EIGHT
WITH THE ELECTION of John F. Kennedy to the office of the President of the United States of America, there was an influx of new men into the higher appointive echelons of the government. Nowhere was this change more pronounced than in McNamara’s Office of the Secretary of Defense and, from there, throughout the Pentagon. It was said that there were more Phi Beta Kappas in that office than ever before. True, but this did not ensure that they were the best military minds.
However, they overcame their lack of military experience and knowledge through study and dedication to their jobs. They learned from their environment, among the older and more stable bureaucrats. Most important, they brought with them new ideas, new perspectives, and new goals. Nowhere was this more evident than in their approach to the unconventional problems of the Cold War and its greatest battlefield at that time, Indochina.
One thing became quite clear before too many months had passed. They, and their young President, had come to stay the course. They laid out long-range plans through the first four years and clearly intended to be there for the second four, when their work would come to fruition. And next there was Bobby, and then Teddy. There was always the possibility of “the Dynasty.”
I had been assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 1960 when Thomas Gates, the Morgan Guaranty Trust banker from New York, was secretary. As a businessman, he ran the Pentagon and the military establishment as a businessman would. He was an excellent secretary of defense.
My military assignment carried over into the McNamara era. He was one of the new world of businessmen. He had been a Harvard professor and had gone directly to a high position with the Ford Motor Company. Much was made of the fact that Kennedy had selected the president of the Ford Motor Company to be the secretary of defense. Few noted at the time that when McNamara came into the Pentagon as the appointee to the job, he had been the president of Ford no more than a month.
I was called to brief Mr. McNamara on a military activity related to CIA operations on the second or third day he was in office. As had been the custom under Mr. Gates, I prepared a briefing paper on the subject that was only two or three pages long. I discussed it with McNamara and left it in his hands. Just as I reached my office, I received a call asking me to return.
When I arrived, his executive officer—an old friend of mine—informed me that Mr. McNamara had read my brief paper, liked it, and wanted me to go back and write up the whole business. Over the course of the rest of the day I composed about twenty-five pages and returned them to the secretary’s office. The next morning I found them on my desk with a brief note: “Fine. Just what I wanted” It was signed by McNamara.
I have thought of that small, introductory incident many times, and I recall that I had said to myself, That man is the secretary. He is going to see mountains of paper. If he wants long briefs loaded with statistics, instead of short summaries, he will never make it. He’ll be buried in bureaucratic paper.
The Kennedy administration was like that. The men nearest to him were old friends, former associates, family. JFK would rather discuss a serious matter with a roomful of friends than with the National Security Council or any of the other committees that proliferate in official Washington.
This is the way Kennedy came to the White House. After all, he had grown up as the son of the American ambassador to Great Britain. He had served with the U.S. Navy during World War II. Since World War II he had been a member of Congress, first as a representative and then as a senator. As the record shows, he was a voracious reader, and he involved himself in a broad spectrum of interests. He was a young man with a lot of experience and the capacity to learn. He was a searching questioner.
As President, he inherited many interesting programs. Two of them played a major part in his life as President. His decisions concerning those projects created the tensions and pressures that brought about his sudden and untimely death. Had Kennedy lived, America would not have become militarily involved in Vietnam. Had he lived, he would have been elected to a second term, and during that term his plans and his goals would have reached fruition. Only his assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963, kept him from achieving those goals.
When he took office, he was confronted with the immediacy of the CIA’s plan to invade Cuba utilizing a brigade of U.S.-trained Cuban exiles. Concurrently, he listened to two important briefings about the situation in Vietnam. President Eisenhower had told him that the Southeast Asian problem nation would be Laos and that Vietnam was no place to become involved with American troops. The other Vietnam briefing came from Edward G. Lansdale, who had just returned from a long visit with Ngo Dinh Diem. Some of those who were at the briefing believed that Kennedy intended to make Lansdale the next ambassador to Saigon.
January 1961 was memorable for another most important event. In that month, Nikita Khrushchev made his famous speech pledging Soviet support of “wars of national liberation.” Almost everyone in the new administration was inclined to believe that unconventional warfare was likely to be vitally important during the decade of the sixties, as we shall see.
