CHAPTER 11

TOWARD ONE VIETNAM

DESPITE THE MASSIVE levels of propaganda, not everyone in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam believed in the communist party’s glorification of war. As in France and Britain after the First World War, the men who had fought were often among the first to speak of the ugly side of war and its terrible toll on soldiers and civilians. As an officer in the People’s Army of Vietnam, Phu Thang had witnessed some of the most violent clashes of the Indochina conflagration and the thought of renewed violence depressed him. Influenced by Nikita Khrushchev’s moves toward peaceful co-existence in 1956 and inspired by more realistic and critical accounts of massive Soviet suffering during the Second World War, Thang and other veterans dared to express an antiwar message. In his 1963 novel Breaking the Siege, Thang’s main character, a veteran of the First Indochina War, gives voice to an unmistakably pacifist message: ‘Such is the war! It leads to so much suffering among the people [. . .] The war has and will lead to so much more suffering, hardship, disgrace, and hate [. . .] There is nothing praiseworthy about war and a soldier’s life is just miserable. If one can gain real fame in combat, then one has to pay a high price for it. One has to stop this bloodshed with its horror early’.¹

Thang’s message was not what the communist leadership wanted to hear from one of its soldiers, not in 1963 as the Vietnamese politburo prepared to go to war against the Republic of Vietnam and, if necessary, the United States. Such a realistic account of war went against the party’s heroization of the conflict since the ‘glorious victory’ at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. Worse still, this came from a soldier still employed in the armed services. The man in charge of the planning for a new war and the former head of the army’s ideological propaganda department during the preceding one, General Nguyen Chi Thanh, went after Phu Thang and others who promoted such a peaceful line. Starting in 1963, veterans who spoke of the ‘horrors’ of war lost their positions in the army, saw their works banned, and sometimes ended up behind bars. It was a humiliating and often devastating fate for men who had risked their lives for their country; but culture had once again to serve war. From 1963, there could be no peaceful co-existence as in the Soviet Union, not even on the cultural front.

CIVIL WAR RESUMES

Reasserting DRV Sovereignty

Although the absence of elections in 1956 disappointed many in the Vietnamese Workers’ Party, the leadership also had its hands full with the land reform fall-out, the administration of new territories, and the modernization of the economy. Moreover, for the time being communist Vietnam’s main backers, the Soviet Union and China, continued to caution against war in favor of peaceful co-existence. Nikita Khrushchev discussed this with Dwight D. Eisenhower in two summit meetings in the late 1950s. In April 1955, Zhou Enlai had stolen the show at the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung by reassuring his listeners that his country had no intention of exporting communism. A year later, a top-ranking Soviet leader explained in Hanoi why in a nuclear world it was important to give peace a chance instead of believing that war with the capitalists could be the only way to communist victory. The Vietnamese side agreed in theory, but Ho Chi Minh warned that because of the presence of the ‘American imperialists’ in the south, his party could not rule out armed action.Such reservations must have seemed warranted, when, in 1957, Moscow stunned the VWP by proposing the admission of both Vietnams to the United Nations.²

The Soviet action certainly vindicated those in the party who had doubted the possibility of achieving national unification through peaceful co-existence. One such critic was Le Duan. Born into a modest family in central Vietnam, Le Duan became involved in radical politics as a railway worker in the 1920s. He joined the communists in 1930 and, after serving five years in prison, directed the party in central Vietnam until the French sent him back to Poulo Condor in 1940. He did hard time in the island prison until the Japanese capitulation in August 1945, when, freed, he returned to the mainland and ran the southern party branch. This powerful man remained in the south after 1954 to lead the party’s clandestine organization there. He repeatedly informed his party of the desperate situation created by Ngo Dinh Diem’s repressive measures and did his best to provide local guidance. In mid-1956, he penned a report on the ‘The Path of the Revolution in the South’. In it, he advised imperiled southern cadres against taking up arms right away, explaining that the party had no real administrative structure or armed forces on which to rely. Until it could approve such an important policy change, political struggle had to remain the mot d’ordre. However, as the July 1956 deadline for holding elections passed, Duan urged his followers to remain close to the peasant ‘masses’, ready, as during the August Revolution in 1945, to seize the favorable moment to take power by force.

The problem was that, as it had been in northern Vietnam in 1944–5, the communists in the south were not always in control. More often than not, communist cadres watched from the sidelines as revolts broke out spontaneously in the highlands and in delta provinces like My Tho and Long An. Those who supported such revolts did so in violation of party policy and were more often than not reacting to events rather than directing them. This gave rise to a paradoxical situation: if the party tried to contain the political fall-out of the rural wrath its Maoist-minded cadres had provoked in the north during the land reform program, the refusal of the party to support peasant revolts in the south denied communists their most important social base for conducting their ‘people’s war’. With their numbers falling fast, southerners begged the leadership to change its policy so that they could deploy some form of armed action to protect themselves and harness the rural discontent surging around them.³

This was the message Duan carried with him when he arrived in Hanoi in late 1957. His senior position in the party, long service in the south, and his direct and often combative style made him an excellent advocate of a more aggressive policy. Assisting him in this lobbying effort were many unhappy southerners who had regrouped in the north after 1954 and his former deputy in the south, Le Duc Tho. The latter had joined the politburo and now directed the party’s most powerful ‘organizational committee’ (the one responsible for setting the internal agenda). Le Duan also found important support in the person of Ho Chi Minh, who took him under his wing as the party began discussing seriously what to do about the ‘south’.

