8
RICHARD NIXON is visiting Saigon in mid-April 1967 to burnish his foreign policy credentials as he considers a run for the presidency the following year, and I’m assigned to spend a day with the former vice president. He is getting the usual VIP treatment from the American Embassy and the Vietnamese, meeting with Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky before arriving at the airport where I wait with a few other reporters to accompany him on a helicopter trip to the countryside. He is in shirtsleeves and sweating in the stifling heat.
I’ve heard that Nixon dislikes the press. His bitter outcry to reporters after losing the California governor’s race in 1962, that “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” resonates gleefully in combative newsrooms around the country. But he is effusively friendly here. He shakes my hand. He nods over to where some uniformed local girls are bringing cold drinks. “Good-looking, hmm,” he says, grinning. He is equally amiable to the American soldiers and civilian officials he meets in Mekong Delta encampments during the day, listening thoughtfully to the briefings. There’s not much news, though. Nixon’s a well-known hawk on the war and repeats his support of it. He continues his forceful criticism of the anti-war protests growing in intensity back home, saying they weaken the soldiers’ fighting spirit. He leaves early the following morning.
Nixon takes office as the 37th president of the United States in January 1969. He quickly assures a war-weary public he won’t seek military victory in Vietnam and will soon start bringing the troops home. But his off-the-cuff remarks to our handful of reporters at the Saigon airport 21 months earlier are prophetic. As president, Nixon seems unmoved by anti-war protest, and his increasingly bellicose military undertakings while in office do not cool off public dissent but trigger more. And he is unhurried in winding down the U.S. role in the war. It will be a long four years later, with the combat deaths of an additional 20,000 Americans, before the last soldiers come home.
Veterans of the embattled administration of the previous president, Lyndon Johnson, blame Nixon for unnecessarily delaying the war’s end. “The American people at the grass roots had come to the conclusion that we should abandon the effort,” says Johnson’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, one of several former officials I interview for a television documentary after the war.
Rusk says he is surprised that Nixon takes so long to bring about a “particular result” rather than to simply extract American forces, greatly reducing the conflict. “There was no suggestion of defeat in an American withdrawal,” Rusk adds. “We had left behind for the Nixon administration a military position which the North Vietnamese could not have overrun.” The particular result he mentioned was the ceasefire agreement signed in Paris by Henry Kissinger and a North Vietnamese official, Le Duc Tho, effective Jan. 28, 1973.
But Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, also interviewed for my television project, says that Nixon had no intention of quickly pulling out of Vietnam. Unlike Johnson, who was primarily interested in domestic affairs, Nixon is fixated on foreign policy. “Vietnam was an expedient, a kind of stage where America’s bona fides, our intentions, our motives, were being acted out,” Haldeman says. Nixon aimed to defuse the forces of world communism by exploiting the rivalry between China and the Soviet Union and improving America’s relations with both of them, thereby achieving détente and limitation of arms. “Nixon believed America had to negotiate from strength, to prove its willingness to fight. Vietnam became that place,” Haldeman says.
Nixon weaves his grand foreign policy designs behind White House doors, aided and encouraged by Kissinger, a Harvard-educated political scientist known as a brilliant and pragmatic strategist. They set in motion a “Vietnamization” plan to soften the blow of the American withdrawal. It is ambitious, calling for the gradual rearming and retraining of the whole South Vietnamese military establishment as a permanent buffer against the communists.
Nixon’s decision to delay withdrawing troops to achieve his military and political goals means that numbers are reduced by only 60,000 at the end of his first year in office. Nearly 500,000 remain, most of them young draftees. Families at home are impatient for their return. The burden facing U.S. military authorities is to extract under fire a demoralized fighting force increasingly prone to behavior that strains military discipline and the code of conduct.
On my trips to the battlefield I find that American soldiers are aware that they are fighting a holding action until the Vietnamese are ready to shoulder their own burden. For many, there is less personal incentive to win than there used to be, but the dangers are just as real. The soldiers see the final phase as uncertain. Under Nixon, every year the combat keeps escalating: In 1969 the secret bombing of Cambodia, in 1970 the invasion of Cambodia, in 1971 the invasion of Laos, in 1972 a new major offensive by North Vietnam.