Kennedy knew that the conflict in Southeast Asia had been instigated under the covert leadership of the World War II Office of Strategic Services and the CIA on one side and by the Soviet KGB and the Chinese on the other. Khrushchev’s challenge was ominous, and Kennedy did not doubt that it focused on Cuba and Vietnam. Even before the JFK inauguration, McNamara and a team of close associates moved into a suite of offices in the Pentagon. McNamara attended the “Pre-Brief”1 intelligence-report sessions every morning. He began, right away, concentrating on Vietnam.
As we have seen in this account of the CIA and the progression of the Vietnam era, there were four major steps in this development of conflict in Southeast Asia, by the OSS and CIA on one side and the KGB, with Chinese assistance, on the other, all leading to the inevitable Americanization of the war.
Most of the Kennedy team did not realize that the first step along this Cold War trail had begun in September 1945, the month that the Japanese surrendered to end World War II, with that shipment of arms and other war materiel—approximately one-half of that which had been scheduled to have been used by American troops during the invasion of Japan—from the stockpiles on Okinawa to Haiphong Harbor near Hanoi. There an American OSS team turned them over to Ho Chi Minh and his military commander, Col. Vo Nguyen Giap. The other half of that invasion stockpile went to Korea.
None of us were able to discover, during these early McNamara sessions, who had made that decision in 1944 or 1945. It was an enormously important decision at the time and had monumental impact on the development of the Cold War over the next thirty years. During those next decades, the Vietminh would become a truly formidable foe. One thing we should have learned from that costly experience in Vietnam was that the Vietminh defeated a full array of American military power, including an army of as many as 550,000 men, and in the process had destroyed more than five thousand U.S. helicopters.
With no air force or navy to speak of, the Vietminh proved tough enough to outlast both the mighty U.S. Seventh Fleet and a modern air force equipped with everything from fighter-bombers and U-2 reconnaissance aircraft to B-52 strategic bombers. They took all we could muster, short of nuclear weapons, including the horrendous Christmas 1972 bombing of Hanoi, and survived to hoist their own flag over Saigon.
This tragic debacle of American arms brought to mind the words spoken by Sen. Barry Goldwater during an address in 1983 before a group of retired military men in Washington, D.C., that the trouble with the American military forces at that time was that they had no “Grand Strategy.” Had Kennedy lived, Goldwater would not have had to make that address.
Step number two was an amazing operation, unnoticed by almost everyone on the new Kennedy team. They did not realize that during the mid-fifties, more than 215,000 half-terrorized Tonkinese natives had been flown to South Vietnam, 660,000 more had been transported there by sea with the U.S. Navy, and hundreds of thousands of others had traveled by foot and by other means. This horde of destitute people flooded the south and began to take over villages, jobs, the police organization, the army, and many of the top jobs in the new Diem government.
Early in this period the Saigon Military Mission planners had come up with a civic action program “to place civil service [read ”Tonkinese“] personnel out among the people, in simple dress, where they would work alongside the people, getting their hands dirty.” (This is from the official report prepared by Edward G. Lansdale and presented to the new President during a White House meeting in January 1961.)
When a training center, established in Saigon for SMM’s civic action program, failed to recruit any native (southern) volunteers, Diem/ Lansdale “selected a group of young university-trained men from among the refugees [read ”invaders“] from North Vietnam.” Diem ordered the civic action teams and the army commanders to work together on a “pacification” campaign.
As a result, the immediate beneficiaries of this effort were, more often than not, the northern Catholic invaders.
This situation, as was intended, created the matrix of war—and predictably the “enemy,” as often as not, turned out to be the southern natives, while the government was augmented by the Catholic invaders. Between 1955 and 1960 this inflammatory situation became worse every year, and it was exacerbated by steps three and four, to follow.
Ngo Dinh Diem published two edicts at the suggestion of his American advisers, many of them from Michigan State University under the leadership of Diem’s political mentor, Wesley Fishel.
The third step came when Diem ordered the French to turn over any government positions they held and leave the country. This order destroyed the effective, but fragile, constabulary system, and in a short time there was no law and order in the new country.
The fourth step in the development of this smoldering internal warfare concerned the issuance of a second edict that directed the Chinese to leave, on the assumption, it said, that they were Communists or Communist sympathizers.