If Le Duan and Le Duc Tho urged the party to adopt an armed line, everyone was aware of the dangers of such an approach. Indeed, as the politburo debated this question, Vietnamese communists were deeply involved in the resumption of civil war in Laos between their sister-state run by the Pathet Lao, and the Royal Government of Laos (formerly the Associated State of Laos). Fearful of weakening the Indochinese link in their security chain containing Eurasian communism from the south, the Eisenhower administration had opposed the creation of a coalition Lao government in 1957 which would have included the communist Pathet Lao. Instead the Americans joined the Thais in supporting anticommunist Lao leaders who could keep the country within the American orbit. Determined to support their ally, Vietnamese communists had already dispatched hundreds of advisors to Laos to build up the Pathet Lao’s army, state, party, and territorial control. By 1960 the civil war in Laos blew into a major Cold War crisis as the Soviets initiated an airlift to their Pathet Lao allies via Hanoi, and the Americans threatened to send troops through Thailand to back their own. Little wonder many in the Vietnamese Workers Party worried that the resumption of war in southern Vietnam could explode into something unpredictable, including direct American military intervention.⁴

But Le Duan also saw a model in Laos. He reassured skeptics that the party could go ahead with a more aggressive policy below the seventeenth parallel by authorizing the incremental, carefully managed, and always-deniable use of a combination of armed and political action—just as the VWP was already doing with the Pathet Lao. Armed action would allow southerners to protect themselves. But a carefully calibrated mix of political and military action would also give them the chance to harness peasant discontent, structure it administratively, protect it militarily, and, through the creation of a broad-based national front, build up an alternative political sovereignty. In late 1957, Le Duan also noted that the election of a coalition government in Laos, which did incorporate the Pathet Lao, could serve as a model for advancing the Vietnamese Workers Party’s cause in the south.

By late 1958, the critical situation of the party in the south, internal debate in the north, and Le Duan’s lobbying in Hanoi forced the party to choose. This occurred in January 1959 when the party issued its fifteenth plenum. In this historic document, the party leadership reiterated the importance of consolidating the north, but it also confirmed that this revolutionary process could no longer exclude the unification of the two halves of Vietnam under Democratic Republic of Vietnam sovereignty. As a result, the party now authorized increased political action for southern cadres and allowed them to resume armed action on a limited scale to support it. In concrete terms, this meant that the VWP accepted the need to build a new national front, protect it with force, and provide the personnel and weapons to achieve both interconnected goals. This is why, in May 1959, the Vietnamese Workers Party reactivated its work in the south and began extending an increasingly elaborate network of overland paths southward through eastern Laos, the central highlands, and eastern Cambodia, which were collectively known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In September, the party created a new advisory group for Laos with the task of helping the Pathet Lao to expand its political and military control down the eastern side of Laos bordering Vietnam—this was vital to the operation of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Meanwhile, in 1961, vessels began secretly leaving the north for the south to deliver weapons, administrators, and supplies.⁵

Incremental or not, Hanoi had to structure its stepped-up actions in the south. In September 1960, the Vietnamese Workers Party’s third national congress elected Le Duan as its new party leader and formally authorized the use of armed force to bring about the liberation of the south. This would mean the overthrow of the Republic of Vietnam, and the creation of a coalition government favorable to reunification with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The party would not deploy the People’s Army of Viet Nam in the south. Nor would it try to re-establish its pre-1954 DRV civil service there for fear of provoking direct American intervention. The communists in Hanoi would rather expand their political sovereignty and military control indirectly by supporting efforts already underway to form a national front and by providing a southern, armed force to protect it.

The communists moved quickly. In December 1960, the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, or the NLF, came to life. Over the next year, the VWP transformed it into an operational political entity by recruiting reliable people below the seventeenth parallel and returning thousands of administrators and officers who had relocated to the north after the 1954 ceasefire. By 1964, the total number of returnees amounted to around 40,000 people, including thousands of former DRV civil servants originally from the south. Thanks to these experienced southerners, the National Liberation Front established bases among villages, intensified anti-Diem propaganda, initiated land reform where possible, operated a policing, militia, and taxation system, and began organizing women, children, youth, and peasants into patriotic associations. The appearance of the NLF flag and the circulation of its stamps signified the emergence of an alternative political sovereignty in the south. Nguyen Huu Tho, a well-known anticolonialist lawyer and a loyal communist, became its chairman. This is how civil war resumed indirectly in the south.⁶

The Vietnamese Workers Party directed this burgeoning state-building project. To do so, in early 1961 the politburo re-activated the office that had been run by Le Duan during the Indochina conflict, now better known by its American acronym, COSVN, the Central Office of South Viet Nam. Le Duan’s close confidant from Poulo Condor and a fellow politburo member, Nguyen Van Linh, ran it. The Central Office of South Vietnam also created and directed the ‘People’s Liberation Armed Force’ (or PLAF). Established in February 1961, the PLAF rapidly recruited into its ranks a wide range of disgruntled peasants, youth, religious leaders, and non-Viet peoples, communist or not. Although it focused initially on organizing guerilla units capable of hit-and-run attacks, winning over or assassinating local RV administrators, the PLAF also developed into an increasingly well-armed and trained professional army. Between 1959 and 1961, the People’s Liberation Armed Force’s troop strength increased from 2,000 to over 10,000. By 1964, it counted over 100,000 people in its ranks, 30,000 of whom were regular troops. Although COSVN carefully monitored the use of force, hoping that Diem’s oppressive policies would do the rest, the politburo had to conclude in 1961 that there was ‘practically no possibility that the revolution will develop peacefully’. The question now was whether the Americans would intervene directly in order to try and stop the communists from resuming a war to make all of Vietnam theirs.⁷

THE LIMITS OF COLLABORATION

JFK Commits to South Vietnam⁸

The Vietnamese Workers Party in Hanoi had little reason to be optimistic about the election of a Democrat to the White House in November 1960. Upon entering office in January 1961, John F. Kennedy went further than his predecessors in committing to and arming the Republic of Vietnam. Hardly a week after his inauguration, Kennedy adopted the Counter-Insurgency Plan (CIP) to increase the size of the republic’s conventional forces and militias. This was part of the president’s emerging policy of ‘flexible response’ which was designed to build up American conventional and special forces capable of fighting any type of war in any type of situation, in particular against communist-backed insurgencies in the non-Western world. Throughout the 1950s, Kennedy had warned Eisenhower of the dangers of supporting European colonialism in a time of rapid decolonization. Now, in 1960, he criticized Eisenhower’s support of the French again (this time in Algeria). The US had to take decolonization seriously, he countered, especially in the light of Moscow and Beijing’s stepped-up efforts to win over the support of postcolonial states entering the international system and the United Nations. In January 1961, Nikita Khrushchev declared that the Soviet Union would support movements of national liberation wherever they occurred. And not to be outdone by Moscow, as the Sino-Soviet split widened, Beijing increased its overtures to the Afro-Asian world.⁹

