Enduring Myths: The Confused Legacy of Viet Nam Note: This article was originally published in 2006. By R. J. Del Vecchio It's been 31 years since the dramatic scenes of helicopters taking Americans and desperate Vietnamese off rooftops in Saigon were first played on television around the world. Yet that war remains an intensely controversial subje...

 

By Col. Andrew R. Finlayson, USMC (Ret.)*

“Amateurs talk about tactics; professionals talk about logistics.”

An old military proverb

By Phillip Jennings

President Obama said this week in Laos that sometimes Americans “feel lazy and think we’re so big we don’t have to really know anything about other people.” [1. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/07/world/asia/obama-laos-bombs-war.html?_r=0] He then addressed America’s “secret war” in that country, and proved what he didn’t know. What went on in Laos was hardly a secret, and was not much of a war either, except for those of us who fought it.

When President Dwight D. Eisenhower met President-elect John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office prior to passing the reigns of the presidency, he warned the young Prince of the dangers of war in Southeast Asia. In Laos to be exact. Over first months of the tragically short Kennedy administration, the communists – Soviet, Chinese and North Vietnamese -- kept their aggressive pressure on the small nation as only communists seem able to do; through killings, kidnappings, thievery and rabid control of all aspects of life.

Kennedy sent U.S. Marines to the southern border of Laos, with a warning to the communists to get out and stay out. The bluff worked, and in July 1962 fourteen nations signed another in a long line of Geneva accords, this one guaranteeing Laotian neutrality. The buck was passed to South Vietnam to become the whipping boy for communist aggression in Indochina.

Kennedy, meanwhile, made a rookie mistake which haunted and inhibited America’s commitment to keep Ho Chi Minh’s brutal troops out of Saigon over the next decade; he ceded the eastern third of “neutral” Laos to the communists. And that strip of jungle and Annamite foothills became the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The trail – actually a superhighway -- was built using Laotian slave labor to wage war in South Vietnam. The locals were under constant attack from tens of thousands of North Vietnamese regulars.

After North Vietnamese troops moved into Laos, the Marine helicopters in northern Thailand mysteriously lost their MARINES markings and ended up being flown by civilian (mostly former Marine) pilots in what would become part of a company known as Air America. And in late 1967, I became one of those former Marine pilots who flew the former Marine helicopters in and around Laos for the next three years.

The war in the countryside was brutal, but small and mostly contained. The Americans who trained and led the anti-communist troops were among the gutsiest our country has ever produced. There was less than a thousand of them in-country at any one time. They were primarily CIA (we called them customers) and U.S. Army. They worked alone in the country- side, depending on the locals for everything but air support, which was aptly supplied by Air America, the U.S. Air Force Ravens, and the sometimes available American fighters and bombers for close air support when things got really dicey. This small band of warriors and their local counterparts kept Laos from being overrun by the North Vietnamese divisions until South Vietnam fell and Laos became a domino.

It was tragic that the Laotians were caught in the middle of the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam. But it is not dismissing the tragedy to point out that the overwhelming majority of American bombs fell on unpopulated areas along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Most of the Laotian population live in the lowlands, and near the Mekong River which was the western border for much of the country. The cities of Houi Sai, Luang Prabang (the Royal Capital), Vientiane, Savannakhet, and to the far south, Pakse, were never bombed, and lay as peacefully in the Indochinese sun when the Americans left as when they had arrived.

Good Soldier Obama rightly commented that the U.S. has a moral obligation to continue, and in fact intensify, the efforts to find and defuse/destroy the unexploded ordnance scattered mostly over the eastern one-third of Laos. This is a noble and necessary effort the Americans who fought there, and most Americans at large, would whole-heartedly support.

Obama did not mention the greater moral obligation the Americans have to the remaining Huang/Meo people who gave up a large percentage of their population fighting the communists in Laos on our behalf, led primarily by the great Lao general, Vang Pao. When the Democrat U.S. congress abandoned the South Vietnamese in 1973, they also abandoned our friends and allies in Laos. The communists then slaughtered, bombed, gassed and exiled them from their native lands. It is to our shame for betraying our friends and allies. I would not have expected Obama to bring this up while he was kow-towing to the existing Laotian communist government, and he met my low expectations.

Yes, there was a war in Laos (I was shot down more than once) and the Laotian and American deaths at the hands of the communists were tragic and often extremely brutal. Was it a secret? Absolutely, unless you read The Bangkok Post, The New York Times, or any one of dozens of newspapers and magazines constantly reporting on the war in Laos. I myself was interviewed for articles in Time and the Wall Street Journal while I was “under cover.”

We fought the good fight in Laos. A small, neutral country was being invaded, and we were providing the barest of support. We were enforcing a Geneva Convention mandate, and worked with the indigenous people who carried the brunt of the fighting, and the casualties. Given what we had, we did a respectable job.

The left at the time could find nothing to protest in what we were doing, but they did anyway. Leftists have an innate desire to blame America for all the world’s evils. It was obvious to me, hearing our President speak about Laos, that he was one of the people who hadn’t taken the time to learn about our history and sacrifice in that very gracious and beautiful land. His speech inferred that the United States inflicted massive airstrikes and ruined cities. He expressed regret about the brutality of bombing a peaceful country. He used all the old clichés and leftist tropes (e.g., more bombs than on Europe in World War Two). He all but apologized for our attempt to defend Laos from the communists. And if he knew the first thing about the war we actually fought, he kept it a secret.

Phillip Jennings is an investment banker and entrepreneur, former United States Marine Corps pilot in Vietnam and Air America pilot in Laos. He was also an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency in Central and South America. He is the author of two novels and one best-selling non-fiction book, and received the Pirates Alley Faulkner Prize for fiction in 1999.

The General Andrew J. Goodpaster Lecture
Presented at the Meeting of the American Veterans’ Institute
Army-Navy Club
Washington, DC
3 June 2014

John F. Guilmartin, Jr.

Conventional wisdom holds the Vietnam War to be the most divisive and controversial war in our history, second only to the Civil War. That view enjoys support from all points of the political compass and all segments of the body politic, from the intelligentsia and media pundits to military veterans and everything between. For once conventional wisdom is right... except that there is no consensus on why conventional wisdom is right. Indeed, within the political and ideological spectrum just outlined there are starkly different interpretations of why the war was fought, how, and to what effect. That, I submit, is important, for if we are to draw meaningful lessons from the Vietnam War we must first understand it.

From whence comes understanding? The answer is history, and there we encounter immediate difficulty for the history of the Vietnam War is fraught with divisiveness, controversy and incoherence that rivals that of the war itself. The cause lies in the manner in which the history was written.

The first drafts of the histories of our previous wars were written by historians based on official records, supplemented by memoirs of senior leaders and intelligence on enemy capabilities and intentions that came to hand during and immediately after the war. The result—call it the orthodox interpretation—generally followed government policy. Then, as sources surfaced that were unavailable to the first wave of historians, new interpretations emerged. Call the resultant interpretations revisionist. Historians tested revisionist insights, and if they were valid incorporated them into their work and the quality of the history improved. That, at least, is how it worked in the past.

In contrast, the first draft of the history of the Vietnam War was written by journalists during the early stages of our military involvement. Moreover, the journalists in question were not detached observers, but were engaged in turning American public opinion against South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem. Far from accepting the validity of our government’s policy, the authors of the first daft rejected it, beginning with support of the Diem regime, as they labeled it… and I should explain at this point the difference between a regime and a government: A government is a regime of which the writer approves. A regime is a government of which the writer does not approve.

Preeminent among the journalists in question were Malcolm Browne of The Associated Press; Neill Sheehan of United Press International; David Halberstam of The New York Times; Peter Arnett of Associated Press; and Stanley Karnow who reported for Time, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, The Washington Post and NBC News.

The journalists’ campaign against Diem bore fruit, turning the Kennedy administration against him, leading to his overthrow and murder in a November 1963 coup implicitly endorsed by President Kennedy. Contrary to the journalists’ expectations, Diem’s removal did not lead to an improvement in the political and military situation. Instead, political chaos and military incoherence ensued, leading to the near collapse of South Vietnam in 1964 and massive American military intervention from the spring of 1965.

By then, the journalists’ revisionist interpretation had become orthodoxy, turning the usual process on its head. The new orthodoxy was well entrenched by the time of Diem’s fall and had been embraced by the bulk of the intelligentsia and the nascent but growing anti-war movement. It has showed remarkable staying power, the more so as it informed two popular television histories: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series, Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War, for which Peter Arnett was Chief Correspondent; and the Public Broadcasting Service series, Vietnam: A Television History, for which Stanley Karnow was Chief Correspondent. Both debuted in 1983, as did Karnow’s book Vietnam: A History, based on research for the PBS series. To the best of my knowledge, that book remains the most published and widely-read work on the subject in English and, together with the two television series, effectively forms the basis of what most Americans know—or think they know—about the war.

The underlying narrative in all these works holds that America’s military engagement in Vietnam was unjust, unnecessary and unwinnable. I am painting in the broadest of strokes and some orthodox works are more nuanced, but I am confident that my generalization is accurately descriptive of main stream orthodoxy. Beyond rejecting the validity of American policy, the orthodox interpretation is America-centric, holding that everything of consequence that happened did so as a result of American initiative. By contrast, Vietnamese are portrayed as stereotypes: passive peasant-victims; doughty Viet Cong; well-motivated and disciplined North Vietnamese regulars; brutal and corrupt ARVN (soldiers of the Army of [South] Vietnam); and so on. As is usually the case, there are elements of truth in these stereotypes, but there is much more to it than that.

Let me begin with the circumstances in 1960-1963 during which the orthodox interpretation was forged. The journalists who gave it birth had little if any previous experience in Vietnam. Much of their information concerning South Vietnamese society and politics came from Vietnamese journalist Pham Xuan An, a Reuters stringer who later became chief of Time magazine’s Saigon bureau. As we now know, An was a communist agent of influence. We can be sure that he spoon-fed his interpretations of the Diem government’s crackdown on Theravada Buddhist demonstrations to his American colleagues: Karnow and Halberstam were particularly dependent on him.[1] It was, of course, reportage of the crackdown that led to the Kennedy administration’s decision to support Diem’s overthrow. American media coverage of the self-immolation of Buddhist monks as an act of protest—coverage that was orchestrated by the communists, Buddhists, or both—was the tipping point.

News of An’s role as an agent of influence did not emerge until after the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, by which time the orthodox interpretation had gained general acceptance within academia and the mainstream news media. In the meantime, the imbedded notion that our military policy—citing a more extreme anti-war characterization—was one of atrocity, had gained legitimacy if not universal acceptance. In a gentler interpretation, we were doing more harm to the people of Vietnam (Cambodia was seldom mentioned and Laos largely ignored) with unrestrained firepower than would result from communist victory.

But what if Diem had been unjustly pilloried? What if his policies had, on the whole, been well-suited for the circumstances? What if our military policies, from beginning to end, were more humane than those of the enemy? If that were the case, then our failure to prosecute the war more aggressively after Diem’s overthrow and our abandonment to communist rule of the peoples of formerly-French Indochina was itself a crime. That was—and is—a difficult pill for exponents of the orthodox interpretation to swallow, hence the historiographical impasse.

To be sure, there were revisionist rebuttals, notably Guenter Lewy’s America in Vietnam published in 1978. More recently, Mark Moyer’s Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965, a strong but not uncritical defense of Diem and his policies, appeared in 2006. Both works accuse the orthodox interpretation of being dead wrong on every matter of substance and have, predictably, been greeted more with derision than rebuttal.

In addition, a handful of authors writing in English approached the war from non-American perspectives. Douglas Pike, the only American scholar to write about the war during the war using Vietnamese sources, published extensively on the Vietnamese communist party and its military arm, producing Viet Cong (1969) and PAVN: People’s Army of Vietnam (1986) in addition to numerous journal articles.[2] He dismissed the orthodox interpretation as irrelevant and was ignored by its exponents. Peter Dunn, The First Vietnam War (1985) addressed the earliest stages of the conflict in southern Vietnam from the British perspective. Bernard Fall, Austrian by birth, French by upbringing and American by higher education wrote prolifically on Vietnam from a French perspective. His Street Without Joy and Hell in a Very Small Place, dealing respectively with the French phase of the war and the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, are classics. Both appeared during the American phase of the war and the second, 1964, edition of Street Without Joy covered the American experience to date. Though Fall had a great deal to say about the American conduct of the war prior to his death in 1967 he was thinly reviewed in American scholarly journals[3], no doubt because his interpretations didn’t fit the orthodox mold. A staunch anti-communist, he criticized American policy not on the basis of its supposed immorality, but its ineffectiveness. I would add as an afterthought that the French have done a better job of documenting and analyzing their phase of the war than we Americans have done for ours.

How do we sort this out?

Turning first to realities, the Vietnam War was a major episode in world history. French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 marked the end of Western colonial empires. To be sure, we had agreed to give ours up, promising before World War II to grant the Philippines independence in 1946. The British gave up India in 1947 and Indonesia threw off Dutch rule to become an independent nation that same year. The Portuguese—remarkably—hung on until 1974, but Dien Bien Phu marked the beginning of the end.

American failure in Vietnam, marked by the fall of Saigon in 1975, saw the waning of the pax Americanus that had prevailed since the end of World War II. America would soldier on as the World’s policeman, but with diminished authority and credibility. Of arguably equal importance, our experience in Vietnam changed the way in which we Americans view our government, with trust giving way to eternal suspicion. Finally, the Vietnam War was a major campaign in the Cold War, though to what effect is a matter of debate. Did Soviet expenditures in support of North Vietnam—which were considerable—start the Soviet economy down the slope to collapse? This old soldier would like to think so, but the matter is up for grabs.

Now for myths and misconceptions. The orthodox interpretation holds that the underlying cause of the war was Vietnamese abhorrence of foreign domination, beginning with the thousand year struggle to throw off Chinese rule, followed by a renewed struggle for independence fueled by hatred of French colonialism, indeed, hatred of all foreign domination including American. After repeated failures to overthrow the French, this nationalist motivation found its opportunity in 1940 in the aftermath of France’s defeat by Germany and its direction in the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, portrayed as a nationalist first and a communist second. A pivotal factor in these developments, one glossed over in the orthodox interpretation, was Japanese intervention, beginning with military occupation of strategic points in French Indochina in September 1940, an occupation that first undermined the colonial regime’s credibility and then destroyed the regime itself.

Fueled by the peasantry’s acceptance of communist policy—land redistribution was the key issue—and given teeth by Vo Nguyen Giap’s training program and communist discipline, the anti-French resistance morphed into the militarily formidable Vietminh, a nationalist front organization with communist leadership at the top, and progressed from guerrilla resistance in 1941-45 to victory at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

In fact, the thousand year struggle was real, but consisted almost entirely of Vietnamese civil wars with one side accepting Chinese rule and the other opposing it. Significantly, when the anti-Chinese faction won, the victorious leader invariably petitioned the Chinese emperor for recognition.