This had a destructive impact on the economic system, as mentioned earlier. The Chinese had been the brokers. They purchased the rice, other crops, lumber, etc., and in return provided money and the necessities of life for the village. This simple, basic village-oriented economic system had kept a most effective political system alive for centuries. When the Chinese left, this system collapsed. Diem was so inexperienced and so poorly advised that each time he came out with new orders, the situation worsened. In villages where the council form of government had existed for centuries and was the supreme political authority, Diem abolished all elections in June 1956. He followed this by abolishing all municipal elections. These errors tended to help thrust the northern Catholics into positions above the local people. As we have said earlier, the natives of southern Vietnam were rapidly being made into an enemy, known as the Vietcong.2
By 1960, the situation in South Vietnam was beyond control. The troubles that had been created by Diem’s edicts played directly into the hands of the Vietminh. If anything, the Vietminh were the greatest beneficiaries of this terrible situation. The country was falling into their hands.
Having been busy setting up this operation from behind its cloak of secrecy since 1945 (as the OSS), the CIA was ready by 1960 to come out into the open in what was known as “the war to save South Vietnam and all of Southeast Asia” from the onrush of communism—precisely the type of “war of national liberation” that Khrushchev had vowed to fight. This Cold War intrigue, abetted by “domino theory”3 fears, was ready to pay off with its first series of moves, which would eventually put hundreds of billions of dollars into the pockets of the military-industrial complex of the world.
The CIA’s first major operational plan to achieve this ambitious goal for its allies involved the movement of a U.S. Marine Corps squadron of twenty H-19 Sikorsky helicopters from Udorn, Thailand, to the vicinity of Saigon. This was a most crucial and pivotal development. It not only introduced a major unit of modern equipment into South Vietnam, but in doing so it ignored the restrictive terms of the 1954 Geneva Agreement. Before long there were four hundred helicopters in South Vietnam, at a time when the only U.S. military personnel in that country were restricted by President Kennedy to the role of “advisers.”
In retrospect, it may seem unbelievable that somewhere in Vietnam lie the rusting hulks of five thousand helicopters lost by American forces, by far the majority of them lost after Kennedy’s death in 1963. This was a stark tribute to one of the most foolhardy chapters in the long history of warfare. The loss of five thousand helicopters with crews, passengers, and the dollars they represented makes the “Charge of the Light Brigade,” with all of its tragic overtones, seem like a rainy day at a Sunday School picnic by comparison.
The massive deployment of helicopters in Vietnam, spawned by a secretary of defense who preached “cost-effectiveness” while his department practiced utter waste, makes the helicopter itself a symbol of that war. It is scarcely conceivable that so little tactical effectiveness, across the board, could have been achieved at so horrendous and staggering a cost. In a war that produced so very little of anything upon which we can look with pride, the helicopter certainly has to stand head and shoulders above all others as the symbol of waste, mindlessness, and extravagance.
At one point during the war, the famous Israeli general Moshe Dayan, who had led his forces in a dash across the Sinai in the 1967 war against the Egyptians, went to Vietnam as an observer and writer. No stranger to Vietnam, General Dayan went out into the battle zones with U.S. troops and studied the combat he found there.
The general made his conclusion clear that his “lightning war” tactics would not work in Vietnam and then added, “Helicopters may be first-class equipment, but the way they are being used in Vietnam, they are wasted.”4 As much as anything we are aware of, this underscores the great significance of that first CIA move of military helicopters from Laos to Vietnam in 1960. That single action opened the doors to the wanton expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars—for what?
That was one measure of the helicopter fiasco. There is another. Using a very conservative approach, we can estimate that the loss of five thousand helicopters resulted in no fewer than fifteen thousand to twenty thousand American deaths, based on average crew size and taking into account that many helicopters were lost on the ground, and many others were destroyed without the loss of life. Yet a great number were destroyed with a full crew and a load of American troops. Even if the lower figure of fifteen thousand is accepted, it represents a little less than one-third of all American fatalities in Vietnam. Many of these helicopter and human losses were operational, but a surprising proportion of them were nonoperational—the vehicles just crashed by themselves, without enemy action.