Despite all the talk of peaceful co-existence following the death of Stalin in 1953, the international system remained a highly volatile one. During his first two years in office, Kennedy went to the brink of war with Khrushchev over Berlin and Cuba (and, to a lesser extent, Laos). Although behind-the-scenes cool-headedness and global trade-offs moved Moscow and Washington away from the brink of nuclear Armageddon over Cuba, the Kennedy administration continued to view the communist bloc as the major threat to American global interests and security. Intelligence reports may have shown a more nuanced picture, but Eisenhower’s domino theory continued to inform high-level decision-making. The rapidly accelerating split between Moscow and Beijing did little to change this perception. In the wake of the Cuban crisis in October 1962, Mao publicly lambasted Khrushchev for failing to go all the way against the American capitalists, even if it meant using nuclear weapons. (Of course Chinese communists would negotiate themselves if it served their interests, as they did when Beijing helped Moscow broker a solution to the Lao crisis in 1962.) But China’s increasing support of Vietnamese communist armed action against the southern republic hardly reassured Kennedy. Moreover, it also obligated the Soviets too to maintain their support of Hanoi for fear of ceding the revolutionary high ground to Mao in the battle over the leadership of the communist bloc.

What concerned Kennedy’s administration most in Indochina was the Republic of Vietnam, which the Americans termed South Vietnam. The president accepted the resolution of the Lao crisis at the negotiating table in Geneva at the same time as building up a strong anticommunist state in South Vietnam. Like his predecessors, Kennedy did not want to dispatch American troops, preferring to rely on the republic to serve Washington’s containment needs indirectly. Kennedy continued to arm, train, and finance the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) through the Military Assistance Advisory Group first established in 1950, and the Counter-Insurgency Plan. In fact, he greatly increased American support. In his first year in office, overall military aid to the republic increased from $50 million annually to $144 million. By 1962, the ARVN fielded a professional army of 220,000 men, while the Soviets and Chinese assisted the DRV in creating a 200,000-strong PAVN. Kennedy multiplied the number of military advisors in Vietnam, allowing them to accompany ARVN troops on combat missions. The 800 advisors in Vietnam in January 1961 more than tripled by the end of the year and stood at 11,000 by late 1962. This rapid military expansion required a new bureaucratic institution to run it as American commitment to Indochina entered its twelfth year. In early 1962, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (or MACV) came to life and rapidly replaced the MAAG. To stop the communists from using the complex network of paths they had pushed toward southern Vietnam through eastern Laos, the central highlands and eastern Cambodia (the Ho Chi Minh Trail), Kennedy approved the use of Agent Orange. This chemical defoliant and others facilitated the detection and bombing of enemy supply lines by destroying the jungle canopy. Between 1962 and 1971, the United States sprayed around 80 million liters of herbicides over the jungles of Indochina with devastating ecological and human consequences.¹⁰

American economic advisors, diplomats, and military officers also brought their models and world views with them, just as both the French and the Chinese had before them. ‘You should know one thing at the beginning,’ Edward Lansdale prefaced his memoirs, ‘I took my American beliefs with me into these Asian struggles, as Tom Paine would have done.’ For most American advisors a strong belief in Western-styled modernization was high on this list. Nowhere is this more evident than in the migration from the university to Kennedy’s White House of Walt Rostow, a leading advocate of ‘modernization theory’ and author of The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non Communist Manifesto. Modernization theorists believed that societies develop in a series of increasingly complex stages, moving from ‘traditional’ to increasingly complex states, with the Western industrial democracies being the most advanced. Modernizers in Washington and their acolytes on the ground in Vietnam believed that America could and should help ‘traditional’ societies evolve through technology transfers, better education, and improved transportation and communications. Drawing upon their own experiences in New Deal America and postwar Japan, American modernizers also firmly believed in the development of democratic political institutions and grassroots civic action as part of this package deal. Only then would Vietnam truly be capable of implementing the complicated demands of industrial development, its division of labor, and free market exchanges, without graft, corruption, and nepotism. Of course, ‘modernization theory’ was part of a wider containment strategy; but Americans believed in their superior civilizing mission.¹¹

Ngo Dinh Diem: A Platoon of de Gaulles . . .

But theory and practice are two very different things and foreign models always run into trouble on the ground. Ho Chi Minh after all had apologized to the Vietnamese people for applying the Maoist model of communist modernization with such disastrous effects. In South Vietnam, American diplomats, military advisors, development officers, and non-governmental organization workers increasingly bemoaned Diem’s botched road to modernity, authoritarian ways, and nepotism. Worse, they concurred, his heavy-handed development projects in the countryside and his repression of political opposition alienated the very people needed to fight the communists—the non-communist peasant majority and the members of the urban elite class. Successful land reform programs in Taiwan and Japan had shown the way to economic growth in the countryside. Political pluralization would win over the elite. If the Ngo brothers would just follow the American recipe, all would be fine.¹²

More than in Japan, Taiwan, or even the Republic of (South) Korea, however, time was of the essence in preserving America’s fourth ally on the eastern Eurasian rim. In mid-1961, alarmed Americans diplomats reported that the Republic of Vietnam controlled less than half of the country. The Americans pressed Diem hard to implement reforms fast or risk losing everything. Some spoke privately of finding a replacement for the Vietnamese president. But despite the negative reports piling up on his desk, Kennedy decided to give Diem a chance and look the other way when it came to his counterpart’s democratic abuses. The Vietnamese president had come through in 1954–7; he could do it again. Moreover, the administration felt confident that its increased military assistance would ensure that indirect containment continued to work.