Resentment of French rule, though by no means universal, was deep and real. So, too, was communist skill at forging guerrilla resistance and—the critical point—at determining when to engage in open revolt. That point, however, was determined not by the Vietnamese communists but by the Japanese Army in a March 1945 coup de main that disarmed and incarcerated the French security forces and colonial army. That gave the Vietminh, hard pressed by the French up to that point, breathing room and released from prison a thousand or so trained and indoctrinated communist cadres who went quickly to work organizing—and intimidating—the rural masses. To their credit, the communists moved swiftly to exploit the opportunity presented them by the Japanese, but it was the Japanese who created the opportunity, a point on which the orthodox interpretation is silent.

During this interval Ho Chi Minh and his group moved their base of operations from China into Vietnam and from April 1945 obtained American backing in money, materiel, and, in mid-July, the OSS equivalent of a Special Forces A team parachuted into the wilds of northwestern Tonkin.

Ho portrayed his organization as anti-Japanese to secure American support, but Vietminh operations against the Japanese were minimal. In fact the Japanese Army, in anticipation of defeat, had thrown its support to the Vietminh, meaning—as the Japanese surely knew—the communists. An American officer who parachuted into Ho’s base in mid-June stated that the Vietminh were backed by the Japanese, who supplied them with arms and ammunition from captured French stocks.[4]
When World War II was brought to an abrupt and unexpected end by the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Communists were ready to act, pulling the Vietminh in their wake. With remarkable prescience, Ho had earlier called for a Communist Party Congress that convened at his headquarters on 13 August, only four days after the Nagasaki bomb. It was followed by a Vietminh Congress from the 16th through the 18th. At Ho’s bequest, the Congresses declared Vietnam independent and declared war on Japan… ironically in that the Japanese had already notified American authorities of their willingness to surrender.

Meanwhile, the Communist Party’s Committee for Hanoi, meeting in secret and acting independently of Ho and the Party leadership, had decided that the moment for insurrection was near at hand. The moment came on August 17th when an armed propaganda team hijacked a mass rally of the Civil Servants Commission called to support independence under the Japanese-installed government of Emperor Bao Dai. Taking over the podium, the communists called for total independence and led a mass march on the Governor General’s palace. In the wake of the hijacking, the Communist leadership called for a general uprising. It went down on the 19th with columns marching on the Governor General’s Palace and the barracks of the Garde Indochinoise, the Bao Dai government’s army, where they took control of stores of arms and ammunition. Precisely how that transpired is unclear—Peter Dunn's sources say it was by pre-arrangement with the Japanese—but it is apparent on the face of it that the Japanese backed the coup that gave the Vietminh control of Hanoi.[5] It was a major communist victory, the first of the war, and essential to all that followed.

Nor did Japanese support for the Vietminh end there. Japanese Army “deserters” joined the Vietminh in significant numbers, including a military advisory group of 4,000 to 1,500 men—the numbers are in dispute—under a Lieutenant Colonel Mukayama.[6]
Ho Chi Minh’s famous proclamation of Vietnamese independence on September 2nd, using words that drew liberally from the American Declaration of Independence, formalized what had already transpired. The presence on stage behind the podium of members of a newly-arrived OSS team under Major Archimedes Patti reinforced the impression of American support.

There is considerable irony in the fact that Ho and the communists—who were not yet in full control of the Vietminh—had gained their first, essential, victory with American aid, more apparent than real, and Japanese aid, more real than apparent.

A persistent myth holds that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist who turned to the communists when the United States failed to recognize and support his government. In fact, it is clear from a cursory review of his résumé that Ho was a dedicated Marxist-Leninist revolutionary from the start.[7] Any doubts on this score can be seen in his March 1953 initiation of an “Identification of Class Enemies” campaign, a land redistribution program modeled after Stalin’s kulak (rich peasant) purges of the 1930s. Based on the dubious notion that there were significant class differences among the Vietnamese peasantry in the north, it empowered local tribunals that identified “rich peasants”, “reactionaries” and landowners, many of whom were summarily executed and their land seized [8] At its peak, the program took on the aspects of a witch hunt, sparking open rebellion in Nghe Anh Province in the autumn of 1956, over a year after French defeat and the separation of Vietnam into North and South. It is noteworthy that the uprising took place in that part of Vietnam that had been under communist control the longest. The uprising was put down by the People’s Army of Vietnam with considerable bloodshed.

The Identification of Class Enemies program was called off and Ho Chi Minh publicly apologized for its excesses on national radio. There followed a “Rectification of Errors” campaign accompanied by a wave of bitter recrimination as unjustly accused survivors were released from prison.

In the ensuing chaos, the Party recalled Le Duan from the south, where he was orchestrating resistance to the Diem government, and installed him as Party Secretary in which post he became North Vietnam’s leader, reducing Ho to a largely ceremonial role. This episode is significant for revealing the actual attitudes of Vietnamese peasants toward land redistribution and collectivation. It is also important for placing in power Le Duan, who used aggressive prosecution of the war in South Vietnam as a rallying point for political unity, a point for which we are indebted to recent work by historian Lien-Hang Nguyen.[9]
A byproduct of Le Duan’s consolidation of power was the elimination of any serious possibility of a negotiated settlement to the American phase of the war, for he was adamantly opposed to accepting anything less than a unified Vietnam under communist control. That is Hang Nguyen’s conclusion and I believe correct.

 
More myths and misconceptions with an emphasis on the American phase of the war:

Myth: It was a guerrilla war, a central tenant of the orthodox interpretation. Sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t. While it is true that guerrilla warfare—revolutionary war is a more accurate characterization, for propagandization and coercion were at least as important to communist theory and practice as small war tactics—went far to bleed French resources and exhaust American patience, the communists repeatedly turned to large-scale conventional operations as the key to victory as communist doctrine said they must. That was true of the French phase of the war where the Vietminh mounted four major conventional offensives, two of them abject failures, before victory in thoroughly conventional battle at Dien Bien Phu.[10] During the American phase, the communists mounted massive conventional offensives during the 1965 Pleiku Campaign, the 1968 Tet Offensive and the 1972 Easter Offensive, the first producing an equivocal outcome and the second two unequivocal communist defeats.[11]
Next in our list of myths, “The sorry little bastards won’t fight”—meaning the soldiers of the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam, or ARVN—is one of the most pernicious. It has its origins in the reaction of the first wave of American military advisors to what they perceived as a lack of aggressiveness among their Vietnamese charges. From their perspective, that was no doubt true. Heirs of a tradition of willingness to accept casualties in return for immediate tactical gain, they found themselves dealing with an army that was in it for the long haul in a war in which clear cut tactical victories were rare.[12] Their complaints were echoed by politicians of hawkish and dovish persuasion alike: “Why should American boys die for Vietnam when Vietnamese boys won’t die for Vietnam?” was the cry. In fact Vietnamese boys did die for their country, and in huge numbers.

The official ARVN casualty toll for the American phase of the war—not counting the final year for which records were not kept—was 1,394,000 including 224,000 killed in action.[13] Given South Vietnam’s population of about fourteen million, an equivalent share of America’s populace of some two-hundred million would have been 3,200,000 killed-in-action. Nor is the myth vitiated by mere numbers. The quality of leadership at corps and division level deteriorated in the chaos following the widespread purge of loyalist officers following Diem’s overthrow and the ARVN had its share of marginal units, but by and large elite units—Airborne, Marines, Ranger battalions and, later, the 1st Division—put in exemplary performances and ordinary units fought well more often than not. That includes elements of the oft-derided Regional Forces/Popular Forces (local militia, the so-called “Ruff-Puffs”), right up to the bitter end. To be sure, some units dissolved in the chaos of the final, overwhelming, 1975 invasion, undercut by drastic cutoffs in ammunition allowances and the reduction of South Vietnamese air power’s effectiveness by Soviet-provided surface-to-air missiles, but the ARVN put in some of the finest combat performances in the annals of warfare during the awful spring of 1975. A case in point is the 9-20 April Battle of Xuan Loc on the eastern approaches to Saigon, where the ARVN 18th Division reinforced by the remains of the Airborne Brigade fought a reinforced North Vietnamese corps with massive armor support to a bloody standstill despite artillery inferiority.[14] Another case in point is the last stand on Tan Son Nhut Airfield of the 81st Airborne Ranger Group, who fought on after the departure of the last Americans, taking out T-55 tanks with unguided, shoulder-fired anti-tank rockets until they ran out of ammunition.

Myth: Our bombing of North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail was unnecessary at best and inhumane at worst. This myth is closely linked to the “It was a guerrilla war” myth. If it were, in fact, a guerilla war, then the logistical requirements of communist forces in the South would have been satisfied by locally-obtained food and captured arms and munitions and little external supply would have been needed. This belief at times bled over into American intelligence estimates. A May 1966 appraisal endorsed by Secretary of Defense McNamara held that the external re-supply requirements of communist forces in the south could be met by seven 21/2 ton trucks a day.[15] That, of course, was utterly untrue. In fact, the supposed insurgency in the south was dependent on arms, supplies and reinforcement from the North from the beginning, unequivocally from 1959 (the opening of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the overland route through Laos) and preemptively so from 1964.

The critical importance of the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the communist war effort is emphasized in Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954-1975, published in 1994 and released in English translation in 2002[16], a significant embarrassment to exponents of the orthodox interpretation. Selected passages underline the critical importance of maintaining the flow of men and materiel from China and the port of Haiphong through North Vietnam and down the Trail to the South. They also underline the impressive scale of resources devoted to maintaining the flow.[17] Nor were those resources limited to surface-to-air missile batteries, an air defense radar net, MiG jet fighters, anti-aircraft guns, road repair crews, earth-moving equipment and the maintenance of a large truck fleet. “Peace feelers”, advanced in exchange for bombing halts, were an integral and successful element of communist strategy. So were attempts to influence US media coverage of our bombing.

The latter focused on our bombing of targets in North Vietnam, and had the dual purpose of making our bombing appear inhumane on the one hand and ineffective on the other. Perhaps the most egregious example involves December 1966 reportage from Hanoi by New York Times assistant managing editor Harrison Salisbury in which he stated that we were "dropping an enormous weight of explosives on purely civilian targets." He further stated that "on-the-spot inspection indicates that American bombing has been inflicting considerable civilian casualties in Hanoi and its environs for some time."regious example involves December 1966 reportage from Hanoi by New York Times assistant managing editor Harrison Salisbury in which he stated that we were “dropping an enormous weight of explosives on purely civilian targets.” He further stated that “on-the-spot inspection indicates that American bombing has been inflicting considerable civilian casualties in Hanoi and its envions for some time past”,[18] In fact, contrary to his representations, Salisbury was not an eye-witness. Moreover, much of his copy was written by Australian communist Wilfred Burchett, Salisbury’s “facilitator” during his visit to North Vietnam, and copied from official North Vietnamese press releases.[19]
Another telling example can be found in the New York Times lead editorial for Sunday, February 4th 1968. Written four days after the start of the communist 1968 Tet Offensive, the editorial proclaimed that if the “spectacularly successful Tet offensive had proved anything it was that the bombing of North Vietnam had failed to reduce either the enemy’s will or capacity to fight.”[20] As we now know and as some journalists realized at the time, the offensive was a military disaster for the communists. The prominence given to discrediting the bombing as opposed, for example, to excoriating the misguided and politically-motivated optimism in LBJ’s, McNamara’s and Westmoreland’s public statements in the months before the Tet Offensive or extolling the fighting spirit of the Viet Cong and NVA suggests an eagerness to influence our policy in a way most likely to be helpful to the communist cause.

Next on our parade of myths: The news media did not lose the war. This myth reflects the belief that waning support for our war effort by the American public, and ultimately by our political leadership, was based on an accurate appraisal of military failure and the immorality of our policies rather than on biased and negative media coverage. Belief in this myth was and is a staple of the orthodox interpretation and an article of faith to the bulk of the intelligentsia, to mainstream media pundits and among the anti-war faithful. In a neat bit of intellectual ju-jitsu, exponents of the orthodox interpretation reverse the polarity, portraying as a myth revisionist arguments that the news media did play a central role in losing the war.

The data relevant to supporting or debunking this myth is enormous, and I turn to my own observations to condense the argument. I enrolled as a graduate student in history at Princeton University under Air Force sponsorship in the autumn of 1967. I had returned from my first Southeast Asia combat tour in the summer of 1966 and had spent the intervening year as a flight instructor at the Air Rescue Service Combat Crew Training School where I kept track of current intelligence. As soon as my fellow graduate students recovered from the shock of having a combat veteran in their midst, they asked me what I thought about the debate about the war, very much a hot topic on campus. I responded that I would be happy to tell them about the war on the ground in Southeast Asia, but that they would not learn about it from coverage in what we have come to call the mainstream media, meaning in context the New York Times, the AP and UPI wire services and ABC, CBS and NBC television news. “The debate,” I said, “is not about the war at all. It’s about who should run the country based on what foreign policy assumptions.” Today, over forty-five years later, I stand by that characterization.

To hold my own in the ensuing discussions, for the next two and a half years I tracked on a daily basis relevant coverage in the New York Times and watched the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news roundups (in those days, they were only thirty minutes long and aired in sequence). Coverage of the war on the ground in Southeast Asia was short on operational and strategic context and long on details that called into question the morality and effectiveness of our commitment. The adverse effects of American firepower on the civilian populace were highlighted. Communist atrocities were downplayed or ignored. The classic example of the latter, and a telling one, is the contrast between the extensive coverage given to the My Lai massacre and the sketchy coverage accorded the Hue massacres, where communist forces during the 1968 Têt Offensive rounded up and executed some six thousand civilians.

It seemed clear at the time, and is clearer in retrospect, that the mainstream media were unwilling to publicize unsavory aspects of communist policy. An example from February 1968 makes the point: Viewing the disinterment of a mass grave containing victims of the Hue massacre, West German journalist Uwe Siemon-Netto in company with American journalist Peter Braestrup encountered an American television crew standing idly by. It was clear from the condition of the corpses that many of the victims had been buried alive. “Why?” asked Braestrup, “don’t you film this?” “We are not here to film anti-Communist propaganda” said the camera man [21], a small, but telling detail.

I should add that Braestrup, Saigon Bureau Chief of the Washington Post at the time, broke ranks with his mainstream colleagues by publishing a thorough, critical account of media coverage of the 1968 Têt Offensive, The Big Story (1977).[22] It is worth noting that Braestrup, in contrast to his media colleagues, was a combat veteran, having served as a Marine infantry officer in Korea.

Braestrup’s critique applies to media coverage of the entire war, both because the deficiencies in reportage and interpretation in coverage of the 1968 Têt Offensive were representative of coverage of the war as a whole, and because coverage of the 1968 Têt offensive played a major role in turning public opinion against support of our military effort in Vietnam. The attack on the US Embassy by Viet Cong sappers was portrayed as representative of the success of the entire offensive while the rapid reassertion of government control throughout South Vietnam was essentially ignored.[23] The battle for Hue—the only significant communist success in the first wave attacks, though in the end a communist defeat—was hardly typical of the fighting in general, but received extensive coverage... and here I would dispel another myth: that “television brought the war into our living rooms.”

There is an element of truth in this myth in that discussion of the war was ubiquitous in television news coverage. That having been said, coverage of the war on the ground was minimal. The period of my survey saw considerable footage of stretchers being loaded on to and off of helicopters, typically with an audio gunfire background (in my judgment mostly dubbed in), and early morning interviews of dazed survivors of nearly-overrun fire bases by freshly helicoptered-in reporters, but little to no actual combat footage. Tellingly, the US media all but ignored the ARVN.