Helicopter losses were staggering. “Of the 6,414 total aircraft-related deaths, to April 17, 1971, 1,792 occurred in fixed wing operations, and 4,622 in rotary [helicopters],” according to a U.S. Air Force policy letter of May 1971.
An even more shocking statistic from the same policy letter follows: Of the 4,622 deaths in helicopter crashes, 1,981, or 43 percent, were “casualties not from action by hostile forces.” If you had helicopters, you did not need an enemy.
Not only was the helicopter a tragic and costly adjunct to an altogether tragic and costly war, but it is entirely possible that the helicopter—or more specifically, the voracious demand for support that is directly related to and attributable to the helicopter—was instrumental in creating a situation that had much to do with the unfortunate and unnecessary escalation of the war. By all standards, the demand for manpower to support helicopter operations proved massive.
Helicopters sent to Vietnam in 1960 for what had appeared to be a noncombatant role resulted in the broad exposure of Americans to hostile fire. Once American blood had been spilled in Vietnam, no matter what the cause, it became a matter of national pride and interest to avenge those deaths and, as it was commonly expressed, to “drive out Communist-inspired subversive insurgents.”
This whole helicopter saga had begun with that brief telephone call from the deputy director of central intelligence to the Office of Special Operations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in December 1960, when he sought to obtain the transfer of a squadron of U.S. Marine Corps helicopters from Udorn, Thailand—where they were being used in a CIA program in Laos—to Vietnam. This movement of “cover-unit”5 helicopters caused the displacement of the first few pebbles that became a major avalanche in South Vietnam.
It should be noted that this initial call in 1960 from the deputy director of central intelligence, Gen. C. P. Cabell, came shortly after the First National Bank of Boston had arranged for the Textron Corporation to acquire the Bell Helicopter Company. The CIA had arranged a meeting in the Pentagon in order for a vice president of the Boston bank to discuss Cold War uses of, and demand for, helicopters before it recommended the merger to the officers of Textron. It was the Bell-built “Huey” that became the most-used helicopter in Vietnam.
In earlier days, these old H-19 Sikorsky helicopters had been used to provide transportation for the indigenous security forces of the Saigon government, who would range over the villages of the lush rice-growing country of the southernmost Camau Peninsula. At that time, rioting and banditry had broken out because the Chinese brokerage system had collapsed. This had nothing whatsoever to do with the Vietminh, the Vietcong, or communism. These were simply desperate people deprived of food and water by the removal of the Chinese.
Diem’s government misinterpreted this banditry and violence as insurgency and chose to attack and wipe out these “hot spots of communism.” Thus, the CIA’s helicopters were used in an attempt to suppress a “violent” situation. American advisory personnel flew the helicopters, and American “civilians” maintained them. South Vietnamese police manned the guns.
It is worthwhile to note how fundamentally important an offshoot of this action became. These villages were surrounded by water, but the water was brackish and undrinkable. As a result, huge earthen jars, passed down from generation to generation, were used to store fresh water. During dry periods these jars were replenished by shipments delivered by the same Chinese-owned sampans that came at harvest time to pick up the rice. When these sampans no longer came, water supplies became precarious. Working with the brutal logic of the ignorant, Diem’s police machine-gunned these lifesaving earthen jars in the so-called Communist villages. From this time on, these villagers became maddened by the lack of potable water and by the tragedy of their situation.
Tens of thousands of these terrorized and desperate people became homeless migrants, called “Vietcong” and subversives, in their own homeland. Without intent and without choice, they fell upon residents of other villages that still had water and food. They turned into bandits. Thus, the tens of thousands in turmoil became hundreds of thousands labeled “enemy.”
What else could Diem’s people tell their benevolent American advisers and counselors, who had given them the helicopters and helped them into power in the first place? Of course, it was not all altruism on America’s part. The CIA had been working for fifteen years to bring this struggle to the point where American forces would have to become involved, bringing all their expensive military equipment with them. It became tactically expedient to make use of these helicopters as a throttle on the pace of the war. Whenever villages were attacked, “insurgency” flared up among the people. This created an active “enemy” and gave the new Diem Self Defense Force units, and the new army and its Philippines-trained elite units, plenty of action. From this modest and ostensibly innocent beginning, the United States followed up by sending helicopters by the thousands into Vietnam.