Many writers opposed to American intervention in Vietnam have not been kind to America’s partner in Vietnam. In her Pulitzer prize–winning antiwar book, Fire in the Lake, Frances FitzGerald wrote Ngo Dinh Diem off as an American puppet, no more legitimate than the colonial emperor, Bao Dai, had been under the French. She contrasts Diem’s reliance on foreigners to Ho Chi Minh’s seething indigenous nationalism. Whereas the Americans propped up the besieged Diem regime, Ho’s Vietnam fought on alone against all odds, drawing on a timeless Vietnamese culture of resisting foreign invaders. Official Vietnamese communist historians agree entirely, referring then as now to Diem and his regime as an American creation (‘MyDiem’), entirely illegitimate (‘nguy’). The problem for the Americans at the time, however, was that Ngo Dinh Diem was not a puppet. This fiercely independent-minded nationalist leader repeatedly rebuffed American advice. He and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu had their own ideas about nationbuilding, land reform, and counter-insurgency. And together they often enraged their American backers. As one American diplomat in Saigon in the early 1960s later summed up the difficulties of negotiating with the Ngo family: ‘It was like dealing with a whole platoon of de Gaulles’.¹³

Indeed, the Americans never quite grasped the extent to which Diem, like de Gaulle, was obsessed with national sovereignty, protecting it, affirming it, and determined to run the show on his terms, despite the massive assistance he received from Washington. Lest we forget de Gaulle had done everything in his power to bury Vichy France’s collaborative past with the Nazis in favor of forging a fiercely independent postwar national identity free of America. Diem wanted to do something similar by erasing his country’s collaboration with the French and showing that his country did not take orders from Washington. In order to legitimate his country’s claim to the nationalist mantle, Diem was like de Gaulle incredibly sensitive to questions of national sovereignty, both administratively and symbolically, and never hesitated to say so. When the Americans failed to condemn a plot in the Republic of Vietnam’s army against the Ngos in 1960, the progovernment, English-language Times of Vietnam captured official anger, aptly writing that the ‘threat to our independence does not come from our [communist] enemies alone, but also from a number of foreign people who claim to be our friends’.¹⁴

The Kennedy administration got a taste of Diem’s independence when it proposed a ‘limited partnership’ to the Vietnamese president in late 1961. In exchange for increased military assistance, a possible security treaty, even troops, the Americans requested the right to participate in internal decision-making rather than operating in a purely advisory capacity as they had since 1950. The Americans wanted to use the leverage they felt their assistance entitled them to—in order to push through badly needed political, economic, and military reforms on which effective containment in Vietnam turned—but which Diem kept refusing them. Diem accepted military assistance and sought a security treaty ensuring that the Americans didn’t negotiate over his head with the communists, as they were already doing, in his view, in Laos. However, he rejected the introduction of American ground troops and insisted that the American ‘limited partnership’ was nothing more than another Western attempt to re-establish a protectorate over Vietnam.

Shocked to be treated at the same level as the ‘French colonialists’, the Americans backed down; but Diem’s Gaullism had the Americans livid in the cables they fired back to Washington. How could they save Vietnam if its president would not let them! The two sides now talked past each other more than ever before, each righteously convinced of the validity of its own position. The Americans failed to grasp how their increasingly intrusive efforts to contain communism could translate into a threat to the national sovereignty of their junior partner. The Ngo brothers forgot something just as important: collaboration can provide security, assistance, even revolutionary traction for the smaller partner; but it can also get you into deep trouble, if you or your revolutionary projects jeopardize the larger strategic goals of the stronger power within your alliance. That danger is particularly high in wartime and the more asymmetrical the power relationships are.

NGO DINH DIEM’S THREAT TO INDIRECT AMERICAN CONTAINMENT

Strategic Hamlets and the Meltdown in US–Vietnamese Relations

Rather than improving relations between Saigon and Washington, the Ngo brothers’ embrace of their ‘strategic hamlets’ program produced the opposite effect. In the face of the National Liberation Front’s rapid expansion throughout the countryside in the early 1960s, Diem focused on ways to regain rural support. He reversed his earlier limits on local village elections, increased the effort to root out provincial corruption and graft, and organized the training for a phalanx of younger cadres to run the local administration. These loyal cadres would administer thousands of strategically located villages across the south, which would be regrouped into clusters of larger hamlets, and then connected to each other by roads and waterways. Barbed wire, trenches, cement fortifications, and local militias would protect them. The army and police would be on call to intervene when needed. The ‘strategy’ would form a (theoretically) impregnable armed, administrative wall protecting against Vietnamese Workers Party/National Liberation Front penetration.

While the Ngo brothers borrowed from French, British, and American experiences in counter-insurgency practices, they were also professionally trained administrators themselves. They knew from the First Indochina War how the communists had gone about building up their revolutionary states village by village. In fact, the communists had administered almost all of the Ngos’ (native) central Vietnam during the Indochina War. The brothers were impressed by what they saw in the communist techniques of mass mobilization, rectification, indoctrination, and awed by how their enemies used war to extend political control downward. Like their adversaries, the Ngos wanted to use the current Second Indochina War (or the Vietnam War as it is widely known in the United States) to create a new bureaucratic elite and entrust it with a social revolution capable of winning rural support for their regime. In 1961, they created a mass party, the Republican Youth Movement, which began indoctrinating young people, training them in Personalism, and dispatching them into the countryside to administer the strategic hamlets. Of course, this elite would be firmly anticommunist and often Catholic, but like their communist opponents, they were designed to be carriers of socio-political change and the intermediaries for top-down central control. This new civil service, backed by the military, had the power to overthrow the traditional power structures, stamp out graft and corruption, and promote local elections. Through these cadres, the government and the people would construct a new power structure village by village, rolling back the NLF/VWP as they moved along, creating a new nation.