Photographer Horst Faas and I stumble on a story late in August 1969 that some see as a harbinger of things to come. We are with troops of the Americal Infantry Division searching for the wreckage of an observation helicopter shot down a few days earlier. The AP photographer Ollie Noonan was believed aboard. I am with the commander of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade, Lieutenant Colonel Robert C. Bacon, at his field bivouac in the northern coastal mountains near the crash scene when I hear these words over a crackling field telephone: “I’m sorry, sir, but my men refuse to go. We cannot move out.” They are spoken by Lieutenant Eugene Shurtz Jr., the commander of the battalion’s A Company. The unit has been ordered at dawn to move once more down the jungled rocky slope of Nui Lon Mountain into a deadly labyrinth of North Vietnamese bunkers and trench lines.
A Company is one of three units involved in the assault. Colonel Bacon pales as Shurtz matter-of-factly tells him that the soldiers of A Company will not follow orders. “Repeat that, please,” the colonel asks without raising his voice. “Have you told them what it means to disobey orders under fire?”
“I think they understand,” the lieutenant replies, “but some of them simply have had enough. They are broken. There are boys here who have only 90 days left in Vietnam. They want to go home in one piece. The situation is psychic here.”
“Are you talking about enlisted men or are NCOs involved,” the colonel asks.
“That’s the difficulty here. We’ve got a leadership problem,” replies the company commander. “Most of our squad and platoon leaders have been killed or wounded.” I learn that at one point in the fight A Company was down to 60 men, half its assigned combat strength.
Colonel Bacon quietly tells his company commander, “Go talk to them again and tell them that to the best of our knowledge the bunkers are now empty. The enemy has withdrawn. The mission of A Company today is to recover the dead. They have no reason to be afraid. Please take a hand count of how many really do not want to go.”
Lieutenant Shurtz comes back a few minutes later, saying, “They won’t go, Colonel. And I did not ask for the hand count because I’m afraid they will all stick together even though some might prefer to go.”
By late afternoon, with some coaxing from the most experienced men in the battalion who fly to A Company’s location and make personal appeals, A Company does move. They are led by a seasoned veteran, Sergeant Okey Blankenship of Panther, West Virginia, who, quick tempered and argumentative, talks the reluctant soldiers into rejoining the war.
The A Company story gets a lot of attention from editors and readers who have stopped thinking much about the soldiers still left in Vietnam. There is much editorial comment. The Washington Star newspaper in an editorial tends to dismiss the implications. “There have been suggestions from some quarters that Alpha company’s brief ‘mutiny’ may presage a revolt among young draftees serving in Vietnam who are unwilling to die in an admittedly unwinnable war in which many Americans feel this country never had any business. There is not a scintilla of evidence to support this, and those who suggest it display little knowledge of what soldiering is all about. There have been similar incidents in every conflict since the Punic wars.”
James Reston of The New York Times is more concerned, writing, “This is something that President Nixon needs to be worried about as he plans his Vietnam policy. He has been worried about the revolt of the voters against the war and even a revolt of the generals if he humiliates them by pulling out too fast. But now he must also consider the possibility of a revolt of the men if he risks their lives in a war he has decided to bring to a close.”
In late March 1972, the North Vietnamese launch a conventional invasion against the south. The objective, it is later learned, is not to win the war but to gain as much territory and to destroy as many units of the South Vietnamese army as possible. In this Easter Offensive they gain substantial territory and influence the peace negotiations coming to a head in Paris.
I have a last visit with John Paul Vann during the offensive. He is now the senior American official in the Central Highlands, a strategic region the Saigon government must hold to have any hope of enduring as a legitimate state. I hear some reporters dismiss Vann as “the last American hawk in the war.” He tells me he gets upset by what he describes as the “triviality” of the questions thrown at him at press conferences. I advise him that he can’t win a war with the media.
