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SUCCESS FOR AMERICAN combat troops in their earliest battles in South Vietnam gives officials confidence that the war can be won quickly. At least that’s what they say in public. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara visits Saigon so often and is so optimistic in his assessments that people begin calling it “McNamara’s War.” At an airport press conference late in 1965 when I ask him about that, he says, “I’m proud some think that way.” Years later, he is quoted as having doubts about victory around the same time he answered my question.
The stated American military strategy is to force the communist enemy to call off the war by killing so many of its soldiers so quickly that it has no choice but to give up. Officials point to the well-publicized battle in the Ia Drang valley in November 1965 between American air cavalry troopers and North Vietnamese regular soldiers as a template. Several hundred elite American soldiers were casualties in that brutal, three-day struggle, but far more North Vietnamese combatants died, according to official estimates, as many as 10-to-1. Such a kill ratio, if true and if maintained, seems to portend an unbeatable outcome. The body count becomes the primary indicator of battlefield success.
Not everyone is so sure. I write an analysis that says even with 180,000 combat troops committed to Vietnam at that time, the United States is losing its edge against the communists. Most American and South Vietnamese troops are pinned down by security jobs—including keeping what they hold—so that surprisingly few battalions are available for searching out the enemy. North Vietnam is pouring its own army into the fight. By early 1966, the battlefield situation has returned to where it was a year earlier, before a surge of new American forces tipped the balance temporarily in the allies’ favor.
I try to make friends with Major General William DePuy, the young commander of the renowned “Big Red One,” the 1st Infantry Division based near Saigon. DePuy is a favorite of Westmoreland’s and worked as a staff officer for the general for two years before being sent to his new command with instructions to “get cracking.” DePuy becomes the proponent of a uniquely aggressive tactic labeled “search and destroy,” designed to launch massive firepower and troop assaults against confirmed enemy locations to secure the highest body counts.
One day an information officer with the 1st Division phones me with an invitation to visit his headquarters at Di An. DePuy strides into our meeting room. He says he’s been reading some of my stories in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. “Arnett, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he says. “You better stick around with us for a while. This is where it’s happening.”
I discover that DePuy is a dynamic, demanding leader, and feisty. He’s a “bantam rooster” to his men, a fellow officer commenting that that’s not a bad way to describe DePuy’s “barely contained energy package” in a 5-foot-8-inch body weighing 140 pounds. His intensity frightens his own people as his command becomes infamous in military circles for the high turnover of field officers whose performances he decides are less than tolerable.
While preparing for a field trip with DePuy, I ask him about the criticism and he responds, “I’m interested only in combat effectiveness, not personal feelings or career ambitions. I want only the best.” This trip takes us to the 3rd Brigade base at Lai Khe, once a thriving French rubber plantation now hosting 2,000 American soldiers. Our helicopter lands near a line of waiting officers, and DePuy pins a medal on the chest of one of them, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Haig, a battalion commander being cited for his leadership and heroism at the battle of Ap Gu. Haig’s bravery in surviving a helicopter crash in the middle of the battle and joining his troops in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy wins attention in Washington. Within five years, he’s a general on the staff of Henry Kissinger. A decade later, he’s secretary of state. It’s hard to fault DePuy’s earlier judgment.
DePuy loves helicopters the way NASCAR drivers of that time love their Fords or Chevys. He’s in the sky every day in his UH-1 Huey, hovering over his troops as they tangle with the enemy in villages below and in barely visible battles in the midst of deep jungle, yelling instructions over his field phone. His most dramatic tactical innovation is the massing of multiple fleets of helicopters to airlift his soldiers into battle in the communist-controlled wildernesses of War Zones D and C, north and west of his brigade base camps.
Hearing that DePuy’s planning a large-scale operation in early summer, I beg to go along. I arrive at the Lai Khe base, one of the launching areas, by driving along “thunder road,” the name given to this stretch of Route 13 that is often mined by local communist sympathizers. I learn the operation’s name, Birmingham. At dawn the next morning, I see DePuy consulting with his officers at an airstrip crowded with helicopters. Grim-faced soldiers line up outside the doors.
DePuy beckons me over. He is grinning. “I had to twist the old man’s arm,” he said, referring to Lieutenant General Jonathan Seaman, a popular, mild-mannered officer who is his superior. “But I’ve got nearly a hundred transport and gunships, and we will launch within the hour.” He invites me aboard the command helicopter and hands me earphones. I had written about DePuy’s contention that victory in war always favored the side that was able to concentrate its forces at a critical time on the battlefield. This is what he plans on doing today. But it’s also a tactic that is a cardinal principle of communist guerrillas, whose units rarely attack unless they field superior forces.