All of this was in theory, again. In practice, it was catastrophic. Like the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Diem’s Republic of Vietnam adopted highly coercive methods and paid the price in social support and political legitimacy. In order to move fast against its enemies, the government required tens of thousands of peasants to relocate against their will and to provide massive amounts of physical labor clearing land and building roads, bridges, and villages. By September 1962, the Ngo brothers had incorporated over four million people into 3,225 hamlets. By July 1963, some 7,000 hamlets housed over eight and a half million people in a feat of social mobilization matched only by their enemies. While the strategic hamlets certainly caused problems for the communists’ Central Office of South Vietnam, the breakneck speed with which the nationalist government had built them outdistanced its capacity to administer them. Over-extended, in practice the army left large portions of the south in enemy hands. As in the north, there were not enough trained civil servants to preside over these massive experiments in social engineering. Many of the ‘traditional’ bureaucrats the Ngos had sidelined in the past refused to help restore administrative order now. Most peasants did not want to move from their ancestral villages. Who could blame them? And to make matters worse, the Republic of Vietnam’s massive labor demands created the very waves of social anger and resistance on which the National Liberation Front’s administrative expansion and land reform thrived.¹⁵

Distraught, Americans watched from the sidelines as Diem seemed to drive the peasantry straight into communist hands. Once again, they bemoaned the president’s mad ideas about social revolution, village democracy, nation-building, and Personalism. They also knew that for Ngo Dinh Diem the strategic hamlets project served both to fight the communists and to protect the republic’s sovereignty from American efforts to run the show. Washington’s frustration also grew as the American-trained and -modernized Army of the Republic of Vietnam seemed incapable or unwilling to take the battle to the insurgents. Advisors were shocked when, in early 1963, 2,000 heavily armed, air-supported, and motorized ARVN troops failed to smash the 300–400 PLAF forces holding the strategic hamlet of Ap Bac in My Tho province. The botched operation sent the American advisor who prepared the battle plan, Colonel John Paul Vann, into a fit of anger symbolic of the wider American frustration with their junior partner: ‘It was a miserable damn performance, just like it always is. These people won’t listen. They make the same mistake over and over again in the same way’. That was not quite true. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam officers and men could and often did fight bravely and effectively. But growing American frustration with the course of events and with their allies was real.¹⁶

The Buddhist Crisis and the Overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem

The tipping point came during the Buddhist crisis which lasted from May to September 1963. While Diem’s family was Catholic and the Ngos had tried to use Catholicism and the Catholic refugees to fight the communists and build up their state, the brothers were not bent on creating a ‘Catholic republic’. Upon coming to power, the Ngo brothers actively solicited the support of the Buddhists, including the 200,000 mainly anticommunist ones who had migrated from the north after the 1954 ceasefire. Buddhists had served in some of the highest positions in the Republic of Vietnam (as vice-president, foreign minister, and a general, for example). Diem allowed the General Buddhist Association, created in 1951, to re-establish the Church’s monastic headquarters in the republic, and to hold its second national congress in Saigon in 1958. If anything, it was cooperation which characterized the first five years of relations between the Buddhist Church and Diem’s government. And Buddhist leaders were not entirely unhappy to see Diem weaken the Buddhist ‘sects’, the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao.¹⁷

What set the Buddhists and Diem on a collision course were a series of errors on the part of the Ngo brothers, unfortunate coincidences, and a nationally assertive Buddhist Church that bumped up against an equally nationalist-minded Catholic one. Since the 1920s, Buddhist leaders, inspired by the predominant place this religion held in neighboring Thailand and Burma, sought to both revive and create a Vietnamese Buddhist nationalism of their own. Reform-minded monks established Buddhist institutions, schools, clerical associations, and youth groups the religion needed to make a comeback and to assert itself at national level. However, by the early 1960s this increasingly politicized and assertive Buddhist Church began to see the Ngos and their reliance on Catholic refugees, institutions, and youth groups less as weapons for fighting communists than as obstacles to realizing this Buddhist nation. Buddhist clergy who had supported Diem for years, like the eminent nationalist and venerable Tri Quang, now began to criticize the president’s blatant favoritism toward Catholics. Others saw Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc’s proselytization in central Vietnam as an offensive against the Buddhist religion. Buddhists interpreted anticommunist laws such as one banning atheism as pro-Catholic (and sometimes it was). While Diem’s vague ideology of Personalism had never caused problems before (because no one really understood what it was), Buddhists now fingered its Catholic origins.

With their characteristic arrogance and insensitivity, the Ngo brothers did little to assuage the Buddhists, letting these increasingly hostile perceptions of Catholicism transform into very real socio-political threats. Nor did the Ngos do much to curb their Catholic favoritism. Tensions finally came to a head on 8 May 1963 when a clash between government forces and Buddhist demonstrators calling for religious equality resulted in the death of seven young Buddhists. Angry young monks and lay people took to the streets. Things took a turn for the worse when Diem issued orders banning the flying of religious flags. Always hypersensitive to issues of sovereignty, the president insisted that only the national republican flag could be flown at such events. Despite the fact that Diem had also banned the display of Catholic flags, the Buddhists interpreted this as yet another assault on their faith. Tri Quang and other religious nationalists in Hue and Saigon further mobilized their Church and its followers. Diem’s desire to negotiate an end to the standoff got nowhere. In June, an elderly monk, the venerable Quang Duc, volunteered to immolate himself in a sign of protest. The Buddhist leadership agreed and organized media coverage to draw attention to it and the wider cause. On 11 June 1963, Quang Duc serenely sat down in the Buddha position in downtown Saigon. Supporters doused him with petrol and then set him aflame as one of the few photographers on the spot, Malcolm Browne, filmed his immolation for the world to see. More Buddhist demonstrations and immolations followed, leading Diem to crack down in August by seizing pagodas and arresting hundreds, if not thousands, of them.

