A LITTLE OVER A YEAR AFTER his flight above the Gulf of Tonkin on the night it all began, Commander James Stockdale was shot down. He was on a bombing run over North Vietnam when his plane was ripped open by antiaircraft fire. Stockdale ejected and parachuted toward a small village, shattering his left leg as he hit the dirt street.
Within moments, shrieking villagers—men, women, and children—ran up and started kicking and punching him. Before blacking out from pain, Stockdale heard the drone of American planes above. They were looking for him.
“It’s not worth the risk, guys,” he thought. “I’ve had it.”
He was loaded into a jeep and driven through the night, his broken leg jammed into the narrow backseat. Whenever he screamed in pain, the soldiers in the front grunted something he took to be Vietnamese for “Shut up!”
The next morning, soldiers carried him into a roadside building and laid him on a cement slab. A short man in a white surgical mask stepped up and looked at Stockdale’s bloated, discolored limb. He pulled a large saw from his medical bag.
“No, no!” Stockdale shouted, sitting up suddenly.
The surgeon shrugged. He put down the saw. He filled a needle with a clear liquid and stuck it in Stockdale’s arm and the pilot almost immediately lost consciousness. When he awoke he was relieved to see his leg still attached, covered in plaster from hip to foot. Stockdale was then driven to Hanoi and carried on a stretcher into Hao Lo prison—the “Hanoi Hilton,” as American prisoners bitterly joked. Everett Alvarez was still there. So were about fifteen other American pilots.
Alone in his freezing cell, Stockdale communicated with the other Americans using an ingenious “tap code.” The alphabet was divided into five rows of five letters each—A through E in the first row, F through J in the second row, and so on. There’s no K; C is used for both C and K. To send a message, a prisoner would tap the number of the row, and then, after a brief pause, the number of the letter in that row.
“WHEN—DO—YOU—THINC—WE—WILL—GO—HOME” Stockdale tapped to the pilot in the next cell.
The answer came back: “THIS—SPRING”
It was what they had to believe.
* * *
Patricia Marx moved back to her New York City apartment and continued working on her radio show. She was furious with Daniel Ellsberg for heading to Vietnam without even discussing the decision.
They started exchanging letters soon after he left, though. She wanted Ellsberg to realize he’d blown the appearance of the German poet way out of proportion, and he got the message. That became obvious one day that fall, when Marx pulled a postcard from her mailbox. She recognized Ellsberg’s handwriting. There was only one sentence:
“Will you marry me?”
She decided to fly to Vietnam for a visit. “Not that I was ready to get married to Dan,” she later said. “But I was very ready to explore whether I was ready to get married to Dan.”
Ellsberg got leave for Christmas, and they set off on a tour through Thailand, Nepal, and India. “The most romantic trip I’ve ever had in my life,” Marx later said. “I was totally madly in love.” Early one morning they hired a boat to row them into the Ganges River, a waterway sacred to Hindus. Many people were bathing in the river, and Ellsberg decided to try it. He pulled off his shirt and pants and leaped in in his underwear. Garbage from the city and ash from a nearby crematorium floated past on the water’s surface.
Marx watched for a moment—then yanked off her jeans and jumped in.
“I was impressed,” Ellsberg later said. “I didn’t think I knew many American girls who would have gotten into that water.”
While they stood together in the shallow water, he asked her again to marry him. She said yes. The moment was too magical not to say yes.
And yet, as they headed back to Saigon, she felt some hesitation.
Ellsberg and Patricia Marx in the Ganges River, India, on the day Ellsberg proposed marriage to her.
“It wasn’t totally clear that this was a man that would be a reliable husband,” Marx said of her thinking. He was so intense, so impulsive. And there was the war. They argued a lot about Vietnam. Ellsberg tried to convince her that he—that the United States—was fighting for a noble cause.
“I disagreed with him, but I always felt he was a man of absolute integrity,” Marx said of these debates. “What I sensed was that this was a man who was totally idealistic.”