In fact, Têt 1968 was a massive defeat for the communist forces, whose few and ephemeral successes in the first phase (January through early March) were overshadowed in operational reality by staggering losses, particularly in the second and third phases (May and August), and particularly among the Viet Cong, who were effectively eliminated as a military factor in the war. That was not the impression conveyed by mainstream media coverage.

The turning point came on 27 February when CBS television anchor man Walter Cronkite, just having returned from a whirlwind tour of South Vietnam, during which he witnessed evidence of the Hue massacres, pronounced on the evening news that

It now seems more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer’s almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation: and for every means we have to escalate the enemy can match us.[24]
He went on to add that “the only rational way out will be to negotiate, not as victors but as an honorable people.” President Lyndon Johnson, watching the broadcast, famously commented to Press Secretary George Christian, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”[25] Whatever the verdict on Johnson as a war leader, his political instincts with regard to voter sentiment were keen, amounting in this case to an accurate prophecy… albeit a self-fulfilling one that Johnson made good by announcing on 31 March a bombing halt against targets in northern North Vietnam, his decision to enter into negotiations with the North Vietnamese and his decision not to run for reelection. By that time, our political leadership had overwhelmingly endorsed the media interpretation and the rest is history.

I will conclude with a final myth, one derived from those discussed above and revealing in its content: that the outcome of the war was not so horrible for the peoples of Indochina. Though rarely stated so baldly, this myth was embraced in the bulk of the immediate post-war media coverage. Eventually, promulgation of this myth was suppressed by overwhelming evidence to the contrary, but only after extended delay.

The mainstream media covered the exodus of the Vietnamese boat people (though not the reasons for it), but they had little to say about Vietnam’s “reeducation camps” and for four years turned a blind eye to the horrors of Khymer Rouge rule in Cambodia. This despite the fact that the realities of the Killing Fields and The Year Zero were amply reported in Thailand and thus known to the international community including media representatives. I was stationed in Thailand at the time, and my specific reference is to coverage in the Bangkok Post, a first-rate English language newspaper which I read on a daily basis from the spring of 1975 until late December.

To appreciate the extent of the American media’s blind eye to events in Cambodia some background is in order. The area of western Cambodia contiguous to Thailand, the Battembang Rice Triangle, had never been under communist guerrilla influence and there was considerable cross-border commerce. In addition, Buddhist shrines to the north of the triangle attracted a steady flow of Thai pilgrims. When Phnom Penh fell to the communists on 17 April, considerable numbers of Thais were caught inside Cambodia. Through the spring and into the fall, survivors worked their way out, bringing with them eyewitness accounts of the horrors of Khymer Rouge rule: forced relocation of urban dwellers to “new economic zones”, executions of the educated, of Buddhist monks, of eyeglass wearers and so on. Their accounts were credible and well-reported in the Thai-language press as well as the Post.[26] Beyond the ability to assign numerical estimates to the Khymer Rouge death toll, I have learned nothing about the Year Zero and Killing Fields since. Coverage by the mainstream media—perhaps I should say recognition—began only after the escape from Cambodia in October of 1979 of New York Times reporter Sydney Schamberg’s Khymer cameraman Dith Pran.

Might a reluctance to admit that they played a major role in prompting American withdrawal from the war leading to the terrible carnage that followed help to explain media silence on the issues in question? I leave it to you, the reader, to decide.

What are we to make of our catalogue of realities and myths?

Returning to my opening comments, if we are to learn from history, we must get it right. In conslusion, I ask you, the reader, to reflect on the number of major foreign policy decisions by our government in the post-Vietnam era—not all with happy consequences—that appear to have been driven by acceptance of the lessons of the orthodox interpretation of the Vietnam War.

 
John F. Guilmartin, Jr.

Columbus, Ohio

[1] An was not the only such agent, though far and away the most influential one. Members of the Saigon intelligentsia, who loathed Diem and assiduously courted American journalists, contributed as well. Another was ARVN officer Albert Pham Ngoc Thao who served in various senior positions including province chief and head of the Strategic Hamlet Program. As a province chief, he appears as a source in Malcolm Browne, The New Face of War (Indianapolis and New York, 1965), the first of the journalist-historians’ work published between hard covers.

[2] Pike, a Foreign Service Officer, first attracted public notice with his analysis of the massacre of civilians by communist forces in Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive.

[3] A student in my summer 1998 graduate seminar on the history of the Vietnam War at Ohio State University did a literature search for reviews of Street Without Joy and Hell in a Very Small Place in the standard scholarly journals, e.g. American Historical Review and Journal of American History, and came up with remarkably few reviews—from memory no more than half a dozen—and those were tepid.

[4] Peter Dunn, First Vietnam War, 41-2. The officer was almost certainly Major Dan Phelan of the China-based 14th Air Force AGAS (Air Ground Aid Service) who worked with Charles Fenn, the OSS agent responsible for arranging OSS support for Ho and the Vietminh. See also Dixee Bartholomew-Feis, The OSS and Ho Chi Minh: Unexpected Allies in the War Against Japan, 220-221, photos from the National Archives, Green Belt, Maryland, of the arrival in August 1945 of the first armed Vietminh in Hanoi. Vietminh in the photos whose weapons can be identified are armed with French 7.5 mm rifles, specifically the Mousqueton d’Artillerie Modèle 1892 and the Fusil des Tirallieurs Indo-Chinois Modèle 1902. The one soldier with an automatic weapon is carrying a Chateralleault Fusil Mitrailleur; Ian Hogg and John Weeks, Military Small Arms of the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1973), 3.05-3.06; Hogg and Weeks, The Encyclopedia of Infantry Weapons of World War II (New York, 1977), 101.

[5] Archimedes Patti, Why Viet Nam? 166-67, Dunn, First Vietnam War, 17.

[6] James Dunnigan and Albert Nofi, Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War (New York, 1999), 38-39, cited in James S. Corum and Wray R. Johnson, Airpower In Small Wars: Fighting Insurgents and Terrorists (Lawrence, Kansas: 2003), 43.

[7] See Sophie Quinn-Judge, Ho Chi Minh: the Missing Years, 1919-1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Based on extensive research in Soviet and French Archives including files of the Comintern and Sûreté, Quinn-Judge thoroughly documents Ho’s ideological background and proclivities.

[8] Fall, Two Viet Nams, 155. A case can be made for class differences among the Vietnamese peasantry in the south, where a small class of relatively well-to-do landlords and a large body of landless peasants existed, but that was most assuredly not the case in the north where the vast majority of peasants—Fall says 98%—owned the land they worked.

[9] Le Duan’s role as a power behind the scenes and exponent of a hard line on the war in the South was long suspected, but not the extent to which he became effective dictator. Lien-Hang Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (2012).

[10] These were a major failed offensive in the south in August 1950, the destruction of French forces along the Chinese border in October 1950; the failed attempt to break into the Red River Delta in January-June 1951; and the 1952-1953 Winter-Spring offensive into Laos. To this we can add the conventional response to the November 1951-February 1952 French Hoa Binh offensive in the north.

[11] The October-November 1965 Pleiku Campaign, chronicled in Hal Moore and Joe Galloway’s, We Were Soldiers Once and Young and in the Mel Gibson move We Were Soldiers Once culminated in American defensive victory at LZ X-Ray and defeat at LZ Albany (not addressed in the Gibson movie). The campaign’s outcome was equivocal in that both the US and North Vietnamese abandoned overtly aggressive orientations in its aftermath.

[12] We do not ordinarily think of American military commanders as prone to accept heavy casualties, but it is a matter of record. In World War II American commanders were routinely willing to accept casualties that their British colleagues considered unacceptable. The same contrast applied to American and Australian forces in Vietnam.

[13] John F. Guilmartin, “Casualties”, Stanley I. Kutler, ed., Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (New York, 1996), 103-105.

[14] George J. Veith and Merle Pribbenow, “‘Fighting Is an Art”: The Army of the Republic of Vietnam’s Defense of Xuan Loc, 9-21 April 1975”, Journal of Military History, Vol. 68, No. 1 (January 2004), 163-213.

[15] Mark Clodfelter, The Limits of Air Power: The American Bombing of North Vietnam (New York, 1989), 134-35.

[16] (Merle L. Pribbenow, tr. (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas), originally published in Vietnamese as History of the People’s Army of Vietnam (Hanoi, Vietnamese Ministry of Defense Military History Institute).

[17] Victory in Vietnam, 52-54, 168-69, 225-26, 242 and 261-68.

[18] New York Times, December 25 and 27, 1966, quoted in Wayne Thompson, To Hanoi and Back: The U.S. Air Force and North Vietnam, 1966-1973 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), 45.

[19] Robert Manne, Agent of Influence: The Life and Times of Wilfred Burchett, Mackinzie Paper No. 13 (Toronto, 1989), 48-50. Burchett was involved in exploiting American POWs in communist hands in Korea and Vietnam and played a major role in actress Jane Fonda’s notorious 1972 visit to North Vietnam.

[20] Paraphrased in Wayne Thompson, To Hanoi and Back: The U.S. Air Force and North Vietnam, 1966-1973 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), 123.

[21] Uwe Siemon-Netto, Duc: A Reporter's Love for the Wounded People of Vietnam (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (July 10, 2013), 211-13.

[22] The Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington, 2 vols. (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1977).

[23] See Donald M. Bishop’ review of The Big Story, “The Press and the TET Offensive: A Flawed Institution Under Stress”, Air University Review (November-December 1978).

[24] Quoted in Henry Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 47.

[25] Quoted in Philip Davidson, Vietnam at War, The History, 1945-1975 (Novato, California: Presidio Press, 1988), 486.

[26] Speaking only minimal Thai and reading it not at all, I was kept informed by Captain Daniel Jacobowitz, USAF, and his wife Saifon, a native Thai speaker.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The Vietnam War: Realities, Myths and MisconceptionsThe General Andrew J. Goodpaster Lecture

Presented at the Meeting of the American Veterans’ Institute
Army-Navy Club

Washington, DC

3 June 2014

 
 
John F. Guilmartin, Jr.

 
 
 
 
Conventional wisdom holds the Vietnam War to be the most divisive and controversial war in our history, second only to the Civil War. That view enjoys support from all points of the political compass and all segments of the body politic, from the intelligentsia and media pundits to military veterans and everything between. For once conventional wisdom is right... except that there is no consensus on why conventional wisdom is right. Indeed, within the political and ideological spectrum just outlined there are starkly different interpretations of why the war was fought, how, and to what effect. That, I submit, is important, for if we are to draw meaningful lessons from the Vietnam War we must first understand it.

From whence comes understanding? The answer is history, and there we encounter immediate difficulty for the history of the Vietnam War is fraught with divisiveness, controversy and incoherence that rivals that of the war itself. The cause lies in the manner in which the history was written.

The first drafts of the histories of our previous wars were written by historians based on official records, supplemented by memoirs of senior leaders and intelligence on enemy capabilities and intentions that came to hand during and immediately after the war. The result—call it the orthodox interpretation—generally followed government policy. Then, as sources surfaced that were unavailable to the first wave of historians, new interpretations emerged. Call the resultant interpretations revisionist. Historians tested revisionist insights, and if they were valid incorporated them into their work and the quality of the history improved. That, at least, is how it worked in the past.

In contrast, the first draft of the history of the Vietnam War was written by journalists during the early stages of our military involvement. Moreover, the journalists in question were not detached observers, but were engaged in turning American public opinion against South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem. Far from accepting the validity of our government’s policy, the authors of the first daft rejected it, beginning with support of the Diem regime, as they labeled it… and I should explain at this point the difference between a regime and a government: A government is a regime of which the writer approves. A regime is a government of which the writer does not approve.

Preeminent among the journalists in question were Malcolm Browne of The Associated Press; Neill Sheehan of United Press International; David Halberstam of The New York Times; Peter Arnett of Associated Press; and Stanley Karnow who reported for Time, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, The Washington Post and NBC News.

The journalists’ campaign against Diem bore fruit, turning the Kennedy administration against him, leading to his overthrow and murder in a November 1963 coup implicitly endorsed by President Kennedy. Contrary to the journalists’ expectations, Diem’s removal did not lead to an improvement in the political and military situation. Instead, political chaos and military incoherence ensued, leading to the near collapse of South Vietnam in 1964 and massive American military intervention from the spring of 1965.

By then, the journalists’ revisionist interpretation had become orthodoxy, turning the usual process on its head. The new orthodoxy was well entrenched by the time of Diem’s fall and had been embraced by the bulk of the intelligentsia and the nascent but growing anti-war movement. It has showed remarkable staying power, the more so as it informed two popular television histories: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series, Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War, for which Peter Arnett was Chief Correspondent; and the Public Broadcasting Service series, Vietnam: A Television History, for which Stanley Karnow was Chief Correspondent. Both debuted in 1983, as did Karnow’s book Vietnam: A History, based on research for the PBS series. To the best of my knowledge, that book remains the most published and widely-read work on the subject in English and, together with the two television series, effectively forms the basis of what most Americans know—or think they know—about the war.

The underlying narrative in all these works holds that America’s military engagement in Vietnam was unjust, unnecessary and unwinnable. I am painting in the broadest of strokes and some orthodox works are more nuanced, but I am confident that my generalization is accurately descriptive of main stream orthodoxy. Beyond rejecting the validity of American policy, the orthodox interpretation is America-centric, holding that everything of consequence that happened did so as a result of American initiative. By contrast, Vietnamese are portrayed as stereotypes: passive peasant-victims; doughty Viet Cong; well-motivated and disciplined North Vietnamese regulars; brutal and corrupt ARVN (soldiers of the Army of [South] Vietnam); and so on. As is usually the case, there are elements of truth in these stereotypes, but there is much more to it than that.

 
Let me begin with the circumstances in 1960-1963 during which the orthodox interpretation was forged. The journalists who gave it birth had little if any previous experience in Vietnam. Much of their information concerning South Vietnamese society and politics came from Vietnamese journalist Pham Xuan An, a Reuters stringer who later became chief of Time magazine’s Saigon bureau. As we now know, An was a communist agent of influence. We can be sure that he spoon-fed his interpretations of the Diem government’s crackdown on Theravada Buddhist demonstrations to his American colleagues: Karnow and Halberstam were particularly dependent on him.[1] It was, of course, reportage of the crackdown that led to the Kennedy administration’s decision to support Diem’s overthrow. American media coverage of the self-immolation of Buddhist monks as an act of protest—coverage that was orchestrated by the communists, Buddhists, or both—was the tipping point.

News of An’s role as an agent of influence did not emerge until after the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, by which time the orthodox interpretation had gained general acceptance within academia and the mainstream news media. In the meantime, the imbedded notion that our military policy—citing a more extreme anti-war characterization—was one of atrocity, had gained legitimacy if not universal acceptance. In a gentler interpretation, we were doing more harm to the people of Vietnam (Cambodia was seldom mentioned and Laos largely ignored) with unrestrained firepower than would result from communist victory.