If the Ngo brothers were convinced that this action was crucial to maintaining order, the Buddhist crisis, coming on the heels of the strategic hamlets’ failure, plunged American confidence in the Ngos to its lowest levels as the National Liberation Front continued to expand its hold on the countryside. At the same time, high-level police and army generals informed the Americans that they were no longer supportive of Diem. By alienating large segments of Vietnamese society, they said, the president was ensuring a communist takeover. American diplomats and officers were telling the White House much the same thing. As for Diem, he oscillated between angry defiance and promises of reconciliation with the Americans. But when the Americans learned that some in his entourage were also speaking of opening contacts with the Vietnamese Workers Party in Hanoi in order to reach a settlement among the Vietnamese people, independently of Washington, the Americans concluded that the Ngo family had become a threat to their wider strategic interests. Like Nguyen Van Thinh, the President of the Republic of Cochinchina who had dared to evoke the possibility of speaking directly to Ho Chi Minh in mid-1946, Diem did not fully grasp the extent to which the Americans were as committed as the French had been to using the southern state as a political weapon to preserve their interests. On 2 November 1963, with a green light from Kennedy, Vietnamese military and security officers overthrew Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Nhu. Hours before his death at the hands of the coup leaders, holed up in the presidential palace, Diem had pleaded with the American ambassador to understand one thing: ‘I am trying to reestablish order’. The Americans no longer believed it. Nor did many Vietnamese.¹⁸

FROM INDIRECT TO DIRECT INTERVENTIONS

Hanoi Chooses Direct Intervention¹⁹

Although the politburo welcomed the American-backed overthrow of Diem, the fall of the Ngo brothers did not result in the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam as the Vietnamese Workers’ Party leadership had mistakenly expected. And while their NLF/PLAF had further expanded its control over large parts of the countryside, it did not have the necessary might to overthrow the American-backed Army of the Republic of Vietnam on its own. As a result, powerful voices in Hanoi began to push for direct though gradual Democratic Republic of Vietnam military intervention in the south in order to topple the Republic of Vietnam, create a coalition government with the NLF/VWP in it, and unify the whole country under the Democratic Republic of Vietnam before the United States could send in troops. Le Duan, Le Duc Tho, and their allies in the army, especially a general named Nguyen Chi Thanh, led the charge. They advocated carefully calibrated and interconnected conventional and guerilla war.²⁰

This military strategy emphasizing conventional war did not command unanimity within the VWP politburo, however. Many—notably General Vo Nguyen Giap—balked. Giap and his allies worried that such an aggressive line risked provoking the Americans directly into joining the war, creating a conflagration that would be infinitely more violent for the Vietnamese army and people than the one they had just fought against the French. This group was not ‘pro Soviet’ or a bunch of ‘doves’, but rather believed that the best military strategy for the time being was a guerilla, protracted people’s war, not a conventional, direct one. Some also worried that such an aggressive line would risk alienating the Soviets whose leaders, even those taking over from Khrushchev in 1964, wanted a negotiated settlement and might not support the communists in Hanoi. Still others wanted to maintain a combined political–military line in the south, while pressing for the reconvening of the Geneva Conference. (The neutralization of Laos which had been accomplished in 1962 seemed to provide reason for hope—a negotiated settlement which allowed the Pathet Lao to take part in a coalition government and avoid a bigger war involving the US had been achieved.) And, lastly, there was an internal debate featuring those who prioritized war against those who were focused on fully communizing the north first.

While the internal archival details on these debates remain unclear, they patently occurred against the backdrop of the widening split between the Soviets and the Chinese and this affected Hanoi’s war strategy. Most importantly, the Chinese increasingly supported the armed line being pushed by Le Duan’s entourage. It was an internationalist duty, Mao said, to support the Vietnamese communist revolution and war against the ‘American imperialists’. (It was also a way of keeping the Americans off China’s vulnerable underbelly.) And of course support for Hanoi’s armed struggle allowed the Chinese to advance in their high-stakes contest with the Soviets for the leadership of the communist bloc. Mao now accused the Soviets of ‘revisionism’, an emotionally charged word in the communist Church, meaning ‘apostasy’. The Soviets felt the pressure and increasingly, if reluctantly, leaned toward supporting their fellow communists in Hanoi. Le Duan looked to the Chinese for support, whose military and logistical aid would be essential to an expanded war. He embraced the Chinese side in internal debates, treating those who cautioned against conventional war with the Americans as ‘revisionists’, again conveying that he meant something very close to treason in the Vietnamese context. Publicly, however, Le Duan, Ho Chi Minh, and others were careful in plotting a neutral course in the Sino-Soviet split, for the DRV needed vital hi-tech weapons which only Moscow could provide.²¹

The advocates of direct though gradual military intervention emerged victorious in early 1964 when the Vietnamese politburo formally approved their ninth plenum. In this historic document, the party concluded that the United States no longer trusted the Republic of Vietnam to do the fighting for possession of Vietnam. The Battle of Ap Bac had shown that. With Diem out of the way and his military successors beholden to the Americans, Washington was now in a position to intervene directly. The VWP had to continue the political struggle and guerilla warfare, the plenum conceded, but the time had come for Hanoi to intervene directly in the south by sending People’s Army of Vietnam regular troops. The hope was that together with the National Liberation Front/People’s Liberation Armed Force, the communists in Hanoi could bring down the republic in a carefully calibrated way before the Americans intervened. But everyone knew that by dispatching the Democratic Republic of Vietnam army to win the civil war directly, Hanoi might in itself provoke direct American intervention. Debates became so divisive that in March 1964 Ho Chi Minh had to step in to smooth things over, but not before telling the army to prepare for war.²²

The man in charge was to be General Nguyen Chi Thanh, a jovial yet dedicated communist officer, loved by many, feared by others. Close to Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, Thanh was a politburo member, head of the army’s powerful General Political Directorate during the First Indochina War, and now equal in rank to Vo Nguyen Giap. He had played a key role in creating the People’s Army of Vietnam, a professional, politically controlled force, and was convinced that his men could withstand American firepower and win. We met him at the outset of this chapter. He fully supported the politburo’s decision to unify the nation under VWP control whatever the cost. The politburo put him in charge of the Central Office of South Vietnam and sent him to the central highlands below the seventeenth parallel to run it. Thanh knew this area like the back of his hand, for he had run clandestine party and military matters there since the 1930s.²³

