the Vietnam War Generation (New York:Brunner & Mazel, 1990); David Marlowe, Psychological and Psychosocial Con-sequences of Combat and Deployment: With Special Emphasis on the Gulf War(Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2001), 90–114.

17. Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness, American Culture at the Break-ing Point (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970); Wini Breines, “Observation: Sixties Sto-ries’ Silences White Feminism, Black Feminism, Black Power,” NWSA Journal8:110–8:131(1996); Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Vintage Books, 1974),455–658; Edward P. Morgan, The 60s Experience: Hard Lessons about ModernAmerica (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 127–214.

18. Schwab, Defending the Free World, 100–104; Gibbons, The U.S. Gov-ernment and the Vietnam War, 2:316–2:333.

19. Dean Rusk, Address by Secretary Rusk, made before the American Soci-ety of International Law on April 23, 1965, “The Control of Force in Interna-tional Relations,” in Pentagon Papers, 3:733–3:736.

20. Schwab, Defending the Free World, 198–202.21. Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times,

1961–1973 (New York: Oxford University, 1998), 494–530; Larry Berman,Lyndon Johnson’s War: The Road to Stalemate in Vietnam (New York: W.W.Norton, 1991), 176–204.

22. William M. Hammond, The U.S. Army in Vietnam, Public Affairs, TheMilitary and the Media, 1968–1973 (Washington, DC: Center for Military His-tory, 1996), 147–169; William V. Shannon, “Vietnam Issue: A Time for FenceSitting,” New York Times, May 19, 1968.

23. Chester Cooper, Report R-185A, The American Experience with Pacifi-cation in Vietnam, Volume 3: History of Pacification (Springfield, VA: Institutefor Defense Analyses, 1972), 324–325 in Carr’s Compendium; Woodruff, Unh-eralded Victory, 165–168.

24. Jack Anderson, “Nixon Now Facing Grimmest Crisis,” Washington Post,May 2, 1970; “Campus Crisis, Widening War, Deaths at Kent State ProduceTurmoil at Universities,” Wall Street Journal, May 6, 1970; Arlen J. Large,“Cambodian Sequel, Invasion May Shorten the War but Maybe Not in WayNixon Intended,” Wall Street Journal, May 7, 1970; Robert Jay Lifton, “TheAmerican as Blind Giant Unable to See What It Kills,” New York Times, June14, 1970.

25. Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War, 81–86.26. Quoted in Richard F. Grimmett, CRS Report for Congress, Congres-

sional Use of Funding Cutoffs Since 1970 Involving U.S. Military Forces andOverseas Deployments, January 10, 2001, p.2, Congressional Research Service,Library of Congress; Wilbanks, Abandoning Vietnam, 195.

CHAPTER 8: CONTINUITY

1. Sharp, Strategy for Defeat, 267–270; Woodruff, Unheralded Victory,289–291; Summers, On Strategy, 1–8.

2. Gerald Ford, Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress Reporting on

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United States Foreign Policy, April 10, 1975, Public Papers of the President, atwww.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.

3. Karl D. Jackson, “The Ideology of Total Revolution,” in Cambodia1975–1978: Rendezvous with Death, ed. Karl D. Jackson (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1989), 37–38; Kenneth M. Quinn, “The Pattern and Scope ofViolence,” in Jackson, Cambodia 179–208; David Chandler, Voices from S-21:Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1999).

4. For antiwar sentiments in memoirs of senior officials see George W. Ball,The Past Has Another Pattern: Memoirs (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982); Hu-bert H. Humphrey, The Education of a Public Man: My Life and Politics (Gar-den City, NY: Doubleday, 1976); Clark Clifford and Richard J. Holbrooke,Counsel to the President: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991).

5. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and theAmerican Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1988), 415–573; Bruce Cumings, Parallax Visions, Making Sense of East-AsianRelations (London: Duke University Press, 1999); Schwab, Redeemer Nation,287–295.

6. Studies of the mass media and the Vietnam War have shown far less criti-cal bias against the U.S. government than had been believed. However, the effectof the media coverage of the war was cumulative. Hammond, The Military andthe Media, 1968–1973, 617–637.

7. The cultural literature on the Vietnam War is rich and growing. See TobeyC. Herzog, Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (New York: Routledge, 1992);Katherine Kinney, Friendly Fire: American Images of the Vietnam War (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2001); Don Ringnalda, Fighting and Writing theVietnam War (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994); Lloyd B. Lewis,The Tainted War: Culture and Identity in Vietnam War Narratives (Westport,CT: Greenwood Press, 1985); Michael Anderegg, Inventing Vietnam: The Warin Film and Television (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Jim Neil-son, Warring Fictions: American Literary Culture and the Vietnam War Narra-tive (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998).