The target areas this day are small clearings in the jungle in War Zone C, named during the earlier French war. In the air now, I twist in my seat. I see helicopters swarming around and behind us like migrating geese in seasonal flight. DePuy is chattering on his command phone as the vastness of the war zone opens up before us, beyond the last vestiges of populated communities. I thrill at being a part of this incredible display of America’s military might.
DePuy calls for artillery support, and I see bursts of flame and smoke in the three landing zones he has designated. We fly on, and the artillery shells keep coming, the explosions so near now that I can almost hear them over the roar of the rotor blades. The shells will clear the landing zones of enemy personnel and fortifications. I was an artilleryman in my youth during required military service in my native New Zealand. I’m thinking these shells are flying right over us, maybe closely. DePuy sees my consternation and shouts into his phone, “The trick, Arnett, is in the timing.”
Airstrikes from a dozen planes provide a spectacular denouement, splashing napalm and high explosive bombs into the jungle foliage as the first helicopters swing into landing formation and, one by one, hover over the scarred ground, disgorging the troopers and then flying off as the next ship comes in. By midmorning, DePuy has sent more than a thousand of his best troops into an enemy stronghold rarely penetrated in the 15 years of warfare that preceded them.
Flying back to base with DePuy, I see he is elated. He has other units ready to reinforce, he tells me. He can send them into War Zone C at 90 miles an hour. DePuy even suggests that the epic battle at Dien Bien Phu that ended in disaster for the French in 1954 could have been won with his tactics. Maybe. Ultimately, his Birmingham operation will be less successful than expected.
DePuy makes colorful news copy. He likes the story I write on Aug. 31, 1966, that calls him a military genius who would either kill all the communists in his division area north of Saigon or they would kill him. He makes the cover of Newsweek magazine on Dec. 5, 1966. But there is a downside to his tactical boldness. To save his soldiers’ lives he orders that in making contact with the enemy they avoid being decisively engaged. Better to call in air and artillery fire while support units maneuver. By keeping American soldiers out of the kill zone while making maximum use of firepower, DePuy does indeed save his own men, but there is a disproportionate loss of civilian lives and property that alarms the high command and clouds his career.
I interview General DePuy in Washington a few years after the war. He has regained his reputation as one of the brightest officers in the military, widely seen as the chief architect of the restructuring of American army doctrine after the withdrawal from Vietnam. I ask him about “search and destroy,” and he says he regrets the title. “It started out with the best of intentions,” he tells me, “to search for the enemy, find him and destroy him. Later I guess it became associated with pictures of troops searching villages and setting them on fire. It came to suggest we were destroying the whole country.”
Airlifting soldiers into battle by helicopter is one thing. What they face on the ground is another. AP photographer Horst Faas and I accept an invitation to cover a risky infantry action west of Saigon. The mission is to rout out communist snipers from tunnels and bunkers in the tangle of wild rubber trees and shrub bordering Cu Chi, a town on the main highway to the Cambodian border. The invitation is extended by an officer we see as a friend, Lieutenant Colonel George Eyster, commander of the renowned Black Lion battalion, the 2nd of the 28th Regiment, 1st Infantry Division. Eyster is a tall quiet man whom we often run into in our visits to his brigade base. He’s a West Point graduate and modest about his lineage; his father was a brigadier general and chief information officer for American forces in Europe in World War II. He lives in Cocoa Beach, Florida, and enjoys showing us pictures of his wife and kids.
We arrive at the operational area at night, and move out at dawn. Eyster and a company commander, Captain George Dailey, decide to go on foot along the visible paths and tracks in the scrub to better bring up jeep-mounted weaponry. They admit it’s a gamble because snipers might be observing us from concealed tunnels.
An hour into the mission I join Eyster, Dailey and a radio operator to peer at a detailed operational map of the area. Eyster is pointing to a map location just ahead when four shots ring out in a cluster, echoing loudly through the undergrowth. My shoulder is next to Eyster’s, and I feel his body shake. I hear him gasp. He slides to the ground, as I do next to him for my own safety. “George, I’m hit,” he mutters to Dailey, who is now on his feet shouting, “The colonel’s hit, the colonel’s hit! Bring up a medic, bring up a medic!” Horst Faas runs up as Eyster’s eyes open and in a weak voice he mutters, “Horst, don’t get hit, don’t get hit,” and lapses into unconsciousness.