Thanh brought with him to the south in 1964 military officers from the First Indochina War. They reorganized the south into military regions (B1, B2, and B3) and extended the pathways of the Ho Chi Minh Trail as far southward as possible in order to arm and feed the PLAF and the rice-consuming PAVN regiments. Thanh, like Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, knew that the Americans knew that their troops and cadres were crossing the seventeenth parallel. The communists denied it publicly, but (internally) they did not care. For them, the seventeenth parallel was not a legally constituted national border and the Americans had sinned first by trying to create a separate, sovereign Vietnam out of the RV. And if the Republic of Vietnam leadership, backed by the Americans, was now determined to cast the war as one sovereign state’s violation of another, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam leadership was just as determined to re-establish its pre-1954 administrative presence in the south to reassert its pre-1954 territorial sovereignty. The communists did not see themselves as starting a war; they were determined to finish the one they had been fighting since September 1945. Significantly, the party resumed its direct war where the People’s Army of Vietnam had ended it with the French in June 1954, not at Dien Bien Phu, but in the southern highlands, where PAVN regiments had decimated French mobile groups making a run for the shelter of Pleiku. By May 1965, 7,000 PAVN troops under Thanh’s command operated in the central highlands overlooking the Mekong delta region. This was no coincidence.

Washington Chooses Direct Intervention²⁴

President Lyndon Johnson would have preferred, like his predecessors, to focus on American domestic matters, above all his ideas for the ‘Great Society’. He would have preferred to continue the American policy of the last twenty years of fighting communism in Vietnam by proxy. But the military governments replacing Ngo Dinh Diem were unstable and incapable of stopping the insurgency, those in the White House had concluded. The 16,000 military advisors Kennedy left in Vietnam in late 1963 increased to 23,000 in 1964 as Johnson tried to hold the line. The president also rejected the idea of ‘neutralizing’ South Vietnam (i.e. letting it plot a course independent of the Cold War); it would, in his view, only weaken American containment of China. Like Kennedy in 1963, Johnson had to choose: either the US had to cut its losses and get out or else it had to intervene directly. Most of Kennedy’s advisors had stayed on under Johnson and, with very few exceptions, were as hawkish as Le Duan’s entourage inside communist Vietnam. Whatever their inner reservations and post facto claims, Johnson and his cabinet advisors chose war instead of negotiating or withdrawing from their investment in South Vietnam. And with the French and Diem now gone that could mean only one thing—the end of indirect containment of the communists.²⁵

At the same time as the politburo’s Nguyen Chi Thanh assumed his command in the highlands, Johnson named General William C. Westmoreland to run the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, in Saigon. The Americans increased their surveillance of the north by sending vessels into the Gulf of Tonkin and joined their Vietnamese counterparts in organizing covert operations above the seventeenth parallel (commando raids, psychological warfare, sabotage, and communications surveillance). The aggressive course all sides were now adopting made an incident all but inevitable, just as it had in 1946. The first occurred on 2 August 1964, when a DRV ship fired on the intelligence-gathering destroyer USS Maddox. Johnson refrained from taking action, but two days later, when reports of a second attack arrived on his desk (although in reality, the second attack had never actually occurred), he ordered retaliatory air raids and brought a historic resolution before Congress asking for authorization to use armed force to protect American forces and stop DRV aggression. On 7 August 1964, the US Congress voted in favor of the resolution almost unanimously. Known as the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, this was the legal document upon which America went to war against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam without declaring it officially. Congress had authorized Johnson to take ‘all necessary measures’.

Given that the Republic of Vietnam’s leaders allowed the Americans to intervene directly in their territory and also that they were in no position to stop the DRV from going to war against them, they would now have to watch from the sidelines as others started to make decisions for them. This does not mean that republican leaders had surrendered all of their national sovereignty. However, by betting on direct American military intervention to win a civil war, the generals in charge of the Republic of Vietnam had repeated the same gamble that their non-communist nationalist predecessors had made in 1947 by joining the French. In both cases, this choice limited their freedom of action. The rare non-communist Vietnamese man to have rejected both bargains was the very one the Army of the Republic of Vietnam generals and the Kennedy administration had just overthrown.

Similarly, while the communists did their best to respect the independence of the southern political institutions they had created in the form of the NLF and the PLAF, the leadership of the VWP in Hanoi’s decision to fight directly now left little doubt as to who was in charge. The shock was rude for some in the south when non-communists opposed to the generals in Saigon realized that they were not running the NLF. They should have known better from past events of the pre-1954 period. For example, when non-communist southern nationalists challenged the Indochinese Communist Party’s self-appointed right to lead the anti-French resistance in a heated meeting in 1949, Le Duc Tho shot back angrily to his astonished listeners that ‘anyone who opposed the communists was anti-resistance, a traitor’. To put it another way, if non-communists threatened to pry the National Liberation Front loose from the Vietnamese Workers Party’s grip in independent ways, then they would risk the same fate as Ngo Dinh Diem did when he tried to plot a course inimical to Washington’s interests. In 1964, both Washington and Hanoi chose war and in so doing expected their respective southern allies to fall into step.²⁶

Meanwhile, as American bombs began to fall over North Vietnam, China backed the more aggressive DRV strategy in the south. Mao saw in increased support for the Vietnamese struggle against American ‘imperialism’ a foreign threat he could use to mobilize internal support for his ‘Cultural Revolution’. Moreover, the rapidly deteriorating state of Sino-Soviet relations convinced him that supporting the Vietnamese was an excellent way of pushing back against the Soviets as well as the United States. In October 1964, China successfully tested its first nuclear bomb. Two months later, the leadership in Beijing agreed to send (over a three-year period as it turned out) 300,000 People’s Army of China engineering troops to serve in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s northern provinces building roads, securing border exchanges via the railways and manning anti-aircraft batteries. This helped free Vietnamese soldiers to fight the war in the south. With this huge logistical troop presence in the DRV and the acquisition of the A-bomb, Beijing’s message to Washington was crystal-clear: the Chinese would not deploy combat troops in support of the DRV, but any attempt by the US to cross the seventeenth parallel with troops would trigger direct Chinese intervention just as it had at the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea in 1950.²⁷

The Soviets also increased their assistance to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the wake of the Gulf of Tonkin clash, supplying MIG-17s, surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), radar systems, and real time intelligence on B-52 bombing routes. Sino-Soviet intervention was indirect but it was crucial to the DRV’s ability to wage war. And by carefully negotiating and even manipulating Sino-Soviet competition, the leadership in Hanoi successfully obtained the vital military and economic assistance it needed from the communist bloc to go to war. Just as in 1950, Vietnamese communists felt that such generous aid was fully justified, given that their armies and people were bearing the burden of a direct war with the leader of the enemy capitalist camp, the United States.