8. Anderegg, Inventing Vietnam, 56–80. Anderegg compares two preeminentearly Vietnam War films, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, which he de-scribed as “formulaic” but very representative of American culture in their use of“extreme experience revealing basic cultural contradictions and conflicts” (78).

9. Richard Kulka et al., Trauma and the Vietnam War Generation: Reportof Findings from the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study (NewYork: Brunner & Mazel, 1990); Kathleen B. Jordan, William Schlenger et al.,“Lifetime and Current Prevalence of Specific Psychiatric Disorders among Viet-nam Veterans and Controls,” Archives of General Psychiatry 48(1991):207–215.

10. Lawrence B. Radine, The Taming of the Troops: Social Control in theUnited States Army (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 3–142; Robert K.Griffith, The U.S. Army’s Transition to the All-Volunteer Force, 1968–1974(Washington, DC: Center for Military History, 1996).

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11. Richard H. Kohn, “Out of Control: The Crisis in Civil-MilitaryRelations,” The National Interest 35 (Spring 1994); Gregory Foster, “FailedExpectations: The Crisis of Civil-Military Relations in America,” Brookings Re-view 15 (Fall 1997); A. J. Bacevich, “Tradition Abandoned,” The National In-terest 48 (Summer 1997); John Allen Williams, “The Military and ModernSociety: Civilian-Military Relations in Post-Cold War America,” World and I14:9 (September 1999): 306.

12. Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (New York:Collins, 1982), 308.

13. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Se-curity Adviser, 1977–1981 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983), 426–470;Richard Thornton, The Carter Years: Toward a New Global Order (New York:Paragon, 1991), 356–545.

14. Steven Kull, Minds at War: Nuclear Reality and the Inner Conflicts ofDefense Policymakers (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 47–155; Richard NedLebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1994), 348–368.

15. Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals’ War:The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (New York: Little, Brown, 1995),130–131.

16. Anthony Cordesman, The Iraq War, Strategy, Tactics, and the MilitaryLessons (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 475–516.

17. Sharp, Strategy for Defeat, 270.18. Robert M. Cassidy, “Prophets or Praetorians? The Uptonian Paradox and

the Powell Corollary,” Parameters 33 (Autumn 2003): 130–143. For a fineoverview of the Gulf War, see William Head and Earl H. Telford, eds., The Ea-gle in the Desert: Looking Back on U.S. Involvement in the Persian Gulf War(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996).

19. James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, The History of Bush’s War Cabinet(New York: Viking, 2004), 165–372.

20. Roger W. Barnett, Asymmetrical Warfare: Today’s Challenge to US Mili-tary Power (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2003); Melissa A. Applegate, Preparingfor Asymmetry: As Seen Through the Lens of Joint Vision 2020 (Carlisle Bar-racks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2001), at www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ssi/preparing.pdf; David E. Brigham, The Global War on Terrorism: War orCounterinsurgency? (Newport, RI: Naval War College, February 2004), athttp://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA22704.

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1961–1963, Volume II: Vietnam, 1962

1961–1963, Volume III: Vietnam, January–August 1963

1961–1963, Volume IV: Vietnam, September–December 1963

Johnson Administration1964–1968, Volume I: Vietnam, 1964

1964–1968, Volume II: Vietnam, January through June 1965

1964–1968, Volume III: Vietnam, July through December 1965

1964–1968, Volume IV: Vietnam, 1966

1964–1968, Volume V: Vietnam, 1967

1964–1968, Volume VI: Vietnam, January–August 1968

1964–1968, Volume VII: Vietnam, September 1968–January 1969

1964–1968, Volume X: National Security Policy

Nixon Administration1969–1976, Volume I: Foundations of Foreign Policy

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http://www.Paperlessarchives.com (CD collections)

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Vietnam War after Action-Lessons Learned Reports

Vietnam War Air Force History

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Abrams, Creighton, 43, 93, 122Acheson, Dean, 1, 5, 12, 163n23Afghan War, 143, 152, 155–159AID (United States Agency for

International Development),117–119, 121–122

Antiwar movement, 46, 48, 50,52–53, 56, 60, 74, 85–86, 94–96,100, 124; broad effects of,130–138, 142, 147–149, 152

Army of North Vietnam. See PAVN(People’s Army of Vietnam).