But what if Diem had been unjustly pilloried? What if his policies had, on the whole, been well-suited for the circumstances? What if our military policies, from beginning to end, were more humane than those of the enemy? If that were the case, then our failure to prosecute the war more aggressively after Diem’s overthrow and our abandonment to communist rule of the peoples of formerly-French Indochina was itself a crime. That was—and is—a difficult pill for exponents of the orthodox interpretation to swallow, hence the historiographical impasse.

To be sure, there were revisionist rebuttals, notably Guenter Lewy’s America in Vietnam published in 1978. More recently, Mark Moyer’s Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965, a strong but not uncritical defense of Diem and his policies, appeared in 2006. Both works accuse the orthodox interpretation of being dead wrong on every matter of substance and have, predictably, been greeted more with derision than rebuttal.

In addition, a handful of authors writing in English approached the war from non-American perspectives. Douglas Pike, the only American scholar to write about the war during the war using Vietnamese sources, published extensively on the Vietnamese communist party and its military arm, producing Viet Cong (1969) and PAVN: People’s Army of Vietnam (1986) in addition to numerous journal articles.[2] He dismissed the orthodox interpretation as irrelevant and was ignored by its exponents. Peter Dunn, The First Vietnam War (1985) addressed the earliest stages of the conflict in southern Vietnam from the British perspective. Bernard Fall, Austrian by birth, French by upbringing and American by higher education wrote prolifically on Vietnam from a French perspective. His Street Without Joy and Hell in a Very Small Place, dealing respectively with the French phase of the war and the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, are classics. Both appeared during the American phase of the war and the second, 1964, edition of Street Without Joy covered the American experience to date. Though Fall had a great deal to say about the American conduct of the war prior to his death in 1967 he was thinly reviewed in American scholarly journals[3], no doubt because his interpretations didn’t fit the orthodox mold. A staunch anti-communist, he criticized American policy not on the basis of its supposed immorality, but its ineffectiveness. I would add as an afterthought that the French have done a better job of documenting and analyzing their phase of the war than we Americans have done for ours.

How do we sort this out?

Turning first to realities, the Vietnam War was a major episode in world history. French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 marked the end of Western colonial empires. To be sure, we had agreed to give ours up, promising before World War II to grant the Philippines independence in 1946. The British gave up India in 1947 and Indonesia threw off Dutch rule to become an independent nation that same year. The Portuguese—remarkably—hung on until 1974, but Dien Bien Phu marked the beginning of the end.

American failure in Vietnam, marked by the fall of Saigon in 1975, saw the waning of the pax Americanus that had prevailed since the end of World War II. America would soldier on as the World’s policeman, but with diminished authority and credibility. Of arguably equal importance, our experience in Vietnam changed the way in which we Americans view our government, with trust giving way to eternal suspicion. Finally, the Vietnam War was a major campaign in the Cold War, though to what effect is a matter of debate. Did Soviet expenditures in support of North Vietnam—which were considerable—start the Soviet economy down the slope to collapse? This old soldier would like to think so, but the matter is up for grabs.

Now for myths and misconceptions. The orthodox interpretation holds that the underlying cause of the war was Vietnamese abhorrence of foreign domination, beginning with the thousand year struggle to throw off Chinese rule, followed by a renewed struggle for independence fueled by hatred of French colonialism, indeed, hatred of all foreign domination including American. After repeated failures to overthrow the French, this nationalist motivation found its opportunity in 1940 in the aftermath of France’s defeat by Germany and its direction in the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, portrayed as a nationalist first and a communist second. A pivotal factor in these developments, one glossed over in the orthodox interpretation, was Japanese intervention, beginning with military occupation of strategic points in French Indochina in September 1940, an occupation that first undermined the colonial regime’s credibility and then destroyed the regime itself.

Fueled by the peasantry’s acceptance of communist policy—land redistribution was the key issue—and given teeth by Vo Nguyen Giap’s training program and communist discipline, the anti-French resistance morphed into the militarily formidable Vietminh, a nationalist front organization with communist leadership at the top, and progressed from guerrilla resistance in 1941-45 to victory at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

In fact, the thousand year struggle was real, but consisted almost entirely of Vietnamese civil wars with one side accepting Chinese rule and the other opposing it. Significantly, when the anti-Chinese faction won, the victorious leader invariably petitioned the Chinese emperor for recognition.

Resentment of French rule, though by no means universal, was deep and real. So, too, was communist skill at forging guerrilla resistance and—the critical point—at determining when to engage in open revolt. That point, however, was determined not by the Vietnamese communists but by the Japanese Army in a March 1945 coup de main that disarmed and incarcerated the French security forces and colonial army. That gave the Vietminh, hard pressed by the French up to that point, breathing room and released from prison a thousand or so trained and indoctrinated communist cadres who went quickly to work organizing—and intimidating—the rural masses. To their credit, the communists moved swiftly to exploit the opportunity presented them by the Japanese, but it was the Japanese who created the opportunity, a point on which the orthodox interpretation is silent.

During this interval Ho Chi Minh and his group moved their base of operations from China into Vietnam and from April 1945 obtained American backing in money, materiel, and, in mid-July, the OSS equivalent of a Special Forces A team parachuted into the wilds of northwestern Tonkin.

Ho portrayed his organization as anti-Japanese to secure American support, but Vietminh operations against the Japanese were minimal. In fact the Japanese Army, in anticipation of defeat, had thrown its support to the Vietminh, meaning—as the Japanese surely knew—the communists. An American officer who parachuted into Ho’s base in mid-June stated that the Vietminh were backed by the Japanese, who supplied them with arms and ammunition from captured French stocks.[4]
When World War II was brought to an abrupt and unexpected end by the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Communists were ready to act, pulling the Vietminh in their wake. With remarkable prescience, Ho had earlier called for a Communist Party Congress that convened at his headquarters on 13 August, only four days after the Nagasaki bomb. It was followed by a Vietminh Congress from the 16th through the 18th. At Ho’s bequest, the Congresses declared Vietnam independent and declared war on Japan… ironically in that the Japanese had already notified American authorities of their willingness to surrender.

Meanwhile, the Communist Party’s Committee for Hanoi, meeting in secret and acting independently of Ho and the Party leadership, had decided that the moment for insurrection was near at hand. The moment came on August 17th when an armed propaganda team hijacked a mass rally of the Civil Servants Commission called to support independence under the Japanese-installed government of Emperor Bao Dai. Taking over the podium, the communists called for total independence and led a mass march on the Governor General’s palace. In the wake of the hijacking, the Communist leadership called for a general uprising. It went down on the 19th with columns marching on the Governor General’s Palace and the barracks of the Garde Indochinoise, the Bao Dai government’s army, where they took control of stores of arms and ammunition. Precisely how that transpired is unclear—Peter Dunn's sources say it was by pre-arrangement with the Japanese—but it is apparent on the face of it that the Japanese backed the coup that gave the Vietminh control of Hanoi.[5] It was a major communist victory, the first of the war, and essential to all that followed.

Nor did Japanese support for the Vietminh end there. Japanese Army “deserters” joined the Vietminh in significant numbers, including a military advisory group of 4,000 to 1,500 men—the numbers are in dispute—under a Lieutenant Colonel Mukayama.[6]
Ho Chi Minh’s famous proclamation of Vietnamese independence on September 2nd, using words that drew liberally from the American Declaration of Independence, formalized what had already transpired. The presence on stage behind the podium of members of a newly-arrived OSS team under Major Archimedes Patti reinforced the impression of American support.

There is considerable irony in the fact that Ho and the communists—who were not yet in full control of the Vietminh—had gained their first, essential, victory with American aid, more apparent than real, and Japanese aid, more real than apparent.

A persistent myth holds that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist who turned to the communists when the United States failed to recognize and support his government. In fact, it is clear from a cursory review of his résumé that Ho was a dedicated Marxist-Leninist revolutionary from the start.[7] Any doubts on this score can be seen in his March 1953 initiation of an “Identification of Class Enemies” campaign, a land redistribution program modeled after Stalin’s kulak (rich peasant) purges of the 1930s. Based on the dubious notion that there were significant class differences among the Vietnamese peasantry in the north, it empowered local tribunals that identified “rich peasants”, “reactionaries” and landowners, many of whom were summarily executed and their land seized [8] At its peak, the program took on the aspects of a witch hunt, sparking open rebellion in Nghe Anh Province in the autumn of 1956, over a year after French defeat and the separation of Vietnam into North and South. It is noteworthy that the uprising took place in that part of Vietnam that had been under communist control the longest. The uprising was put down by the People’s Army of Vietnam with considerable bloodshed.

The Identification of Class Enemies program was called off and Ho Chi Minh publicly apologized for its excesses on national radio. There followed a “Rectification of Errors” campaign accompanied by a wave of bitter recrimination as unjustly accused survivors were released from prison.

In the ensuing chaos, the Party recalled Le Duan from the south, where he was orchestrating resistance to the Diem government, and installed him as Party Secretary in which post he became North Vietnam’s leader, reducing Ho to a largely ceremonial role. This episode is significant for revealing the actual attitudes of Vietnamese peasants toward land redistribution and collectivation. It is also important for placing in power Le Duan, who used aggressive prosecution of the war in South Vietnam as a rallying point for political unity, a point for which we are indebted to recent work by historian Lien-Hang Nguyen.[9]
A byproduct of Le Duan’s consolidation of power was the elimination of any serious possibility of a negotiated settlement to the American phase of the war, for he was adamantly opposed to accepting anything less than a unified Vietnam under communist control. That is Hang Nguyen’s conclusion and I believe correct.

 
More myths and misconceptions with an emphasis on the American phase of the war:

Myth: It was a guerrilla war, a central tenant of the orthodox interpretation. Sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t. While it is true that guerrilla warfare—revolutionary war is a more accurate characterization, for propagandization and coercion were at least as important to communist theory and practice as small war tactics—went far to bleed French resources and exhaust American patience, the communists repeatedly turned to large-scale conventional operations as the key to victory as communist doctrine said they must. That was true of the French phase of the war where the Vietminh mounted four major conventional offensives, two of them abject failures, before victory in thoroughly conventional battle at Dien Bien Phu.[10] During the American phase, the communists mounted massive conventional offensives during the 1965 Pleiku Campaign, the 1968 Tet Offensive and the 1972 Easter Offensive, the first producing an equivocal outcome and the second two unequivocal communist defeats.[11]
Next in our list of myths, “The sorry little bastards won’t fight”—meaning the soldiers of the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam, or ARVN—is one of the most pernicious. It has its origins in the reaction of the first wave of American military advisors to what they perceived as a lack of aggressiveness among their Vietnamese charges. From their perspective, that was no doubt true. Heirs of a tradition of willingness to accept casualties in return for immediate tactical gain, they found themselves dealing with an army that was in it for the long haul in a war in which clear cut tactical victories were rare.[12] Their complaints were echoed by politicians of hawkish and dovish persuasion alike: “Why should American boys die for Vietnam when Vietnamese boys won’t die for Vietnam?” was the cry. In fact Vietnamese boys did die for their country, and in huge numbers.

The official ARVN casualty toll for the American phase of the war—not counting the final year for which records were not kept—was 1,394,000 including 224,000 killed in action.[13] Given South Vietnam’s population of about fourteen million, an equivalent share of America’s populace of some two-hundred million would have been 3,200,000 killed-in-action. Nor is the myth vitiated by mere numbers. The quality of leadership at corps and division level deteriorated in the chaos following the widespread purge of loyalist officers following Diem’s overthrow and the ARVN had its share of marginal units, but by and large elite units—Airborne, Marines, Ranger battalions and, later, the 1st Division—put in exemplary performances and ordinary units fought well more often than not. That includes elements of the oft-derided Regional Forces/Popular Forces (local militia, the so-called “Ruff-Puffs”), right up to the bitter end. To be sure, some units dissolved in the chaos of the final, overwhelming, 1975 invasion, undercut by drastic cutoffs in ammunition allowances and the reduction of South Vietnamese air power’s effectiveness by Soviet-provided surface-to-air missiles, but the ARVN put in some of the finest combat performances in the annals of warfare during the awful spring of 1975. A case in point is the 9-20 April Battle of Xuan Loc on the eastern approaches to Saigon, where the ARVN 18th Division reinforced by the remains of the Airborne Brigade fought a reinforced North Vietnamese corps with massive armor support to a bloody standstill despite artillery inferiority.[14] Another case in point is the last stand on Tan Son Nhut Airfield of the 81st Airborne Ranger Group, who fought on after the departure of the last Americans, taking out T-55 tanks with unguided, shoulder-fired anti-tank rockets until they ran out of ammunition.

Myth: Our bombing of North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail was unnecessary at best and inhumane at worst. This myth is closely linked to the “It was a guerrilla war” myth. If it were, in fact, a guerilla war, then the logistical requirements of communist forces in the South would have been satisfied by locally-obtained food and captured arms and munitions and little external supply would have been needed. This belief at times bled over into American intelligence estimates. A May 1966 appraisal endorsed by Secretary of Defense McNamara held that the external re-supply requirements of communist forces in the south could be met by seven 21/2 ton trucks a day.[15] That, of course, was utterly untrue. In fact, the supposed insurgency in the south was dependent on arms, supplies and reinforcement from the North from the beginning, unequivocally from 1959 (the opening of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the overland route through Laos) and preemptively so from 1964.

The critical importance of the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the communist war effort is emphasized in Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954-1975, published in 1994 and released in English translation in 2002[16], a significant embarrassment to exponents of the orthodox interpretation. Selected passages underline the critical importance of maintaining the flow of men and materiel from China and the port of Haiphong through North Vietnam and down the Trail to the South. They also underline the impressive scale of resources devoted to maintaining the flow.[17] Nor were those resources limited to surface-to-air missile batteries, an air defense radar net, MiG jet fighters, anti-aircraft guns, road repair crews, earth-moving equipment and the maintenance of a large truck fleet. “Peace feelers”, advanced in exchange for bombing halts, were an integral and successful element of communist strategy. So were attempts to influence US media coverage of our bombing.

The latter focused on our bombing of targets in North Vietnam, and had the dual purpose of making our bombing appear inhumane on the one hand and ineffective on the other. Perhaps the most egregious example involves December 1966 reportage from Hanoi by New York Times assistant managing editor Harrison Salisbury in which he stated that we were "dropping an enormous weight of explosives on purely civilian targets." He further stated that "on-the-spot inspection indicates that American bombing has been inflicting considerable civilian casualties in Hanoi and its environs for some time."regious example involves December 1966 reportage from Hanoi by New York Times assistant managing editor Harrison Salisbury in which he stated that we were “dropping an enormous weight of explosives on purely civilian targets.” He further stated that “on-the-spot inspection indicates that American bombing has been inflicting considerable civilian casualties in Hanoi and its envions for some time past”,[18] In fact, contrary to his representations, Salisbury was not an eye-witness. Moreover, much of his copy was written by Australian communist Wilfred Burchett, Salisbury’s “facilitator” during his visit to North Vietnam, and copied from official North Vietnamese press releases.[19]
Another telling example can be found in the New York Times lead editorial for Sunday, February 4th 1968. Written four days after the start of the communist 1968 Tet Offensive, the editorial proclaimed that if the “spectacularly successful Tet offensive had proved anything it was that the bombing of North Vietnam had failed to reduce either the enemy’s will or capacity to fight.”[20] As we now know and as some journalists realized at the time, the offensive was a military disaster for the communists. The prominence given to discrediting the bombing as opposed, for example, to excoriating the misguided and politically-motivated optimism in LBJ’s, McNamara’s and Westmoreland’s public statements in the months before the Tet Offensive or extolling the fighting spirit of the Viet Cong and NVA suggests an eagerness to influence our policy in a way most likely to be helpful to the communist cause.