I notice Vann is more animated than usual. He’s just returned to Pleiku from three days in the besieged provincial capital of Kontum. To blunt the frequent enemy attacks, he says he has orchestrated around-the-clock U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber strikes. It is probably one of the most enormous concentrations of firepower used in the war. Vann insists that it’s working. He praises the Vietnamese general in command in Kontum, Ly Tong Ba, whom I had heard Vann scolding 10 years earlier at the disastrous battle of Ap Bac for not being sufficiently aggressive with his armored patrol. “You should see him now,” he says proudly.
Vann says he’s traveling down to the coastal city of Qui Nhon and offers me a ride. He directs the helicopter pilot to fly over Mang Yang, a twisting, jungled, narrow pass that opens the highlands to the South China Sea. In an infamous battle during the French war, an elite mobile infantry unit was ambushed there and destroyed by the communists. Vann shouts at me over the helicopter clatter, “They say the French dead were buried right here, standing up and facing France. If I’m to die, that’s what I want, standing upright here and facing east to Texas.”
Vann did die here a few weeks later, on Jun. 9, 1972. His helicopter crashed on a night flight to Kontum with the loss of everyone on board. Vann was a maverick, an anti-establishment outsider who forced his way inside, one of the last Americans who believed in victory in Vietnam, and died trying to achieve it. Vann received a hero’s funeral in Washington, D.C., with some in attendance who had derided his earlier efforts in Vietnam and who now came to mourn. It was great for his family. My thought was that if Vann had anything to say about it, he would have preferred being buried standing up in his beloved Vietnam, and facing east across the great Pacific Ocean to Texas.
In mid-August of 1972, I’m invited to visit the other side, a rare trip to Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital, to cover the journey of a prominent group of peace advocates. They’ve been promised the opportunity to bring back home three captured Navy pilots to be released from the “Hanoi Hilton” prison on the occasion of their visit. The mother of one prisoner and the wife of another will go. I want to go. I know it’s a propaganda ploy by the communists to win sympathy for their side as the peace talks drag on in Paris. But I figure that I can outwit them enough to give credibility to my coverage. AP president Wes Gallagher is concerned about my participation because both Jane Fonda and Anthony Lewis of The New York Times have incurred storms of criticism for their visits to North Vietnam earlier in the year. He looks at me under furrowed brows. “Peter, it’s your reputation and mine on the line this time.”
Two of the travelers are national figures. One is David Dellinger, a shaggy-haired, fervid peace activist, known as one of the Chicago Seven anti-war protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He turns out to be a gentle man with a wry sense of humor. The second is the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, a boisterous former CIA operative who was undercover in a small town for years in the Soviet Union after World War II, later the chaplain at Yale University, and currently a Christian clergyman. A third member is Richard Falk, a professor at Princeton University, author of 20 books on international law. And there’s Cora Weiss, a peace activist headquartered in a handsome home in the upscale Riverdale section of the Bronx. She arranges the trip through her Hanoi connections. While I am visiting Cora the phone in her kitchen rings often. She tells me she is bugged by the FBI and other government agencies because of her anti-war activities. In Martha’s Vineyard where she says she had a home, “the tap was so loud the phone spluttered and jumped on the hook all night, and imagine that when you’re lying in bed with your husband.” She protests to a State Department security officer, who tells her, “That’s not my bug, mine’s not so powerful. That’s Laird’s.” Melvin Laird is secretary of defense.
We arrive in Hanoi from Vientiane, Laos, on a regular flight of the International Control Commission, a body that loosely supervises previous political agreements between the two Vietnams. I am assigned a young woman named Lien as an escort and I walk through nearly empty, noiseless streets, the silence sometimes broken by the sharp tinkle of a bicycle bell. I pass the dust-covered old French colonial buildings, and in the more densely populated areas the paint is peeling off the walls of the little shops and the timbers are rotting. The people are dressed mostly in somber garments, usually black trousers and white or gray shirts and blouses. I think of Saigon, where I had been just the week before, its economy swelled by American dollars, with its atmosphere of a boom town, sidewalks crowded with soldiers but also beautiful young women, its highways congested with flashy motorcycles, sporty cars and jeeps.