ARVN (Army of the Republic ofVietnam), 19–22; development of,75; Diem Coup, 23, 26, 28–30; in-effectiveness of, 45–46, 49–50, 54,57–58, 67–68, 71–72; pacificationof, 76, 80–82, 93, 95, 98, 102,110, 112–113, 126, 128, 139

Balkans War, 156

Cambodia, 2, 3, 7, 37, 39, 44, 46, 64,76; fall of, 101–102, 107; invasion

of, 77–78, 91, 96–97, 99,140–142; secret bombing of,134–135, 145–146

Chieu Hoi (Open Arms Program),112–113

China (Peoples Republic of China), 2,4; and dialogue with U.S., 99, 102,118, 122, 129, 132, 137, 144–145;post-Vietnam War, 153; andrecognition of Vietnam, 6, 7, 18;U.S. fear of land war with, 25, 31,40, 51–52, 61, 74, 78, 80–82, 90–91

Christmas Bombing (1972), 97, 134CI (Counterinsurgency), British model

of, 20; dissent from ground war,88–89, 91, 96, 103, 112, 121;doctrine of, 56–60; Johnsonadministration, 25–26; Kennedyadministration, 20–24; MarineCorps concept of, 33, 40, 46, 48,50–51; and minority groups incentral highlands, 54, 106–109; andpotential for victory, 155–158; inrelation to pacification, 76–77, 82

Index


CIA (Central Intelligence Agency),origins of, 10, 28, 35–36, 44, 51,57, 69, 91, 109, 111, 141, 162n18

CIDG (Civilian Irregular DefenseGroup), 54, 108

CINCPAC (Commander in Chief,Pacific), 13, 19, 31, 43–44, 86,145, 156

Clausewitz, Carl Von, 13–14, 55, 71,92–93, 160

Clausewitzian theory of war, 13–14,17, 28, 33, 35–36, 39, 52, 64, 80,86–87, 92, 157

COMUSMACV (Commander, UnitedStates Military AssistanceCommand Vietnam), 73

CORDS (Civil Operations andRevolutionary Development Ser-vices), 110–112, 119, 122

De Gaulle, Charles, 3, 5Dellums, Ronald, 134DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency),

10, 162n18Diem, Ngo Dinh, 19, fall and

assassination, 23–26Diem Regime, fall of, 20–26, 51, 55,

109, 114, 117–118, 126, 130DMZ (demilitarized zone), 17th

parallel, 29, 39, 81, 97DOD (Department of Defense), 10,

26, 37, 76, 87, 91, 130Domino theory, 7–8, 99–100, 107,

114, 129–130, 139, 142, 163n14DRV (Democratic Republic of

Vietnam), 24–25, 30, 34–35, 37,39, 44, 46, 49–50, 53, 58, 72, 78,80–82, 85, 88–89, 91, 97–98,100–101, 106, 110, 119, 122, 135,137–138, 142, 145.

Easter Offensive (1972), 79–80Ecocide, 131, 134–135Eisenhower, Dwight D., 6–7, 9, 17,

36, 86; administration of, 6, 9–10,

13, 17, 89, 114, 116; and dominotheory, 7, 114, 129; and militaryindustrial complex, 125, 127, 129,158

Ford Administration, 14, 47, 63, 86,101–102, 124, 146, 151

Ford, Gerald R., 2, 36, 102, 146, 151Fulbright Hearings, 67–70, 78,

95–96, 132, 137, 147

Genocide, 53, 81, 96, 102, 131,133–134, 146

Giap, Vo Nguyen, 6, 65, 79, 1704nGoldwater, Barry M., 11, 36, 86,

163n20GVN (Government of Vietnam). See

South Vietnam (Republic ofVietnam).

Gulf of Tonkin incident, 25–28, 35,44, 89, 118, 127, 138; aspropaganda, 123, 138–139;resolution of, 25–28, 102

Harkins, Paul, 19, 22, 24, 43Harriman, Averrill, 17, 24, 72Hmong (Laos), 146Ho Chi Minh Trail, 24, 49, 81, 85,

91, 97, 99, 106, 140

ICA (International CooperationAdministration), 117

JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff), 9, 95, 98,108, 115–116, 130, 137, 141, 145,154, 156, 58, 164n2, 166n26,170n1; and Gulf of Tonkin, 28, 29;and Laos, 17–18, 21, 25, 27; andstrategic dissent, 86–93; strategicviews of, 31, 35–39, 43–46, 53,63–64, 66; and Tet offensive, 72,74, 80