As the strife heated up in 1961, Secretary McNamara created Combat Development Test Centers in Vietnam to study firsthand how the war should be waged. The helicopter became more intimately associated with close-in combat. A wild, carefree helicopter sweep was more thrilling than a motorcycle race along the California oceanside, and ten times as hell-raising. American and Vietnamese gunners armed with automatic weapons sprayed indiscriminate barrages into villages and forest havens from one end of the country to the other. When more action was desired, they dropped napalm to set the flimsy huts of the villages on fire. It was at this time that Agent Orange was introduced as a military weapon. It was intended by McNamara’s “Whiz Kids” to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam so that the gunners in the helicopters could better seek out their targets, that is, those Vietnamese who ran away as the helicopters approached.
In those earlier days, tactical intelligence was nonexistent. Helicopter crews dashed out on missions, little knowing where they were going or what they would find when they got there. They shot at anyone and anything that moved. Those were the days of deadly ambushes of American helicopters and of blind attacks upon any target. Because of the helicopter’s slow speed and vulnerability, the crews soon learned how costly a 55-mph flight at gun-range altitude could be. They abandoned higher-altitude flights and resorted to very low level “nap of the earth” tactics. This put the odds in their favor, because they were able to reduce their exposure time if they remained consistently below treetop level over the rice fields. The tactic generally paid off, except for chance encounters with wily ground teams.
For a while, losses were cut, but then the battle-wise bandits found a way to turn this tactic to their favor. The combat helicopter of that 1960—66 period was overtaxed when it had to fly two hundred miles in a round-trip with any more than ten passengers and their military equipment. The bandits learned that if they struck a target village in order to set up a helicopter counterattack less than sixty or seventy miles from the helicopter base, they would allow the helicopter pilots discretion to fly a deceptive and devious flight path to the target, providing the helicopters with a margin of safety against ambush.
However, when they attacked a target that was eighty to one hundred miles from the helicopter base, the pilots were forced to fly a more nearly straight-line flight path at low-altitude, “nap of the earth” levels to the target and back. In such situations, it was much more feasible for the bandits to set up an ambush. And this is just what they did, repeatedly.
Having learned this tactic, the bandits had won a definite advantage. They knew where the helicopter base was, and they had the option to attack any village they wanted in order to set up a situation that would lure a helicopter response. By observing the preparatory action at the base, they could alert the ambush parties by radio that the helicopters were en route.
Teams of natives equipped with any weapons they could find would lie in the tall grass in fields along the intended flight path of the massed helicopters. Then they would wait for the helicopters to fly overhead.
One of their most effective tactics involved the use of a bow and arrow barrage. These archers had none of the style and color of Robin Hood, but they were just as lethal. They would lay upon their backs in the fields with crude, heavy bows across their feet, upraised to the aerial target. When the helicopters approached, they would load their bows with heavy, clublike projectiles that were fastened to twine, wire, rope, or vines. The air would be filled with this trash, which would catch in the rotor blades, bringing down as many as fifteen helicopters at one time.
As the years passed and escalation of the war took place, more and more airfields were built and covered with helicopters. It was no longer necessary to fly long missions. Refueling stops were more frequent, and thus cargo tonnage increased. The battle helicopter “gunships” were developed, and these aircraft, bristling with machine guns and rockets, gave better than they received. This situation gave rise to the next level of enemy tactical measures to prey upon the ever-lucrative helicopter target.
To these homeless men in the bush, the helicopter was still the best and most worthwhile target. They were densely concentrated on airfields all over Vietnam. This was just the type of target that a small, stealthy band could attack, hit and run, with little fear of loss and great expectation of spectacular results. With great care and stealth, the enemy moved mortars and short-range rockets close to the airfields. Without warning, a wild barrage of weaponry would descend from the sky, and large numbers of sitting-duck helicopters would be lost. These sneak attacks took their toll as total helicopter losses climbed into the thousands.
The primary objective of guerrilla forces in this type of warfare is not to become involved in major battles but to keep hitting the enemy where he is most vulnerable, to make him bleed to death.