Next on our parade of myths: The news media did not lose the war. This myth reflects the belief that waning support for our war effort by the American public, and ultimately by our political leadership, was based on an accurate appraisal of military failure and the immorality of our policies rather than on biased and negative media coverage. Belief in this myth was and is a staple of the orthodox interpretation and an article of faith to the bulk of the intelligentsia, to mainstream media pundits and among the anti-war faithful. In a neat bit of intellectual ju-jitsu, exponents of the orthodox interpretation reverse the polarity, portraying as a myth revisionist arguments that the news media did play a central role in losing the war.

The data relevant to supporting or debunking this myth is enormous, and I turn to my own observations to condense the argument. I enrolled as a graduate student in history at Princeton University under Air Force sponsorship in the autumn of 1967. I had returned from my first Southeast Asia combat tour in the summer of 1966 and had spent the intervening year as a flight instructor at the Air Rescue Service Combat Crew Training School where I kept track of current intelligence. As soon as my fellow graduate students recovered from the shock of having a combat veteran in their midst, they asked me what I thought about the debate about the war, very much a hot topic on campus. I responded that I would be happy to tell them about the war on the ground in Southeast Asia, but that they would not learn about it from coverage in what we have come to call the mainstream media, meaning in context the New York Times, the AP and UPI wire services and ABC, CBS and NBC television news. “The debate,” I said, “is not about the war at all. It’s about who should run the country based on what foreign policy assumptions.” Today, over forty-five years later, I stand by that characterization.

To hold my own in the ensuing discussions, for the next two and a half years I tracked on a daily basis relevant coverage in the New York Times and watched the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news roundups (in those days, they were only thirty minutes long and aired in sequence). Coverage of the war on the ground in Southeast Asia was short on operational and strategic context and long on details that called into question the morality and effectiveness of our commitment. The adverse effects of American firepower on the civilian populace were highlighted. Communist atrocities were downplayed or ignored. The classic example of the latter, and a telling one, is the contrast between the extensive coverage given to the My Lai massacre and the sketchy coverage accorded the Hue massacres, where communist forces during the 1968 Têt Offensive rounded up and executed some six thousand civilians.

It seemed clear at the time, and is clearer in retrospect, that the mainstream media were unwilling to publicize unsavory aspects of communist policy. An example from February 1968 makes the point: Viewing the disinterment of a mass grave containing victims of the Hue massacre, West German journalist Uwe Siemon-Netto in company with American journalist Peter Braestrup encountered an American television crew standing idly by. It was clear from the condition of the corpses that many of the victims had been buried alive. “Why?” asked Braestrup, “don’t you film this?” “We are not here to film anti-Communist propaganda” said the camera man [21], a small, but telling detail.

I should add that Braestrup, Saigon Bureau Chief of the Washington Post at the time, broke ranks with his mainstream colleagues by publishing a thorough, critical account of media coverage of the 1968 Têt Offensive, The Big Story (1977).[22] It is worth noting that Braestrup, in contrast to his media colleagues, was a combat veteran, having served as a Marine infantry officer in Korea.

Braestrup’s critique applies to media coverage of the entire war, both because the deficiencies in reportage and interpretation in coverage of the 1968 Têt Offensive were representative of coverage of the war as a whole, and because coverage of the 1968 Têt offensive played a major role in turning public opinion against support of our military effort in Vietnam. The attack on the US Embassy by Viet Cong sappers was portrayed as representative of the success of the entire offensive while the rapid reassertion of government control throughout South Vietnam was essentially ignored.[23] The battle for Hue—the only significant communist success in the first wave attacks, though in the end a communist defeat—was hardly typical of the fighting in general, but received extensive coverage... and here I would dispel another myth: that “television brought the war into our living rooms.”

There is an element of truth in this myth in that discussion of the war was ubiquitous in television news coverage. That having been said, coverage of the war on the ground was minimal. The period of my survey saw considerable footage of stretchers being loaded on to and off of helicopters, typically with an audio gunfire background (in my judgment mostly dubbed in), and early morning interviews of dazed survivors of nearly-overrun fire bases by freshly helicoptered-in reporters, but little to no actual combat footage. Tellingly, the US media all but ignored the ARVN.

In fact, Têt 1968 was a massive defeat for the communist forces, whose few and ephemeral successes in the first phase (January through early March) were overshadowed in operational reality by staggering losses, particularly in the second and third phases (May and August), and particularly among the Viet Cong, who were effectively eliminated as a military factor in the war. That was not the impression conveyed by mainstream media coverage.

The turning point came on 27 February when CBS television anchor man Walter Cronkite, just having returned from a whirlwind tour of South Vietnam, during which he witnessed evidence of the Hue massacres, pronounced on the evening news that

It now seems more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer’s almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation: and for every means we have to escalate the enemy can match us.[24]
He went on to add that “the only rational way out will be to negotiate, not as victors but as an honorable people.” President Lyndon Johnson, watching the broadcast, famously commented to Press Secretary George Christian, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”[25] Whatever the verdict on Johnson as a war leader, his political instincts with regard to voter sentiment were keen, amounting in this case to an accurate prophecy… albeit a self-fulfilling one that Johnson made good by announcing on 31 March a bombing halt against targets in northern North Vietnam, his decision to enter into negotiations with the North Vietnamese and his decision not to run for reelection. By that time, our political leadership had overwhelmingly endorsed the media interpretation and the rest is history.

I will conclude with a final myth, one derived from those discussed above and revealing in its content: that the outcome of the war was not so horrible for the peoples of Indochina. Though rarely stated so baldly, this myth was embraced in the bulk of the immediate post-war media coverage. Eventually, promulgation of this myth was suppressed by overwhelming evidence to the contrary, but only after extended delay.

The mainstream media covered the exodus of the Vietnamese boat people (though not the reasons for it), but they had little to say about Vietnam’s “reeducation camps” and for four years turned a blind eye to the horrors of Khymer Rouge rule in Cambodia. This despite the fact that the realities of the Killing Fields and The Year Zero were amply reported in Thailand and thus known to the international community including media representatives. I was stationed in Thailand at the time, and my specific reference is to coverage in the Bangkok Post, a first-rate English language newspaper which I read on a daily basis from the spring of 1975 until late December.

To appreciate the extent of the American media’s blind eye to events in Cambodia some background is in order. The area of western Cambodia contiguous to Thailand, the Battembang Rice Triangle, had never been under communist guerrilla influence and there was considerable cross-border commerce. In addition, Buddhist shrines to the north of the triangle attracted a steady flow of Thai pilgrims. When Phnom Penh fell to the communists on 17 April, considerable numbers of Thais were caught inside Cambodia. Through the spring and into the fall, survivors worked their way out, bringing with them eyewitness accounts of the horrors of Khymer Rouge rule: forced relocation of urban dwellers to “new economic zones”, executions of the educated, of Buddhist monks, of eyeglass wearers and so on. Their accounts were credible and well-reported in the Thai-language press as well as the Post.[26] Beyond the ability to assign numerical estimates to the Khymer Rouge death toll, I have learned nothing about the Year Zero and Killing Fields since. Coverage by the mainstream media—perhaps I should say recognition—began only after the escape from Cambodia in October of 1979 of New York Times reporter Sydney Schamberg’s Khymer cameraman Dith Pran.

Might a reluctance to admit that they played a major role in prompting American withdrawal from the war leading to the terrible carnage that followed help to explain media silence on the issues in question? I leave it to you, the reader, to decide.

What are we to make of our catalogue of realities and myths?

Returning to my opening comments, if we are to learn from history, we must get it right. In conslusion, I ask you, the reader, to reflect on the number of major foreign policy decisions by our government in the post-Vietnam era—not all with happy consequences—that appear to have been driven by acceptance of the lessons of the orthodox interpretation of the Vietnam War.

 
John F. Guilmartin, Jr.

Columbus, Ohio

[1] An was not the only such agent, though far and away the most influential one. Members of the Saigon intelligentsia, who loathed Diem and assiduously courted American journalists, contributed as well. Another was ARVN officer Albert Pham Ngoc Thao who served in various senior positions including province chief and head of the Strategic Hamlet Program. As a province chief, he appears as a source in Malcolm Browne, The New Face of War (Indianapolis and New York, 1965), the first of the journalist-historians’ work published between hard covers.

[2] Pike, a Foreign Service Officer, first attracted public notice with his analysis of the massacre of civilians by communist forces in Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive.

[3] A student in my summer 1998 graduate seminar on the history of the Vietnam War at Ohio State University did a literature search for reviews of Street Without Joy and Hell in a Very Small Place in the standard scholarly journals, e.g. American Historical Review and Journal of American History, and came up with remarkably few reviews—from memory no more than half a dozen—and those were tepid.

[4] Peter Dunn, First Vietnam War, 41-2. The officer was almost certainly Major Dan Phelan of the China-based 14th Air Force AGAS (Air Ground Aid Service) who worked with Charles Fenn, the OSS agent responsible for arranging OSS support for Ho and the Vietminh. See also Dixee Bartholomew-Feis, The OSS and Ho Chi Minh: Unexpected Allies in the War Against Japan, 220-221, photos from the National Archives, Green Belt, Maryland, of the arrival in August 1945 of the first armed Vietminh in Hanoi. Vietminh in the photos whose weapons can be identified are armed with French 7.5 mm rifles, specifically the Mousqueton d’Artillerie Modèle 1892 and the Fusil des Tirallieurs Indo-Chinois Modèle 1902. The one soldier with an automatic weapon is carrying a Chateralleault Fusil Mitrailleur; Ian Hogg and John Weeks, Military Small Arms of the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1973), 3.05-3.06; Hogg and Weeks, The Encyclopedia of Infantry Weapons of World War II (New York, 1977), 101.

[5] Archimedes Patti, Why Viet Nam? 166-67, Dunn, First Vietnam War, 17.

[6] James Dunnigan and Albert Nofi, Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War (New York, 1999), 38-39, cited in James S. Corum and Wray R. Johnson, Airpower In Small Wars: Fighting Insurgents and Terrorists (Lawrence, Kansas: 2003), 43.

[7] See Sophie Quinn-Judge, Ho Chi Minh: the Missing Years, 1919-1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Based on extensive research in Soviet and French Archives including files of the Comintern and Sûreté, Quinn-Judge thoroughly documents Ho’s ideological background and proclivities.

[8] Fall, Two Viet Nams, 155. A case can be made for class differences among the Vietnamese peasantry in the south, where a small class of relatively well-to-do landlords and a large body of landless peasants existed, but that was most assuredly not the case in the north where the vast majority of peasants—Fall says 98%—owned the land they worked.

[9] Le Duan’s role as a power behind the scenes and exponent of a hard line on the war in the South was long suspected, but not the extent to which he became effective dictator. Lien-Hang Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (2012).

[10] These were a major failed offensive in the south in August 1950, the destruction of French forces along the Chinese border in October 1950; the failed attempt to break into the Red River Delta in January-June 1951; and the 1952-1953 Winter-Spring offensive into Laos. To this we can add the conventional response to the November 1951-February 1952 French Hoa Binh offensive in the north.

[11] The October-November 1965 Pleiku Campaign, chronicled in Hal Moore and Joe Galloway’s, We Were Soldiers Once and Young and in the Mel Gibson move We Were Soldiers Once culminated in American defensive victory at LZ X-Ray and defeat at LZ Albany (not addressed in the Gibson movie). The campaign’s outcome was equivocal in that both the US and North Vietnamese abandoned overtly aggressive orientations in its aftermath.

[12] We do not ordinarily think of American military commanders as prone to accept heavy casualties, but it is a matter of record. In World War II American commanders were routinely willing to accept casualties that their British colleagues considered unacceptable. The same contrast applied to American and Australian forces in Vietnam.

[13] John F. Guilmartin, “Casualties”, Stanley I. Kutler, ed., Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (New York, 1996), 103-105.

[14] George J. Veith and Merle Pribbenow, “‘Fighting Is an Art”: The Army of the Republic of Vietnam’s Defense of Xuan Loc, 9-21 April 1975”, Journal of Military History, Vol. 68, No. 1 (January 2004), 163-213.

[15] Mark Clodfelter, The Limits of Air Power: The American Bombing of North Vietnam (New York, 1989), 134-35.

[16] (Merle L. Pribbenow, tr. (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas), originally published in Vietnamese as History of the People’s Army of Vietnam (Hanoi, Vietnamese Ministry of Defense Military History Institute).

[17] Victory in Vietnam, 52-54, 168-69, 225-26, 242 and 261-68.

[18] New York Times, December 25 and 27, 1966, quoted in Wayne Thompson, To Hanoi and Back: The U.S. Air Force and North Vietnam, 1966-1973 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), 45.

[19] Robert Manne, Agent of Influence: The Life and Times of Wilfred Burchett, Mackinzie Paper No. 13 (Toronto, 1989), 48-50. Burchett was involved in exploiting American POWs in communist hands in Korea and Vietnam and played a major role in actress Jane Fonda’s notorious 1972 visit to North Vietnam.

[20] Paraphrased in Wayne Thompson, To Hanoi and Back: The U.S. Air Force and North Vietnam, 1966-1973 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), 123.

[21] Uwe Siemon-Netto, Duc: A Reporter's Love for the Wounded People of Vietnam (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (July 10, 2013), 211-13.

[22] The Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington, 2 vols. (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1977).

[23] See Donald M. Bishop’ review of The Big Story, “The Press and the TET Offensive: A Flawed Institution Under Stress”, Air University Review (November-December 1978).

[24] Quoted in Henry Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 47.

[25] Quoted in Philip Davidson, Vietnam at War, The History, 1945-1975 (Novato, California: Presidio Press, 1988), 486.

[26] Speaking only minimal Thai and reading it not at all, I was kept informed by Captain Daniel Jacobowitz, USAF, and his wife Saifon, a native Thai speaker.

by Col. Andrew Finlayson, VVFH Founding Member

In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, there were seven ongoing communist insurgencies in SE Asia - Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines all had active communist insurgencies. Three of those insurgencies were successful in 1975 (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). When one considers the question of whether or not the successful communist insurgencies lived up to the promises they made to their respective populations to provide peace, social justice and economic well-being, it is instructive to look at the records of those seven countries with communist insurgencies and see how they fared over the past 40 years.