Johnson Administration, 20;transition into, 25–28, 31, 34,38–39, 44, 66–67, 70, 72, 89,

190 INDEX


91–92, 100, 109, 126, 135–136,138, 147

Johnson, Lyndon B. (LBJ), 10–11; atodds with JCS, 18, 25, 27–28, 38,47, 63, 66, 71–72, principles ofwar, 92–3, 127, 130, 137

Kennedy Administration, 10, 14;Vietnam policy of, 17–22, 24, 27,63, 80, 86, 106, 109, 126, 136,141, 162n18, 164n4

Kennedy, John F. (JFK), 7, 17; andDiem coup, 23–25, 90, 107, 127; atodds with JCS, 18

Kerry, John, 94Khanh, Nguyen, 26Khymer Rouge, 101–102, 146–147Kissinger, Henry, 2, 29, 74, 79, 94,

97–102, 136; and influence onVietnam policy, 141–146, 174n15,176n3

Krulak, Victor, 23, 165n11

Land reform, 117–119Lansdale, Edward G., 21–22, 88,

106, 108Laos, 2–3, 7; convert operations of,

107–108, 124, 134, 141–142,145–146, 164n2, 172n38; andLaotian crisis, 13, 17–18, 39, 44,46, 64, 74; loss of sanctuaries,101–102; sanctuaries of, 76–79,91, 95–99

LeMay, Curtis E., 18, 34, 80, 86,164n2, 170n1, 172n38

Lemnitzer, Lyman, 18–19, 21, 164n4;and policy dissent, 86–90

Linebacker I and II raids, 80–81

MAAG (Military Assistance AdvisoryGroup), 19, 43, 45, 75

MACV (Military AssistanceCommand, Vietnam), 13; creationand design of, 19–20, 22, 24;deployments of, 28–32, 35; end of,

98, 101, 108, 111–112; organiza-tion of, 43–5, 55–6, 67, 69–70; andrelationship with CI program,114–115, 119, 122, 126–127, 130,141, 145, 172n24; and TetOffensive, 72, 74–78, 82; andVietnamization, 91–93

Malay Polynesian tribes, 48, 54, 107Managerial Internationalism, 38;

definition of, 64, 68Mansfield, Mike, 18, 40, 137Mao, Zedong, 6, 153McGovern, George, 78, 137, 147McNamara, Robert S., 24, 26, 30,

66, 72, 87–88, 164n2Military realism, 18, 25Minh, Doug Van (Big Minh), 24, 26Minh, Ho Chi, 3–6, 27, 51, 53, 65,

81Munich Syndrome (analogy),

definition of, 11–13, 163n22,163n24, 170n1

NFLSVN (National Front for theLiberation of South Vietnam), andantiwar movement’s views, 135,142; and Chieu Hoi, 13, 115, 118,127; defeat of, 76–77, 79–80, 82,86, 95, 99; and fall of Saigon, 102,106; growth of, 28–32, 39; andJohnson administration, 45–53,55–57, 69–70; origins of, 20–23;and Phoenix program, 108–112;and Tet Offensive, 73; under Diem,26–27

National Security Council (NSC), 10,23, 35; civilian view of, 36–37, 39,64, 88, 90, 159

New York Times, 87, 98, 111,139–140

Nixon Administration, 7, 34, 46,56–57; and Cambodian invasion,77; and Clausewitzian doctrine, 80,81; covert operations of, 107; anddomino theory, 107; and end of

INDEX 191


draft, 152; and end of war, 98–100;and nation-building, 113, 134, 136,141–142, 145; operations of,74–75; precarious state of, 85–86,94, 96; size of antiwar movement,147

Nixon, Richard M., 13, 35–36, 40;de-escalation, 46, 47; and EasterOffensive, 79; election of, 64; exitstrategy of, 93–94, 97, 99–100,107; and Linebacker I, 80; andLinebacker II, 81; and mining ofHaiphong, 45; operations of,73–75; peace with, 129, 136, 141,145, 176n3; rules of engagement,44; withdrawal plan of, 77

North Vietnam. See DRV (Demo-cratic Republic of Vietnam).