To those who have seen the hand of the Kremlin behind all this master strategy, it must be clear by now that if the objective of the Communists in Southeast Asia was to see the United States sacrifice men and money in tremendous quantities while they themselves gave up little money and no men, Vietnam was the ideal situation. It bothered the Kremlin not at all to see Asians die along with Americans. In fact, as long as the war continued, the Soviets won on a relative basis over Asians and Americans at the same time. The war in Indochina was a classic example of how this modern concept of “war by attrition” could prove successful.
The Indochinese were the innocent victims in this struggle, because their homeland had been chosen as the battleground for this impossible contest that earned more than $500 billion for the military-industrial power elite. The helicopter war exemplified the success of this guerrilla strategy, both from the Pentagon’s point of view and from that of the detached, chess-playing men in the Kremlin, who understood that you must give up a little to win a lot.
Helicopter operations can be likened to an iceberg. The good and the glory, if any, were seen at the top; the cost and the tragedy were submerged. Sometimes this submerged mass shows itself above the wave. Statistics are not always the best resort, but they serve a useful purpose. The study of statistics was what Secretary McNamara liked best. Those statistics forecast that a helicopter-augmented war machine would churn out big dollars.
For many, many years, all military helicopter operators in the army, air force, and marines had attempted to maintain their ungainly machines at a 50 percent or better “in-commission” rate. This means that, at that time, they expected one out of every two helicopters on hand to be flyable.
The army, for example, for years plugged away at a 49 percent rate and strived for better. Such a rate was affected by many factors and would most likely have been lower than 49 percent had not a great number of helicopters in the field been factory-new, making it nearly certain they would be in commission. A 50 percent rate was considered good. Newer models may have exceeded this rate for brief periods, but then their high support costs created problems of their own. The significance of this 50 percent in-commission rate was felt most when evaluated in terms of operational factors. For example, to move one hundred men one hundred miles in one day at the rate of ten men per helicopter actually took twenty helicopters. This ensured that ten would be ready to perform that job, because 50 percent, or ten helicopters, would not be available at any given time.
Keep in mind also that in the typical Vietnamese tactical situation, it was no more than one hundred miles to the operational site, and then another one hundred miles back, and there was no fuel at that base in the hostile zone. As a result, moving one hundred men two hundred miles in one day for a mission at midpoint took twenty helicopters. At unit price, this doubled the cost of operation.
The next cost showed up in personnel. A twenty-helicopter squadron consisted of some two hundred men. Two or more of these squadrons required supply and maintenance units of an additional two hundred men each and the food, housing, and fuel elements essential to support their operations.
As a result, a continuing demand for operations that required an average of twenty helicopters per day to transport two hundred men one hundred miles actually required a base with forty helicopters and close to one thousand operational, medical, headquarters, and support personnel—not including those who provided housing, food, fuel services, transportation, and the vital function of twenty-four-hour-a-day perimeter defense.
Between 1960 and 1962, when the American military advisory strength in South Vietnam was limited to 16,000 men, Gen. Paul Harkins, then the senior commander in Saigon, complained bitterly that with a ceiling of 16,000 men, he could get only 1,200—1,600 effective combat advisers, because most of the rest were confined to logistical support work. The bulk of that support work and cost was related to the helicopter.
Gen. Earle Wheeler, at that time director of the Joint Staff,6 ordered an analysis of the Harkins complaint that led to the Okanagan study7 of helicopter operations in Vietnam. The study revealed that not only was General Harkins’s complaint well founded; it was learned that a major segment of the oversized logistics contingent was directly involved in the support of helicopters that General Harkins himself had requested, little realizing the resultant burden of his action.
The surprising thing revealed by this study was that this was true even when most of the helicopters in Vietnam were assigned not to the army but to the CIA8 and much of the maintenance was being performed by highly paid contract civilians.
The helicopter mushroom grew, and it generated greater demands of its own. Helicopter bases were soft and vulnerable targets. They needed vast supporting perimeter defenses. These defenses created a heavy demand for “noncombatant” U.S. military personnel. Because these perimeter guard elements were sparsely positioned and were immobilized by the nature of their task, they became centers of little wars of their own, thus heating up the intensity of combat throughout the land.