Peace

Many in the West thought that once the communists came to power and all of the US and allied forces left Vietnam, a new era of peace and harmony would exist. At least that is what the communists promised. Unfortunately, it was not to be. The communist government of the united Vietnam fought two wars with their neighbors, China and Cambodia, and tensions still persist with China over the East China Sea. A little known fact that is often overlooked by some in the West is more SE Asians died in war and the results of war in the 14 years after the last American left Vietnam than during the years when US forces were in South Vietnam. Although exact figures for the number of SE Asians who died after the communist victories in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia vary, even the conservative estimates are mind-boggling. There were 65,000 executions in Vietnam between 1975 and 1982 (Desbarats and Jackson, “The Cruel Peace,” Washington Quarterly, Fall 1985: also US Dept. of State Bulletin, Sept. 1985). The UN High Commissioner on Refugees estimated that 250,000 people fleeing Vietnam by boat died at sea. Another 165,000 died in Vietnam’s infamous “re-education camps” (Desbarats, Jacqueline. “Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation,” The Vietnam Debate, 1990).

According to Lt. Gen. Le Kha Phieu, the commander of Vietnamese forces in Cambodia, the Vietnamese military suffered 55,000 deaths between 1978 and when the Vietnamese ended their occupation of Cambodia (Reaves, Joseph. “Vietnam Reveals Cambodian Death Toll,” Chicago Tribune, July 1, 1988). There are no accurate figures for the number of Cambodian deaths suffered in the war, but it is safe to assume they suffered heavier casualties than the Vietnamese.

Although the claims of the Vietnamese and Chinese differ widely on the casualties produced by their 1979 war, a conservative estimate provides a range of Chinese military deaths at 7,000 to 26,000 and approximately 30,000 Vietnamese military deaths, with an additional 100,000 Vietnamese civilian deaths (Zhang Xiaoming, “China’s 1979 War with Vietnam,” China Quarterly, No. 184, December 2005, pp. 851-874). The Communist Lao government continues to this day to inflict casualties on the Hmong minority in that country with the figure of 100,000 killed since 1975 (Rummel, Rudolph. Statistics of Democide, University of Hawaii; also, “Forced and Forgotten” Lawyers’ Committee on Human Rights, 1989, p. 8). And, according to the Yale Genocide Program, the communist party in Cambodia killed approximately 1.7 million of that country’s citizens when it came to power, one of the most horrific genocidal crimes ever committed.

Dr. William Lloyd Stearman, Founding VVFH Member

A poll taken on this 40^th anniversary would no doubt reveal that most Americans believe we should not have fought in this small obscure country half a world away, and do believe that the war there was unwinnable and that our huge expenditure of blood and treasure there was totally in vain. Most people are nonplussed at hearing that we got into World War II because of what is now Vietnam. In the 1930s, we somewhat tolerated Japan’s rampaging all though China. However, when Japan invaded what is now Vietnam, we saw this as a threat to Southeast Asia and took the strong measure of promoting a boycott of critical oil, scrap iron and rubber deliveries to Japan. Japan, then realizing a now hostile US would try to prevent its planned invasion of Southeast Asia, sought to disable our fleet at Pearl Harbor as a preventative measure. Japan then proceeded to use its new-found base to invade and conquer most of Southeast Asia. President Eisenhower must have had this mind when he was asked, at April 7, 1954 press conference, about “the strategic importance of Indochina [Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia] for the free world.” He then described the “falling domino” principle whereby “the beginning of a disintegration [in Vietnam] would have the most profound influences” leading to “ the loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the [Malay] peninsula and Indonesia.” He added that Japan, Formosa [Taiwan], the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand “would also be threatened.” (He could also have added India.)

Eisenhower’s “domino theory” was pooh-poohed by a number of people in the U.S., but, given the parlous unstable conditions in Southeast Asia, it was taken seriously by leaders there as well as in Australia and India and by leaders in Hanoi and (then) Peking. For example, China’s famed Marshal Lin Piao stated in September 1965 that the defeat of “U.S. imperialism” in Vietnam would show the people of the world “that what the Vietnamese people can do, they can do too.” In the late 19­60s, Indonesian leaders Suharto and Malik (not great friends of the U.S.) told U.S. officials that our first introduction of U.S. combat troops (Marines) in Vietnam in March 1965 helped embolden them to resist the October 1, 1965 Communist coup supported by China, which came very close to succeeding. (The two later told columnist Robert Novak the same thing.) Had this coup succeeded, the Philippines would have soon been threatened which could well have triggered our intervention under a 1954 treaty. Then we would have been facing a far more threatening adversary than in Vietnam. The 1965 introduction of US Marines apparently had a generally bracing effect in Southeast Asia. For example it also encouraged the British defense of Malaysia against a Communist invasion from Indonesia. By the end of the Vietnam War, even the victorious Communist side that lost over two million dead was too weakened to pose a threat to any country save nearby Laos and Cambodia. The war also bought precious time to enable the countries of Southeast Asia to strengthen their positions. In essence, we basically got into the war to prevent the toppling of dominoes in Southeast Asia and we succeeded. One could say that this was a strategic victory while the loss in Vietnam was a tactical defeat.

Was the war in Vietnam truly unwinnable? After “Vietnamization” had removed all U.S. combat troops from Vietnam, Hanoi, on March 30, 1972, launched its “Easter Offensive” with largest conventional attack of the war consisting of the equivalent of 23 divisions equipped with hundreds of Soviet tanks, long-range artillery, rockets and surface to air missiles. The brunt of the fighting fell on the South Vietnamese ground forces with massive U.S. air support as well as naval and logistical support. The only American ground forces left were advisors and forward air controllers. South Vietnam forces eventually moved from the defensive to counter offensives and by mid-September 1972 were clearly winning. The Communist forces had lost about 100,000 killed in action, twice as many as the U.S. had lost in the entire war. Sometime after Hanoi’s final 1975 victory, a former top commander in the South, General Tran Van Tra stated in the Party organ Nhan Dan that his troops had eventually reached the verge of defeat. Had the war continued some months further, the South could have emerged victorious by evicting all enemy forces from Vietnam. Facing defeat, Hanoi saved the day by offering substantial concessions sought by Henry Kissinger in previous negotiations. With the best of intentions, Kissinger took this bait and the resulting negotiations process brought South Vietnamese military operations to a halt. The 1973 Peace Accords broke down. The U.S. drastically reduced aid, and then Congress banned all U.S. military operations in Indochina sealing Vietnam’s doom.

William Lloyd Stearman, PhD, Senior U.S. Foreign Service officer (Ret.)National Security Council staff under four presidents, director NSC Indochina staff, Jan. ’73 to Jan. ’76, Adjunct Professor of International Affairs Georgetown University (1977 to 1993), author of memoir An American Adventure, From Early Aviation Through Three Wars to the White House (Naval Institute Press, 2012

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Recently I've been studying the Pentagon Papers and the events surrounding their release. In that regard I read a New York Times op-ed written by Daniel Ellsberg that purports to tell the story of what compelled him to release national secrets to the media. More than any other single event in American history, Ellsberg's perfidy opened the floodgates of government distrust and the media's lack of respect for national secrets.  He is the progenitor of Wikileaks and especially of Edward Snowden.

Ellsberg's op-ed is an obvious example of self-serving justification for an act he knew was wrong. In point of fact, he himself decided he was willing to risk a life in prison to expose what he believed were lies being told to the American people. But were they? There were certainly things documented in the Pentagon Papers that could be viewed as lies by an unsophisticated or biased observer.  What Ellsberg characterizes as lies are decisions made by Presidents against the advice of some of their advisors.  Ellsberg agreed with the dissenting advisors and so believed they were right and the Presidents were wrong.

A generation of presidents, believing that the course they were following was in the best interests of the country, nevertheless chose to conceal from Congress and the public what the real policy was, what alternatives were being pressed on them from within the government, and the pessimistic predictions they were receiving about the prospects of their chosen course.

Here Ellsberg casts those who disagreed with the President in the role of being correct in their (and, of course, his own) opinions and naively suggests that open government means airing every disagreement inside an administration publicly.  Good leadership means considering advice from advisors who will often disagree among themselves over a particular course of action.  It also means making decisions based on that advice and your own best judgment.  It is inevitable that some of those advisors will be upset because their preferred course of action was not taken.  It's equally inevitable that, given the egos involved, some of them will look for opportunities to "prove" that they were right and that the President followed the wrong advice.

That is the reason we consistently see "tell-all" books after advisors whose advice was not taken leave office as well as hagiographies by those with whom a President agreed.

Although Ellsberg himself admits that "a generation of Presidents" believed that the course of action that they chose was "in the best interests of the country", he nevertheless characterizes them as lying simply because they chose a course with which he disagreed.  One can only surmise that if Ellsberg would have agreed with their decisions, he never would have characterized the process of decision-making as lying.  Yet despite the fact that five consecutive Presidents followed the same general policy, because Ellsberg disagreed with that policy he felt that it was necessary for him to commit a traitorous act to expose them.

Throughout the campaign of 1964, President Johnson indicated to the voters -- contrary to his opponent Barry Goldwater -- that no escalation was needed in South Vietnam. He sometimes added, almost inaudibly, ''at this time.''

As the Pentagon Papers later showed, that was contradicted as early as May 1964 by the estimates and recommendations of virtually all of Johnson's own civilian and military advisers. I believe he worried, not only in 1964 but over the next four years, that if he laid out candidly just how difficult, costly and unpromising the conflict was expected to be, the public would overwhelmingly want escalation on a scale that promised to win the war.

To this end, Congress and the voters might compel him to adopt the course secretly being pressed on him by his own Joint Chiefs of Staff. From 1964 through 1968, the Joint Chiefs continuously urged a litany of secret recommendations, including mining Haiphong; hitting the dikes; bombing near the Chinese border; closing all transportation routes from China; sending ground troops to Laos, Cambodia and the southern part of North Vietnam; possibly full-scale invasion of North Vietnam.

I think that this escalation would not have won the war.

While Ellsberg is certainly entitled to his opinion, his opinion did not justify revealing government secrets to the public.  As he points out and history confirms, had Johnson revealed to the public what his advisors were telling him, the public would have demanded escalation in Vietnam.  Since Ellsberg "thought" that escalation would not have won the war, one would assume that he would be happy that the President "lied" to the public.  The irony of this contradiction seems to escape him completely.

Setting aside Ellsberg's concerns for a moment, what kind of President would conceal his true desires because he believed they were out of sync with the desires of the American people?  We have previously discussed the incompetence of American leadership with regard to the war.  Certainly that would have been grounds for going public with what he knew but without revealing state secrets.

Both Kennedy and Johnson handled the war ineptly, not only ignoring the advice of the military experts but moving in a direction that they were repeatedly warned would not achieve the desired result.  But this is not lying.  It's incompetence.  Johnson in particular behaved despicably toward the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ignored their advice completely and placed his trust in McNamara, a man who had no military knowledge at all.  This too is not lying but incompetence.

Remarkably, Ellsberg himself recognized that the ongoing disagreements within administrations were debates, but because of his personal beliefs he characterized them as lies rather than normal disagreement within advisory groups.

I first learned of these debates in 1964 and 1965, when I was special assistant to John McNaughton, the assistant defense secretary. I read all the documents of that period that were later included in the Pentagon Papers, and I heard from McNaughton of his discussions with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and President Johnson. I strongly regret that at that time, I did not see it as my duty to disclose that information to the Senate.

But then I was in Vietnam for two years from 1965 to 1967. I saw that our ground effort in South Vietnam was hopelessly stalemated, and I did not believe that increased bombing of the north would ever cause our adversaries to give up. Therefore I came to the belief in 1967 that we should negotiate our way out.

Because he spent time in Vietnam, Ellsberg apparently became convinced that his limited view of the conflict was an accurate one and decided that he knew better than five Presidents what the correct course of action was.  So, desperate to gain what he viewed as a fair hearing for his beliefs, which he believed were superior to those of five Presidents, he decided to violate his oath and reveal state secrets to the world.  For this traitorous act he is celebrated as a hero by many of the misguided fools that believe themselves to be wiser than the men chosen to lead the nation.

So my concern in releasing the Pentagon Papers was not simply, or even primarily, to get out the truth. I thought I would probably go to prison for the rest of my life. I wouldn't have done that just to set the record straight. I released the papers because I foresaw prolonged war and eventual escalation, including incursions into Laos and Cambodia, the mining of Haiphong and the bombing of Hanoi. I wanted to avert these events, but they all occurred.

Ellsberg's ego wouldn't allow him to accept the fact that he was not the President.  He felt he knew better than the men who had a much broader knowledge of Vietnam, of secret negotiations, of plans he knew nothing about, of issues with which he was completely unaware.  All that mattered was that his views be aired, even if he had to go to prison.  Even what he perceived as the truth didn't matter!  This is a man with a massive ego.  This is a man for whom no other view than his own is valid.  it's not surprising then that his oath meant nothing to him when weighed against his superior opinions.

The greatest irony of all is that the Pentagon Papers reveal that basic US policy toward Vietnam was consistent across five Presidencies and that all of the claims of the antiwar movement were false.

By James D. McLeroy

At various times and places the Second Indochina War (1959 to 1975) displayed some of the characteristics of a South Vietnamese revolution, insurgency, guerrilla war, and civil war. Primarily, however, it was always an incremental invasion of South Vietnam by the North Vietnamese Army, at first indirect and covert, then direct and overt.

In 1945, Ho Chi Minh and his guerrilla forces quickly seized control of the North Vietnamese government in the power vacuum left by the surrender of the occupying Japanese army. Ho then proclaimed himself President of the new Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). After the 1949 victory of Mao Tse-tung's army in the Chinese Civil War, Ho went to China to ask Mao for military aid. Ho’s irregular Viet Minh forces were then fighting the conventional French forces attempting to reclaim their former control of Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia).

Mao gave the DRV not only weapons, but also military training, logistical support, technical troops, and secure bases in southern China. In 1951, General Vo Nguyen Giap, commander of the Viet Minh forces, went to China to arrange the assignment of a resident Chinese Military Assistance Group in the DRV. Without massive Chinese aid the Viet Minh forces could not have defeated the French forces and won the First Indochina War (1946-1954) at the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu.

In the Second Indochina War (1959-1975) against the South Vietnamese and U.S. forces the initial North Vietnamese strategy was again an adaptation of Mao Tse-tung’s three-stage, rural-based, protracted attrition model. The first stage was squad and platoon-size terrorism and guerrilla tactics. The second stage was company and battalion-size semi-conventional, mobile tactics. The third stage was regimental and division-size conventional, positional tactics.

In the Second Indochina War the NVA fought a strategically offensive, total war to conquer South Vietnam and achieve military hegemony in Laos and Cambodia. President Johnson’s refusal to allow Westmoreland to fight a strategically offensive war in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, where the NVA were fighting it, forced him to fight a strategically defensive war limited to South Vietnam.

Johnson always feared the entrance of China into the war (as in Korea). For that reason, he refused to approve a large-scale U.S. invasion of eastern Laos and Cambodia to destroy the NVA's sanctuary bases and permanently block the Ho Chi Minh Trail network. For the same reason he also refused to approve a truly strategic, unrestricted, sustained air campaign to destroy the physical capability of North Vietnam to receive Soviet supplies.

Westmoreland knew that his defensive attrition "strategy" was only a grand tactic, but he had no alternative. He knew that pacification of South Vietnam would be impossible, as long as large VC and NVA troop units had protected sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia and unlimited Chinese and Soviet war supplies delivered through the Ho Chi Minh Trail network in Laos.