In Saigon, the action seems far away, the crackle of distant gunfire sometimes the only indication there is a war on. In Hanoi, fear floats in on the dust. I hear the squawk of loudspeakers. My escort translates, “American planes 70 kilometers out,” the first warning to the population of approaching airstrikes. Soon after, the announcement, “American planes 50 kilometers out.” The sirens start to wail when the planes are within 40 kilometers. People search out the single-berth bunkers built like cisterns, with steel lids, along every street. Wardens alert people in houses to move into roomier shelters. Then a quiet settles over the city as people wait to see how close the bombers come. The siren wails the all-clear. The planes are active elsewhere in the country this day.
The three U.S. pilots are released to our care: Navy Lieutenants Mark Gartley and Norris Charles, and Air Force Major Edward Elias. Elias bunks with me at our hotel, and at first he is disconcerted to discover I’m a reporter, but then he settles down. He’s had worse conditions at the Hanoi Hilton prison. One day we all travel to the countryside, where the pilots observe that years of American bombing have failed to achieve significant results. We repeatedly encounter vehicle convoys, rows of stacked ammunition along the roadsides and piles of gasoline drums. We pass scores of transportation trucks casually parked under trees, and to me they look vulnerable to airstrikes. Norris Charles tells me, “We could never see those things from the air, and the moment someone comes down for a better look, blam, blam, blam.”
The peace advocate group has good connections in Hanoi. We are invited to visit with Prime Minister Pham Van Dong at his palatial government residence near Ho Chi Minh’s tomb. He’s a handsome, silver-haired figure, and friendly, giving bear hugs to all. At a formal meeting in his office where tea and cookies are served, he reiterates Hanoi’s hard line on the war. Afterward, he insists we go walk with him informally on the grounds of his residence. He radiates confidence and determination.
As Vietnamization is speedily upgraded, so do the North Vietnamese respond with a military upgrading of their own. The legendary Ho Chi Minh Trail infiltration gateway stretching across mountainous border regions is engineered into a two-lane highway, allowing military supply trucks just a day or so to make the journey from north to south; a few years earlier, it could take foot soldiers dragging bicycles weighed down with ammunition 60 days to travel over the then primitive path.
Gearing up to fight a stronger Vietnamese army supported for the time being by the American troops and their firepower still in-country, the communists do not match the eventual American troop withdrawal with one of their own. Hanoi’s forces remain in the south in the scores of thousands, the ceasefire agreement allowing them to do so. Nixon’s strategy has paved the way for his historic opening to China in 1972, and détente with Russia. But with America increasingly absent from the battlefield, it leaves the South Vietnamese with an almost overwhelming burden of survival.
Arnett and an American military photographer assist a wounded South Vietnamese soldier to an ambulance south of Hue, 1969. (Peter Arnett Collection)
Reunion of Pulitzer Prize winners from AP in New York on May 10, 1966. Fifth from left is Peter Arnett. (AP Photo)
Arnett talks with North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong during visit to Hanoi, August 1972. (Peter Arnett Collection)
Arnett on patrol with South Vietnamese paratroopers in the province of Binh Dinh, Vietnam, circa 1965. (AP Photo)
Arnett, third from left, poses with members of President Carter’s Commission to Hanoi in March 1977. The Commission was there to investigate missing American soldiers and seek better relations. (Peter Arnett Collection)
South Vietnamese military police with fixed bayonets escort AP reporter Peter Arnett, center, and cameraman Larry Bedford away from the Chu Van An high school in Saigon, September 1963, where Vietnamese troops arrested scores of high school boys. (AP Photo)
Sitting in a Vietcong tunnel system used during the war, but now turning into a tourist attraction at Cu Chi east of Saigon, 1985. Arnett was visiting Vietnam for the 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. (Peter Arnett Collection)