Paris Peace Accords (1973), 51, 73,4,80, 82; after signing, 97–100, 142

PAVN (People’s Army of Vietnam),29, 31, 39, 44–45, 49–52, 46–47,61, 67–70; and CI war against,107–109, 112–113, 122, 128, 130,136, 139; and fall of SouthVietnam, 101–102, 106; and TetOffensive, 72–73, 76, 79–82, 85,93, 97–99

Phoenix Program, 51, 57, 74, 108,110–113, 121, 134, 140

PLA (People’s Liberation Army), 44,50, 56–57, 61, 67, 71, 72, 76,81–82, 85, 101, 139. See also VietCong; NFLSVN.

Pnomh Penh. See Cambodia.Political realism, 52Pol Pot, 146–147Popular Forces (PF), South Vietnam,

75, 113Powell, Colin, Gulf War views of,

154–157 POW (prisoners of war), 27, 94, 97,

129, 146, 158

PRC (People’s Republic of China). SeeChina.

Psychiatric casualties, 48, 59–60;post-traumatic stress disorder(PTSD), 150–151, 180

PTSD (Post-traumatic stresssyndrome). See psychiatriccasualties.

Regional Forces (RF), South Vietnam,70, 130

Republic of Vietnam (RVN). SeeSouth Vietnam (Republic ofVietnam).

Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces(RVNAF), 43, 57, 67; defeat of,97–99; development of, 74–76; andEaster Offensive 79, 81; and fall ofSouth Vietnam, 82, 86, 93,101–102, 115, 121–122, 130

Roosevelt, Franklin (FDR), 4Russell, Richard, 38, 137

Saigon. See South Vietnam (Republicof Vietnam).

SEATO (Southeast Asian Treaty Orga-nization), 88, 139

Sharp, Ulysses S., 31, 35, 52, 86, 90,156

South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam),2, 8, 12; alternative means,106–122; denouement of, 85–103;and development of the RVNAF,75–76; and Diem period, 18–24;and Easter Offensive, 79–82; andescalation of the war, 43–54, 57,61, 66–67; and fall of SouthVietnam, 141–146; andintervention period, 28–40; and theNixon administration, 74; andpacification, 76–77; andpropaganda, 126–142; transition toJohnson administration, 25–27

Soviet Union (USSR), containment of,4–8, 18, 24, 40, 51, 61, 65, 74, 78;

192 INDEX


and Nixon administration, 80–83,90–91, 97, 99–100, 122, 129, 132,137, 144, 146; and post-Vietnamera, 153–154

Strategic Hamlet Program, 20–26,109, 126

Tet Offensive (1968), 39, 50, 65,71–73, 82, 94, 106, 124, 127,139–140, 168n12

Thailand, 7, 60, 70, 130, 164n2Thieu, Nguyen Vann, 79, 97–98,

115–116Truman administration, 10, 12, 31,

43, 45, 89, 162n14Truman, Harry S., 5, 7, 12

United States Air Force (USAF), 8, 13,18–19, 32; doctrine of, 34, 35, 44,49, 71, 75, 80–81, 91–92, 100

United States Army (USA). SeeMACV.

United States Marine Corps (USMC),30, 32; clear and hold, 68, 92;tactical doctrine of, 33, 35, 48

United States Navy (USN), 8–9, 13,18, 32; tactical doctrine of, 35, 39,71, 80, 91–92, 94, 102, 153

Viet Cong (VC), 13, 19; defeat of,70–71, 75–76; growth of, 22–24,

28, 33; ineffectiveness of, 82, 88,92–93, 95–96, 106, 108, 112; or-ganization of, 48, 50, 52–54,57–58, 65; strength of, 67–69;terror and assassinations, 125–128,133–134, 136, 140, 168n10,170n4, 174n18; and use of terror,118–119, 122

Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI), 49,51; intelligence estimate of, 69, 77,85, 89, 96, 106, 109–110, 113,119, 121

Viet Minh, 6, 109, 118Vietnam, history of, 2, 21, 49, 51,

65–66, 18, 110, 161n3Vietnamization, critique of, 93–94,

98, 103; history of, 73–76, 79; andnation-building, 113, 121, 140,174n15; purpose of, 46

VVAW (Vietnam Veterans Against theWar), 94

Wall Street Journal, 78, 140Washington Post, 98, 111, 139Westmoreland, William S., 50, 56;

and troop requests, 66–67, 70–72,93, 136

Wheeler, James Earle, 29, 37, 72,93–94

Wilsonian Internationalism (neo-Wilsonianism), 39, 141

INDEX 193



About the Author

ORRIN SCHWAB a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, is theauthor of Defending the Free World: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnsonand the Vietnam War, 1961–1965 (Praeger, 1998). He has taught at Pur-due University Calumet and the University of Chicago.


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