He knew that the only way he could seize and hold the strategic initiative was by invading Laos and Cambodia to destroy the NVA's base areas and permanently block the Ho Chi Minh Trail network. Without unlimited logistic support from the USSR and a constant supply of troops from North Vietnam, the NVA would lack the physical capability to conquer South Vietnam, regardless of their indomitable will to do so.

In the long term it was politically futile to rely on an offensive operational strategy based on an attrition grand tactic limited to South Vietnam as a substitute for an offensive grand strategy to achieve a decisive victory in Indochina. The political futility of relying on an attrition grand tactic is irrelevant, however, to the factual question of the short-term effectiveness of the attrition tactic itself.

The fact that Westmoreland’s large-scale tactics were often operationally inefficient does not imply that they were also tactically ineffective. In all the large battles from 1965 to 1968 his use of combined-arms firepower to produce mass enemy attrition was, in fact, tactically effective, usually devastatingly so.

By the end of 1968, U.S. and ARVN conventional forces had effectively destroyed the VC main combat forces. In the first half of 1972, ARVN conventional forces, supported by U.S. airpower and augmented by regional and local civilian self-defense forces, decisively defeated the NVA's second conventional invasion of South Vietnam. By the end of 1972, South Vietnamese and U.S. counterinsurgency forces had also eviscerated the VC civilian infrastructure.

Both the internal and the external war for the survival of the Republic of Vietnam had been temporarily won. After the NVA’s crushing defeat in 1972, the decisive destruction of their bases in Laos and the permanent blockage of the Ho Chi Minh Trail network would have made it impossible for the NVA to recover. An offensive grand strategy would have enabled both of those tactics.

Instead, the hard-earned conventional and counterinsurgency victories of the ARVN and U.S. forces were deliberately forfeited by the anti-war Democrat majority in both U.S. Houses of Congress. The ARVN, militarily depleted by the NVA invasion in 1972, were critically weakened by the radical 1973 Congressional reductions in U.S. military aid, including basic ammunition. They were then fatally crippled by the 1974 Congressional prohibition of all U.S. military activity in Southeast Asia, including U.S. air support of ARVN forces from bases in other countries.

In 1975, the modern, Soviet-equipped NVA forces invaded South Vietnam again in a mass, armored Blitzkrieg, exactly as North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950. With no concern for U.S. air counterattacks, no need for any VC guerrilla fighters, and no attempt to win any "hearts and minds", they quickly defeated the demoralized, inadequately equipped ARVN forces.

Two years after all U.S. forces had been withdrawn from South Vietnam, the NVA, not the Viet Cong, conquered South Vietnam with modern, conventional forces using conventional tactics and weapons, not with guerrilla forces using unconventional tactics and weapons. They had been planning to do so since 1959 and had unsuccessfully attempted to do so three times before (in 1965, 1968, and 1972). They finally won their American War strategically in America, as they always believed they eventually would, by political default, not tactically in South Vietnam by combat victories over U.S. forces.

As Ho Chi Minh predicted, they won it by resolutely daring to continue losing battles like Khe Sanh tactically at an unsustainable military cost longer than the irresolute U.S. Congress dared to continue winning such battles tactically at an unsustainable political cost. The paradoxical battle of Khe Sanh – a tactical success for the U.S. military in the short term, yet a strategic failure for the U.S. government in the long term -- was the largest of many Pyrrhic victories in a tragic, seven-year failure of U.S. national leadership.

The DRV, neither democratic nor a republic, was a Stalinist police state controlled by Le Duan, First Secretary of the ruling Lao Dong Party and leader of its Political Bureau (Politburo). From 1960 until his death in 1986, he was the de facto commander and chief strategist of the DRV. By 1967, the DRV’s titular President, Ho Chi Minh, was merely an aged and ailing figurehead, whose only political power was the prestige of his name as the founding father of the DRV.

Le Duan was not a charismatic dictator. He was a Machiavellian manipulator, who ruled the DRV collectively through its multilayered committee system. The most important one was the five-man Subcommittee for Military Affairs (SMA) of the Central Military Party Commission. It was subordinate only to the Politburo led by Le Duan. The other members of the SMA were Le Duan’s long-time deputy, Le Duc Tho, and three North Vietnamese Army (NVA) generals with overlapping offices in the Ministry of Defense.

They were Vo Nguyen Giap, Minister of Defense and NVA Commander; Nguyen Chi Thanh, senior Political Commissar of the DRV’s Viet Cong (VC) forces in South Vietnam; and Van Tien Dung, Giap’s deputy and Le Duan’s protege. In 1967, Nguyen Chi Thanh died, and Le Duan replaced him with Le’s close friend, Pham Hung. Those six key men, dominated by the militant zeal of Le Duan, controlled the DRV’s grand strategy in its sixteen-year war to conquer the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) and achieve military hegemony in Laos and Cambodia.

By James D. McLeroy

After the 1954 partition of Vietnam into a Communist north and an anti-Communist south, approximately 100,000 South Vietnamese Communists moved north to the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam (DRV). About 80,000 of them were Viet Minh veterans of the First Indochina War against the French, and an estimated 10,000 of those were Montagnards. Between 5,000 and 10,000 other Communist Viet Minh combat veterans were ordered to remain in remote areas of the Republic of Viet Nam (South Vietnam), carefully bury their weapons and radios, and wait quietly for future orders from the DRV.

Many of the South Vietnamese “regroupees” in the DRV became regular soldiers in the 338th NVA Division stationed at Xuan Mai near Hanoi. Some 4,500 other regroupees were trained to infiltrate South Vietnam as covert military and political cadre. Their mission was to organize Communist Viet Minh veterans in guerrilla platoons and companies. Other regroupees were trained as agitation-propaganda (agitprop) teams. Their mission was to recruit disaffected South Vietnamese civilians, indoctrinate them in Leninist ideology, and organize them in covert intelligence and logistical networks to support the guerrilla forces.

In 1957, the Communist Viet Minh veterans who remained in South Vietnam were ordered to initiate a terror campaign in rural areas to destabilize the local governments and organize shadow Communist governments. They did so by intimidating, kidnapping, torturing, and assassinating thousands of village leaders, influential individuals, and their families. The South Vietnamese government called the South Vietnamese Communists Viet Cong (VC).

When NVA Transportation Group 559 began work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail network in May, 1957, 12,000 NVA troops were already in Laos to shield and protect them. The first stage of the Trail was completed in October, 1959, and by the end of 1960, some 3,500 NVA regroupee troops had infiltrated South Vietnam. In May, 1961 500 senior and mid-level NVA regroupee officers left for South Vietnam on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The next month, 400 NVA regroupee officers and sergeants followed them.

Former POW/MIA Affairs Chief Gave Congress Outline of U.S. Government's Road Map To Betrayal Of America's POW/MIA

The following article is taken from a statement by Bill Bell (pictured right) which he gave before the Vietnam Subcommittee on Trade of the Committee on Ways and Means in the U.S. House of Representatives on June 18, 1998.

Prior to 1989 our government's most important issue concerning Vietnam was the achievement of a viable settlement in war torn Cambodia.

Subsequent to the withdrawal of a politically acceptable number of Vietnamese forces from that country our focus shifted to the accounting for our missing and dead from the Vietnam War.

At that time the policy of the Bush Administration dictated that the recovery of missing American servicemen was a matter of the "highest national priority".

This high priority supported a strategy of strict reciprocity at the national level, and a high quality investigative effort on the ground in Vietnam. This proactive, yet cautious approach to addressing the important POW/MIA issue precipitated Vietnam's realization that no matter how difficult the effort, our persistence and perseverance would not diminish and only genuine cooperation would be acceptable by our government.

Two weeks after the fall of Saigon, on May 12, 1975, Khmer Rouge in an American-made PCF Swift gunboat seized the U.S. merchant ship SS Mayaguez and its crew in Cambodian waters. After the U.S. withdrawal from Viet Nam and the abandonment of the three countries of former Indochina, a number of conservative politicians and intellectuals in the United States had begun to question America’s “credibility” in the international field, suggesting that this would encourage enemies around the world to challenge America with seeming impunity. The Cambodian seizure of the Mayaguez appeared to be just such a challenge. President Gerald Ford denounced the seizure as an "act of piracy" and demanded immediate release of the ship.

President Ford, goaded by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, believed that the ship’s seizure provided an opportunity for the United States “to prove that others will be worse off if they tackle us, and not that they can return to the status quo. It is not enough to get the ship’s release.” One Pentagon official told Newsweek at the time, “Henry Kissinger was determined to give the Khmer Rouge a bloody nose.” This in a way would be comparable to baseball’s traditional contemptuous gesture of kicking dirt on the umpire’s shoes after he had said, “You’re out of here!” They also wanted to avoid a repeat of the embarrassing Pueblo incident of 1968, where failure to promptly use military force to halt the capture of the U.S. intelligence ship by North Korea led to an eleven-month hostage situation.

On instructions from the President, Kissinger tried to send a message to the Chinese Liaison Office in Washington demanding the immediate release of Mayaguez and her crew; however, it was refused. Kissinger then instructed George H. W. Bush, head of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing, to deliver the note to the Chinese Foreign Ministry and to pass on an oral message that “The Government of the United States demands the immediate release of the vessel and of the full crew. If that release does not immediately take place, the authorities in Phnom Penh will be responsible for the consequences.”

The SS Mayaguez

The SS Mayaguez, owned by Sea-Land Service Inc., was the first all-container U.S. flag ship in foreign trade. Beginning in 1965, the SS Mayaguez sailed a regular route for Sea-Land Services in support of American forces in Southeast Asia: Hong Kong -- Sattahip, Thailand -- Singapore. On May 7, 1975, about a week after the fall of Saigon, the Mayaguez left Hong Kong on a routine voyage carrying 107 containers of routine cargo, 77 containers of government and military cargo, and 90 empty containers -- all insured for $5 million. The exact contents of the 77 containers have never been disclosed, but the Mayaguez had loaded containers from the U.S. Embassy in Saigon just nine days before the fall of Saigon. There was speculation that some may have contained arms and ammunition. Nevertheless, during the entire incident the Khmer Rouge did not search the containers.

The crisis began on the afternoon of May 12, 1975, as the Mayaguez en route to Sattahip, Thailand, was allegedly sailing in a regular shipping lane in the Gulf of Siam about 60 miles from the coast of Cambodia, and about 8 miles from the Poulo Wai Islands.

Jane Fonda's Broadcasts on Radio Hanoi

Co-authors: Dr. Roger Canfield, R.J. Del Vecchio

From July 8 - 22, 1972, the American actress Jane Fonda visited North Vietnam at the invitation of the "Vietnamese Committee of Solidarity with the American People." During this period, she recorded at least 19 propaganda interviews that were broadcast by Radio Hanoi. Twelve of the speeches focused on American servicemen as their primary target. Fonda's key themes included: demands to halt U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, allegations that the Nixon Administration was "lying" about the war, endorsements of the Viet Cong "7 Point Peace Plan," claims that the U.S. military was violating international law and committing "genocide" in Vietnam, and statements of confidence in North Vietnam's continued resistance and ultimate victory over America.

Listed below are all available transcripts of Jane Fonda's Hanoi broadcasts, as recorded by the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). Slightly redacted versions of several broadcasts also appear in the Congressional Record for Sept. 19-25, 1972, "Hearings Regarding H.R. 16742: Restraints on Travel to Hostile Areas." The transcripts are listed by the dates on which they were originally broadcast by Radio Hanoi.

"Brave heroes of the war would come back from Indochina and I was told that it is we who committed crimes, it is we who burned villages and massacred civilian people and raped the Vietnamese women. It is we who did it and we are sorry, and we want the American people to know what is being done in their names."

July 13, 1972: Jane Fonda condemns U.S. bombings

This is the Congressional testimony of a Jesuit Priest who lived in Vietnam for nineteen years and remained after the communist takeover for fifteen months. Judge for yourself whether the communist takeover was good for the people who were unable to escape.

HEARINGS BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS OF THE COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES NINETY-FIFTH CONGEESS FIRST SESSION JUNE 16, 21, AND JULY 26, 1977

STATEMENT OP REV. ANDRE GELINAS, JESUIT PRIEST, PAR EASTERN PROVINCE OE THE JESUIT ORDER

Father Gelinas. First, a word of introduction on my sources of information for the facts that I am about to describe.

I am a Canadian, a Jesuit Priest, as has already been stated. I came to Vietnam in 1957 as a professor of Chinese history at the University of Saigon. Starting in 1963, and for 13 years without interruption, I was on the staff of the Alexander-de-Rhodes Student Center, which has been for all these years the largest and most influential center of activities for Vietnamese University students.

After the Communist takeover, I stayed on at the center for 15 more months, moving around freely within the borders of Gia Dinh Province. My information on conditions outside of Gia Dinh Province comes from these hundreds of Vietnamese students and families that I dealt with daily.

I might add here that most of these were Buddhists and Confucians, only one-third being Christians.

Now, the facts. Let me start with the most obvious, the expected: the complete suppression of the freedom of speech, press, and information. Before the Communist victory. South Vietnam published 27 daily newspapers, 22 in Vietnamese, 3 in Chinese, 1 in French, and 1 in English. It also produced some 200 scholarly journals, scholarly, technical, or literary, and a number of popular magazines. It had three TV channels and some 2 dozen radio stations.

In May 1975, every single one of these newspapers, serials, and stations were suppressed. Back issues of magazines, books, records, and cassettes were confiscated from homes and from libraries and burned in the streets in huge bonfires. From then on, our only source of in-formation was one TV channel owned by the Government, on the air for 2 hours only, from 7:30 to 9:30, and concerned exclusively with propaganda.

Also, two radio stations and three dailies providing the same propaganda, the same editorials, and the same selection of biased news items dictated by the unique party-controlled news agency.

No one was allowed to listen to short-wave radio, and any person aware of this crime in his neighborhood and failing to report it could be deported to the work camps with his entire family.

It was also the duty of every citizen to report ali private conversations deemed contrary to the spirit of the revolution. I hurry to add, however, that at least in Saigon this often repeated threat failed to curb the curiosity of the people. News items from the daily bulletins of the BBC and of the VOA were eagerly sought after, and spread through the population like brushfire.

Another basic human right which has been wiped out by the Communist victor is the freedom of movement. Without a special pass from the police, no one is allowed to go from place to place, not even to the next village or suburb. These official passes are not always easy to obtain, and often they can be had only through bribery.

It goes without saying that permission to travel abroad is restricted to official envoys of the Government. Thousands of Vietnamese Americans can testify to this who are hopelessly separated from their wives, children, and parents.

Another basic right ignored in Vietnam is the right for a court of law, or at least for a hearing before condemnation. Some 300,000 men have been imprisoned in reeducation camps for over 2 years now, and not one of them has ever been judged, condemned, or even accused of any. crime.

In Saigon, someone disappears nearly every day, and note that I am not talking on hearsay. Many of my friends have seen their daughter, their son, their husband fail to come home for supper. After frustrating inquiries from one police station to another, they were invariably told that if they want to stay out of trouble, they should mind their own business, or that the police does not know where this person is, but if he or she was not a criminal, he would surely be home by now.