And to that, as a further explanation of her feelings, she added: “Love is not rational.”
* * *
In late December, President Johnson and his top advisors sat around the table in the White House Cabinet Room. McNamara had just returned from Vietnam with familiar bad news. American forces were inflicting heavy casualties, but the enemy was growing stronger. South Vietnam’s army couldn’t hold on by itself. General Westmoreland wanted another 200,000 American troops in Vietnam, which would bring the total to over 400,000.
McNamara agreed that more soldiers were needed to prevent defeat, but pointed out that if the United States escalated, so would the enemy. If they granted Westmoreland’s request, Americans killed in action would likely rise to one thousand a month. And the probable result would be the same standoff they had now, just at a much bloodier level.
“A military solution to the problem is not certain,” he told the group. “Ultimately we must find a diplomatic solution.”
Johnson leaned forward, resting his broad chest on the table. “Then, no matter what we do in the military field there is no sure victory?”
“That’s right,” McNamara confirmed.
In another meeting early in 1966, McNamara saw these fears put into a language that he understood well: statistics. Marine General Victor Krulak showed the secretary a detailed report he’d written that seemed to prove mathematically that Westmoreland’s war of attrition was doomed.
The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, Krulak explained, could call on at least 2.5 million men to fight. So suppose the United States wanted to reduce enemy forces by 20 percent—a significant figure, though hardly enough to break their will. To accomplish that goal, at the current kill ratio of 2.5 to 1, would cost the lives of more than 175,000 U.S. soldiers.
It was a cruel kind of scorekeeping, stacking up human lives like chips in a poker game. But the point was brutally clear: the United States could not win this kind of war. In fact, Krulak argued, the war of attrition played right into Hanoi’s hands. North Vietnam’s strategy was to keep fighting, to keep absorbing punishment, until the American public tired of war and demanded the withdrawal of American troops. It was exactly how they had beaten the French. It was how they planned to beat the Americans.
McNamara was horrified. He simply hadn’t done the math.
“I think you ought to talk to the president about this,” he told Krulak.
But McNamara never followed up. He never arranged the meeting.
Johnson, meanwhile, was still wrestling with Westmoreland’s request for 200,000 more troops. He was torn. He had rejected the more aggressive steps recommended by the Joint Chiefs, for fear of expanding the war and sparking greater protests at home. Yet he was as determined as ever not to go down in history as the first American president to lose a war.
Finally, he decided to approve the request. The number of American troops in Vietnam would double in 1966. This brought the war home in a whole new way. Since the 1940s, the United States had kept a draft in place, requiring all men ages eighteen to twenty-four to register for military service. Aside from the Korean War years, though, the number actually called to serve had been small. That changed quickly with Johnson’s escalation. From 1966 through 1968, an average of 25,000 men would be drafted every month. For millions of young Americans, and their families and friends, Vietnam was no longer a distant conflict.
* * *
Daniel Ellsberg pulled his car to the side of the road in a tiny hamlet south of Saigon. He grabbed his camera and started walking through the still-smoking ruins of the village.
It was late March 1966. Since his long drives with Vann, Ellsberg had continued driving the roads of South Vietnam. “I had a personal desire to beat the Communists,” he explained later. “I could not believe that the United States could fail in the end to solve the problems that the French had not solved.” This was a visit that would shake his confidence.
As he walked through town, Ellsberg watched villagers stooped over in the remains of their homes, sifting the ruins for anything salvageable. He saw an old woman carefully lift a single, unbroken pink teacup.
A small group of Viet Cong had come through the night before, a villager explained. South Vietnamese soldiers, stationed just down the road, had seen them enter and had opened fire on the village with rockets. The Viet Cong had moved on, without casualties, as soon as buildings began to burn.
Ellsberg watched a young girl pull something from a pile of rubble. It was a plastic doll. He saw the girl smile as she realized her doll was only partly burned.