As opposition increased and became more sophisticated, helicopter formations were seeded with gun-carrying helicopters. Because the gunships carried no combat troops at all, the ratio of men carried, per aircraft per mile, dropped. With this, the cost per man transported, related to the number of helicopters per mission, skyrocketed again.
There is much that can be said in support of the tactical employment of the helicopter in warfare. But there are very few missions of such exceedingly high priority that they can best and most profitably be performed at the cost that helicopters incur. And even if certain operations can be justified, do they occur with enough frequency that they require the continuing availability and maintenance of operational helicopter units?
We have noted the loss of five thousand helicopters, the loss of fifteen thousand or more American lives, and the loss of not less than $1 billion in direct cost; yet we have not scratched the surface. The helicopter is one of the most costly vehicles to maintain and operate of any device ever built, and in South Vietnam the cost per hour of civilian maintenance and facilities was without equal. The helicopter is a voracious consumer of engines, rotors, and spare parts—all of which had to be airlifted from the United States, halfway around the world.
Although the helicopter can land in a space roughly equal to its own length, large numbers of helicopters must be gathered onto major airfields in order that supplies, fuel, and other services may be brought to them efficiently. The vast number and expense of helicopter airfields must be added to all the above.
Of course, these are not the only costs and the only burdens. The military services have thousands of pilots and aircraft crewmen. But these men (and now women) cannot be used for helicopter operations; all helicopter crews must be specially trained. All of these helicopter-related requirements cost heavily in men, money, and material things.
In a war in which the true measure of victory and defeat must be measured in terms of the cost and attrition on each side, the helicopter was found to be the biggest contributor to both cost and attrition. In retrospect, we discovered that the Russians, the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, and the Vietcong never had to contend with anything like it on their side. They won because we lost so much.
This paradoxical situation has caused many of us who were close to that action to wonder what might have happened if the war in Vietnam had been a “normal” war, with aerial strike forces on both sides? Imagine the havoc and devastation that could have occurred if a real, first-class enemy had been able to mount effective air attacks against those airfields where the helicopters were massed. The losses would have been catastrophic. We could not have justified having created such targets in the first place in the face of sophisticated opposition.
This helicopter episode has been a tragic lesson. The copters were introduced by the CIA and used by the agency to cause the escalation of the war. Once the pattern had been set, the military commanders who came later, in 1965 and thereafter, were caught in a tactical bind they could not break.
Much has been said and written about the number of Americans in Vietnam during the Kennedy administration, and there are many who attempt to place the blame for the escalation of that conflict on him. The facts prove otherwise.
As I have shown above, there was a ceiling of 16,000 personnel during the 1960—62 years. This is true; and it must be kept in mind that those Americans, except for such limited assignments as the Military Assistance Advisory Group, were there under the operational control of the CIA. When General Harkins complained about the few combat-effective men he had available, he learned that only 1,200 to 1,600 of the 16,000 personnel in Vietnam were in that category. The rest, more than 14,000, were support troops, and most of them for helicopter support. This was a relatively small number of combat troops considering that the overall total rose to 550,000 within the decade.
According to interpretations of these data that attempt to place the blame for the Vietnam War on Kennedy, the New York Times publication of “The Pentagon Papers” states, “President Kennedy, who inherited a policy of ‘limited-risk gamble,’ bequeathed to Johnson a broad commitment to war.” This is contrived and incorrect. The Times all but ignored President Kennedy’s important National Security Action Memorandum #263, October 11, 1963, that, as official policy, ordered 1,000 men home from Vietnam by the end of 1963, and all U.S. personnel out of Vietnam by the end of 1965. That was the carefully planned Kennedy objective announced scarcely one month before his untimely death.
It was not until President Johnson had signed NSAM #273 on November 26, 1963, that the course of the Kennedy plan began to be changed, and this trend became most apparent with the publication of NSAM #288 in March 1964.
The directed escalation of the war began under Johnson, as we shall see. Had Kennedy lived, all the madness that happened in Vietnam after 1964 would not have taken place. President Kennedy had vowed to bring one thousand Americans home from Vietnam by Christmas 1963 and to have all U.S. personnel out of Vietnam by the end of 1965. Kennedy’s death brought about a total reversal of that carefully structured White House policy and that sincere promise to the American people.