I am filming the scene with an 8 mm camera. Horst and I search for the tunnel that we assume the sniper popped out of. We don’t find it.
My story of the Black Lions, filed the following morning, begins: “It was a long bloody mile we walked Wednesday. At times it was a Dante’s inferno of fire and brimstone. Powerful riot gas drifted through the trees, burning where it touched a man’s sweating skin. Wounded American soldiers writhed on the ground, looking monstrous in their black, grotesque gas masks. It was a walk where death lurked in the trees where the enemy snipers hid, and under the ground where their mines lay.”
I don’t name Eyster in this story out of concern for his family. We visit him at a base hospital where he lies in a barren, uncooled room under a mosquito net. He is ashen faced and in pain, his neck and chest heavily bandaged, his left arm in a sling. Horst has printed a few pictures of the previous day’s action to show him, and he gazes with pleasure at them, whispering, “I had a lucky escape. I nearly didn’t make it.”
The 3rd Brigade commander phones our bureau the next afternoon saying Eyster has died overnight. He invites us to attend the memorial service planned for the following day at the base. We can’t make it. We are already on our way to rejoin the Black Lions because my story has received considerable newspaper play in the United States and editors want more.
Three days later, I write Eyster’s obituary. It begins: “He was the son of a general, a West Pointer, and a battalion commander. But Lieutenant Colonel George Eyster was to die like a rifleman. It may have been the colonel’s leaves on his shoulder, or the map he held in his hand, or just a wayward chance that the sniper chose Eyster from the five of us standing on that dusty path.” His wife, Harriet, reads my story in an Orlando newspaper and writes me, “You gave his children a legacy that no one else could have and his heroism will live for them and be an inspiration to them forever.”
The launching of America’s conventional war against North Vietnam’s infiltrating combat forces sidelines much of the South Vietnamese army to security duties amongst the general population. American military advisers attached to Vietnamese units watch helplessly as sorely needed equipment and supplies flow instead to the new combat arrivals.
I hear about a Vietnamese paratrooper company under communist siege for several weeks at remote Duc Co firebase near the Cambodian border. An American advisory team is with them. I arrange a ride with the 52nd aviation company, a daredevil American outfit based in Pleiku. One of my pilots wears a wide-brimmed hat and has exotic insignia pinned to his jacket. The other has been in the bar with me the previous night and looks hungover. Once in the air, they are all business, piloting their Huey over and around and sometimes under the tops of ancient giant gnarled trees, soaring over triple-canopy growth, and dropping into grassy clearings. I am dizzy and glad as the sandbagged parapets of Duc Co appear and we land briefly on a red clay tarmac. Wounded Vietnamese are pulled aboard as I slip off into the base and the Huey departs.
Inside I see a giant American in a baggy fatigue uniform and a soft khaki cap who is hauling along a wounded Vietnamese soldier with a bloody compress bandage around his right leg. The man is Army Major Norman Schwarzkopf, out of East Orange, New Jersey. He allows me to stay for three hair-raising days as his team helps the Vietnamese airborne troopers survive the constant shelling and combat assaults of communist troops clearly intent on overrunning the camp. Years later in his autobiography, Schwarzkopf tells a couple of stories about me. One claims that in taking me and others outside one rainy night to guide in a medical evacuation helicopter, he asks us to vigorously shake our flashlights as a signal. I allegedly respond, “Major, I’ve been shaking for the whole two days I’ve been here.”
In 1991, while I’m covering the first Gulf War from Baghdad for CNN, I hear that Schwarzkopf, now commander of the coalition forces attacking Saddam Hussein, gets so mad at my live coverage that he orders CNN broadcasts turned off at his headquarters in Saudi Arabia. Soon after the war I see him at a gala Washington media dinner. He is a guest of the U.S. News & World Report magazine publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, and is imposing in his dress blues, receiving the plaudits of well-wishers. He towers over me as I shake his hand. I mention in jest that I’d heard he was not happy with my Baghdad reporting for CNN, and explain in my defense that I am one of the few reporters at the war’s beginning who knows how to pronounce his name. A clever man, Schwarzkopf shoots back, “Yes, but with an Iraqi accent.”