Arrests are usually made in one of the following four ways, all of which I have personally witnessed. First, the person is called to report to the police station, and is never heard of since. Many priests have disappeared in this way. Second, the person is quietly kidnaped by the police patrol car while walking back home on the street or walking to work or walking to the market. This seems the most often-used method.

To list only the big names, Father Minh, Father Loc, Father Thanh were arrested in this way.

Third, the house is raided, usually at dawn. All the occupants are ordered out, and a search conducted without witness by a swarm of troops invariably produces some damning evidence, guns, documents, U.S. dollars, and so on.

Fourth, the house is searched at night, and the person is carried away during curfew hours. It is impossible to know how many persons are presently in jail. All I know is that all jails are crowded, that at least two large new ones have been built near Saigon, and that almost all U.S. BOQ's and BEQ's are now used as houses of detention, as many as 26 persons occupying the average GI single bedroom. I know this from the report of prisoners who have come back to tell me.

Now, not everyone is sent to jail, and only men with a high school education are kept in reeducation camps, but every single South Vietnamese, young or old, man or woman, is submitted to the triweekly sessions of political brainwashing, which often drag on from 7 o'clock to midnight. Everyone has to show his contrition for past crimes, his hatred for Americans who, among other crimes, used to cook and eat Vietnamese babies, so it is said, and his love for the Marxist-Leninist society.

Everyone is threatened with deportation to the work camps if he does not join in the campaign of denunciation against his neighbor, if he clings too hard to religious convictions or if, in any way, he fails to cooperate fully with the new regime. The right to one's own convictions is another one that has been banished from Communist Vietnam.

The list could go on and on, but I think my time is over, and I may say more under the questions.

This is the fate America left to its allies, a people who trusted us to help them defend their country from communist takeover.

These are some selected quotes from intelligent people, leaders of our country.

On Cambodia:

Some will find the whole bloodbath debate unreal. What future possibility could be more terrible than the reality of what is happening to Cambodia now? Anthony Lewis "Avoiding A Bloodbath" New York Times March 17, 1975

If we really want to help the people of Cambodia and the people of South Vietnam, is it not wiser to end the killing? Since most credited analysts of foreign policy admit that the Lon Nol regime cannot survive, won't the granting of further aid only prolong the fighting and, with it, the killing? Representative Bob Carr Congressional Record March 13, 1975

It is hard to predict in an exact sense what would happen if the United States reduced its commitment to Lon Nol. . . . There is a possibility that more moderate politicians would take over in Phnom Penh, and that the insurgents would be content to negotiate with these people. An actual insurgent attack and takeover of Phnom Penh is far from a certainty, as an assault on a city requires large expenditures of resources which the Khmer Rouge would not be likely to want to make. Michael Harrington "Limiting Aid to Cambodia" Congressional Record August 12, 1974

I say that calling the Lon Nol regime an ally is to debase the meaning of the word as it applies to our true allies. . . . The greatest gift our country can give to the Cambodian people is not guns but peace. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now. Representative Chris Dodd Congressional Record March 12, 1975

It is time that we allow the peaceful people of Cambodia to rebuild their nation . . . (T)he Administration has warned that if we leave there will be a "bloodbath." But to warn of a new bloodbath is no justification for extending the current bloodbath. Representative Tom Downey Congressional Record March 13, 1975

By Michael Benge

The communist Hukbong Laban sa Hapon (Anti-Japanese Army) or simply Huks, comprised mainly of disenfranchised peasant tenant-farmers of Central Luzon, was only one of several guerrilla groups resisting the Japanese invasion and occupation of the Philippines. The Huks were well received by the villagers and were seen as their protector from the abuses of the Japanese. There were many motivations for people to join: nationalism, empathy, survival, and revenge. Those who could not join the guerrilla army joined the underground government via its “secretly converted neighborhood associations”, called Barrio United Defense Corps. The Huks also tried to recruit beyond Central Luzon but were not as successful.

On March 29, 1942, the communist Hukbong Laban sa Hapon (Huks) was incorporated into a broad-based united front of guerrillas named the -- Hukbong Bayan Laban sa mga Hapon (Hukbalahap) -- "The Nation's Army Against the Japanese"). Soon after, its representatives met with USAFFE (United States Army Forces in the Far East) representative Colonel Thorpe at Camp Sanchez in the spring of 1942, and under this umbrella, the conferees agreed to cooperate, share equipment and supplies, with the Americans providing trainers under USAFFE’s overall command.Although the communist Huks fought the Japanese, at times, they also fought other guerrilla units under USAFFE as well as killed, pillaged and plundered other Filipino nationalists. Their methods were often portrayed by other guerrilla leaders as terrorists; for example, “Ray C. Hunt, an American who led his own band of 3000 guerrillas, said his experiences with the communist Huks were always unpleasant, they were much better assassins than soldiers.” Tightly disciplined and led by fanatics, they murdered Filipino landlords and drove others off to the comparative safety of Manila. They were not above plundering and torturing ordinary Filipinos, and they were treacherous enemies of all other guerrillas on Luzon. The initial force of 500 armed Huks was organized into five squadrons and “by late summer 1943, Huk leadership claimed to have a fully armed guerrilla force of 5,000 to 20,000 active men and women military fighters and 50,000 more in reserve. By August 1948, the Huks became a trained and experienced force, well-equipped and well-prepared for its guerrilla warfare. Their weaponry was obtained primarily by stealing it from battlefields and downed planes left behind by the Japanese, Filipinos, and Americans. The Huks also created a training school where they taught political theory and military tactics based on Marxist ideas. In areas that the group controlled, they set up local governments and instituted land reforms, dividing up the largest estates equally among the peasants and often killing the landlords.” Among the group's leaders were figurehead Luis Taruc, communist party Secretary General Jesus Lava, and Commander Hizon (Benjamin Cunanan) who aimed to lead the Philippines toward Marxist ideals and communist revolution.

After the surrender of Japan in WWII and the withdrawal of its forces from the Philippines, most of the guerrilla groups disbanded and went home, or were absorbed into the Philippine Constabulary (civilian police) or the Army. The aftermath of the liberation from Japan was characterized by chaos. The paternal relationship of the large landowners toward the tenant farmers had been virtually destroyed during the war, and life was economically unsustainable for the peasants who had joined the Huks. Moreover, the poor harvest between late 1945 to early 1946 period not only exacerbated the plight of the Huks, it also further intensified the gap between the tenants and the landlords. Added to this, the Huks being a communist-led group were considered to be disloyal and were not accorded U.S. recognition or benefits at the end of the war. Their hardships were aggravated by the hostility they experienced when the Philippine Government, following orders from the United States of America, disarmed and arrested the communist Huks. Harassment and abuses against peasant activists became common. Largely consisting of peasant farmers, the Huks feared for their lives as the USAFFE and the Philippine Constabulary (civilian police) hunted them down. In September 1946, the Huks retreated to the Sierra Madre Mountains and their guerrilla lifestyle as a response to supposed maltreatment by the government and renamed themselves Hukbong Magpapalaya ng Bayan (HMB) or People's Liberation Army.

Although the communist Huks were only one of a plethora of guerrilla groups in the umbrella organization Hukbong Bayan Laban sa mga Hapon (Hukbalahap) -- "The Nation's Army Against the Japanese"), originally formed to fight the Japanese. However, in 1946 in what became known as the Hukbalahap Rebellion, the communist Huks extended their fight into a rebellion against the Philippine Government and usurped the Hukbalahap name in an attempt to play off on its patriotic reputation and create a charade of legitimacy among the peasants. Adding to this deception, the Huks claimed that it had extended its guerrilla warfare campaign merely in search of recognition as World War II freedom fighters and former American and Filipino allies who deserved a share of war reparations. In reality, the communist Huks insurrection was but an attempt to take over the entire Philippines. The rebellion lasted for years, with huge civilian casualties.

In 1949, the Huks ambushed and murdered Aurora Quezon, Chairman of the Philippine Red Cross and widow of the Philippines' second president Manuel L. Quezon, as she was in route to her hometown for the dedication of the Quezon Memorial Hospital.  Several others were also killed, including her eldest daughter and son-in-law. This attack brought worldwide condemnation of the Hukbalahap, who claimed that the attack was done by "renegade" members.

The continuing condemnation and new post-war causes of the movement forced the Communist Party of the Philippines (PKP) in 1950 to reconstitute the organization as the armed wing of a revolutionary party and change the official name to Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (HMB) or "Peoples' Liberation Army"; likely changing it in emulation of the Chinese People's Liberation Army. Notwithstanding this name change, the HMB continued to be popularly known as the Hukbalahap, and the English-speaking press and the U.S. Army command continued to refer to it and its members, interchangeably, as "The Huks" during the whole period between 1945 and 1952, and commentators have continued to do so since then.

The start of the 1950s saw the beginning of the rebellion's decline. There was general weariness among the people from years of fighting.  Many prominent Huk leaders either had died or were too old to fight, and those that remained were few. To make things worse, the villagers of Central Luzon showed signs of becoming weary of supporting them or just saw them as irrelevant. Public sympathies for the movement began waning due to their postwar attacks. The Huks carried out a campaign of raids, holdups, robbery, ambushes, murder, rape, massacre of small villages, kidnapping, and intimidation. The Huks confiscated funds and property to sustain their movement and relied on small village organizers for political and material support. Nevertheless, from Central Luzon, the Huk movement had spread to the central provinces of Nueva Ecija, Pampanga, Tarlac, Bulacan, and in Nueva Vizcaya, Pangasinan, Laguna, Bataan, and Quezon.

By Mike Benge, POW, VVFH Founding Member

The only similarity between Francis Ford Coppola’s film set-in South-East Asia and Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness” set in Africa is that both had rivers winding through them and both had major characters named Kurtz. And, oh yes, Coppola copied Conrad’s style of telling stories within a story. Coppola’s 1979 film “Apocalypse Now” makes a mockery of the geography of Vietnam and Cambodia by depicting the Mekong River as running through the jungles of Northwest Cambodia. Captain Benjamin L. Willard’s, played by Martin Sheen, odyssey portrays him powering up one river and drifting down another in his relentless quest to find the reclusive Colonel Kurtz (Marlin Brando) in the heart of Cambodia and assassinate him. (Senator John Kerry would have been a great advisor for this portion of the movie, given his claimed expertise and fantasy in navigating this area in Cambodia – A figment of his imagination. What Coppola produced was an epic messy abortion regurgitated from the hallucinatory nightmare in his mind – the Vietnam War. 

Anthropologist Dr. Gerald Cannon Hickey – Gerry to his friends – was the most knowledgeable scholar on the Montagnards of the Central Highlands in Vietnam. One day Gerry received a phone call from Francis Ford Coppola’s production manager, who wanted to hire him as a consultant on that portion of his film pertaining to Montagnards. Gerry had no patience for the likes of Coppola and wanted nothing to do with his brand of movie madness; besides that, he was in the middle of writing yet another book on the Montagnards. He knew that I was on sabbatical from USAID, which had broken its contract to fund my Master’s Degree at the University of the Philippines at Los Banos, and suggested they contact me for the job, adding, “Mike knows more about the Montagnards than you’ll ever need to know.”  

They took Gerry’s suggestion and offered me the job at a salary much higher than what I was making with USAID, and sweetened the pot by providing a Crown Toyota and a chauffeur to drive me to and from the set each day. I lived near the University only a few miles away from the shooting location. I decided this would be a good break from my intense Master’s research. At first, I was intrigued by what was going on, but I soon realized it was more make-believe than any semblance of the reality of the Vietnam War, and many of the film’s so-called expert advisors were as phony as a $3 bill. 

My first encounter with this was at a humongous evening outdoor picnic-style buffet with lighted lanterns given in honor of Martin Sheen, who decided not to come to the party. I was following Coppola through the line as he described one scene involving the Montagnards. As Captain Willard is floating down a river in a boat, as, he drifts around a bend and looking through field glasses a scene evolves with a group of Montagnard men dancing around a woman giving birth. As they circle around, each, in turn, pushes on her abdomen in a ritualistic aid to help force the baby out. I asked Coppola, “Where in the hell did you get this idea? The birth of a Montagnard child is a private affair attended only by women.” He replied that his personal pilot had seen this when he was a helicopter pilot stationed in the Central Highlands. “Bullshit!” I retorted. He then told me to turn around and ask the pilot, who was standing right behind me. He was pretty impressive, a big guy, standing at least 6 foot 3 or 4, buff, and didn’t seem all that pleased with my comment. I thought to myself,” Holy shit!” Not backing down one iota, I quickly asked, “Where were you stationed?” He replied, “Pleiku.” I then asked, “What were you doing?” He replied, “I was an Army helicopter pilot.” By then Coppola was standing beside me, when I said, “I’ve three questions for you.” Coppola was listening intensely, either to what I was asking, or perhaps just waiting for a clue to what would provoke his pilot to take a poke at me. I then asked, “What was the name of the base you flew out of and what aviation company was stationed there? He hemmed and hawed, and finally said, “I can’t, a don’t, remember.” To which I emphatically said, “Strike one!” I then turned to Coppola and said, “Everyone who was there knew the name, Camp Holloway – about 4 kilometers (2.5 mi) west of Pleiku – for it was named after Chief Warrant Officer Charles E. Holloway, who in December 1962 became the first helicopter pilot killed in action. Camp Holloway was the home of the U.S. Army’s 52nd Combat Aviation Battalion.” I turned back to the pilot and asked, “If you flew out of Pleiku, what was the most distinctive visual landmark from the air?” He couldn’t seem to remember that either. I then forcefully said, “Strike two!” Again, I turned back to Coppola and told him, “The landmark was Pussy Peak. Every pilot who ever flew in Vietnam knew that. The Vietnamese called it “Dragon Mountain” (a contraction of Dragon's Mouth Mountain - Núi Hàm Rồng in Vietnamese) and the Montagnards called it Chu H’Drung. The American name came from the fact that it was shaped like a woman’s torso, with two ridges coming down taking the shape of legs cut off at the knees, with a triangle patch of trees nestled in the crotch of the mountain. It was the major landmark for the dogleg flight pattern from Saigon to Hue. I then addressed the pilot once more, “I have one last question, remember it’s ‘three strikes and you’re out.” “What was the name of the Montagnard tribe in Pleiku that was supposedly conducting this ritual?” Again, he seemed not to remember, so I prompted him with, “Was it the Cao Đài, the Hòa Hảo, or the Nung?” (None of which were Montagnard tribes in South Viet Nam, the later was a tribe for North Vietnam.)  He thought for a while and then with a stammer he emphatically replied, “The Hoa Hao, that’s it, they were called the Hoa Hao.” I ardently told the pilot, “Strike three, you’re out of here!”  Turning my back on him, I said to Coppola, “Your pilot is a liar. The Hoa Hao is a religious sect, not a Montagnard tribe, and I doubt if he was ever in Vietnam. If so, he was a REMF and got his story out of a gin bottle in some bar in Saigon.” The crowd at the buffet had grown quiet, listening to our conversation and waiting for Coppola to explode; but for some reason, he didn’t. Surprisingly, giving the devil his due, Coppola dropped the scene from the movie, nor did the pilot deck me and he kept flying for Coppola. This was my introduction to Coppola’s delusional world.