Washington found it much more difficult to win over Allied support for its cause. The spread of decolonization westward from Asia to Africa by the early 1960s meant that European powers losing their overseas territories were much less supportive of an anticommunist coalition in Southeast Asia than they had been in the late 1940s. By 1965, meaningful French and even British participation in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization was fast disappearing.²⁸ Significantly, the countries that most supported the United States in Vietnam were all in the Asia–Pacific region. To varying degrees, their governments worried about the threat of communism and, with recent memories of Japanese expansion through Tonkin still in their minds, were keen on maintaining the Americans in the region. In 1969, the Australians had 8,000 combat troops in Vietnam, New Zealand had 552, the Philippines 2,000, Thailand had 11,568, and South Korea 50,003, while Taiwan sent counter-insurgency specialists there. Some have written these countries off as ‘mercenaries’. Although Washington exercised real pressure over them and provided all sorts of things to secure their support, each had its own reasons for joining the US, as did the Cubans, North Koreans, and East Germans who supported the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.²⁸

1965: Direct Parallel Interventions

The Gulf of Tonkin incident allowed President Johnson to initiate the air war in 1964. Some six months later, a second incident, this time in the southern highlands, provided the White House with the pretext it needed to land American ground troops in southern Vietnam. In February 1965, General Nguyen Chi Thanh had authorized People’s Liberation Armed Force troops to attack an American helicopter base in Pleiku, killing eight men. In response, Johnson authorized retaliatory airstrikes against military bases in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which rapidly expanded into a strategic bombing campaign against northern military and industrial targets known as Operation Rolling Thunder. While the idea was to force the leadership in Hanoi to stop its support of the southern insurgency and negotiate immediately a settlement recognizing the sovereign existence of the Republic of Vietnam, the Americans badly underestimated the DRV’s commitment to war and unification on their terms. And the communist leadership made exactly the same mistake about the Americans. On 8 March 1965, 3,500 US marines landed in Danang as American ground forces now entered the war, with their navy and air force providing support. The VWP already had 10,000 PAVN troops on the ground below the seventeenth parallel.

This carefully calculated parallel commitment to direct military intervention inexorably led both Washington and Hanoi to escalate their troop levels rapidly. In July 1965, President Johnson accepted General Westmoreland’s request for more men, bringing the total to 125,000. General Thanh did the same. By 1966, the latter commanded 115,000 regular troops, which were evenly divided between the People’s Liberation Armed Force and the People’s Army of Vietnam. If one adds the guerilla forces, Thanh commanded a total of 225,000 combatants by 1966. In that year, the United States increased its troop level to 350,000, while the Army of the Republic of Vietnam counted 315,000 regular troops and an equal number of auxiliary personnel. The number of United States troops peaked in 1969 at 543,000, meaning that combined American–ARVN troops numbered around a million.²⁹

Guerilla and conventional battles combined throughout the Vietnam War, just as they had before 1954. The first direct military encounter between the People’s Army of Vietnam and American troops occurred in November 1965 in the Ia Drang valley. This was a conventional, large-unit confrontation, occurring in the same area where the PAVN had destroyed the French mobile units in June 1954. Thanh also sent the People’s Liberation Armed Force’s main forces into battle against the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, hoping to bring down the republic before the Americans could arrive in full force. In June 1965, a PLAF regiment attacked an enemy base in Dong Xoai. ARVN troops responded with a ferocious counter-attack, as artillery and bombs rained down on their enemy. One PLAF veteran recalled his superior officer shouting into the field phone as the ground shook around them: ‘My God! It’s brutal, brutal’.³⁰

A Savage War of Destruction

The determination of the leaders in Washington and Hanoi from 1965 onward to battle each other directly ensured that the war for Vietnam would become one of the most ferocious conflicts of the twentieth century. The most industrialized and technologically advanced country in the world threw everything it had at one of the least developed states on the same planet, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, all the while unleashing massive firepower over the very Vietnam it was trying to save, the Republic of Vietnam. From a string of bases in Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Guam, and a wall of aircraft carriers perched in the South China Sea, the Americans bombed relentlessly in order to force the communists to the negotiating table, destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail, level the DRV’s small industry and infrastructure to the ground, and support allied ground forces in the south. Planes sprayed tens of thousands of liters of herbicides over the jungle canopy in search of the trucks and people who were pushing bikes carrying supplies down the trails. Thousands of hectares of jungle were ‘transformed into the tropical equivalent of a winter forest’. The communists pushed their supply lines and many of their bases (including those of the Central Office of South Vietnam) into western Indochina. As they did so, the Americans bombed Laos and Cambodia relentlessly. Indeed, the bombing of Cambodia began in 1965, not 1969, as is commonly believed. Laos has the distinction of being the most heavily bombed country in world history, if calculated in per capita terms (i.e. it is a sparsely populated, small country). From 50,000 feet above the ground, out of sight, bomb-laden B-52s dropped mindboggling amounts of explosives. Closer to the ground, fighter jets (F4s) and low-flying bombers (Skyraiders) attacked targets supported by sophisticated radar and communications systems. Even closer to the ground, helicopters not only transported troops rapidly from one remote place to another, as at Ia Drang, but they also became ‘gunships’ (UH-1 ‘Hueys’) capable of unleashing impressive firepower themselves. In all, over 1.4 million tons of bombs fell over all of Indochina, two times the total dropped during the Second World War. Half of all the bombs fell over the Republic of Vietnam. The rest fell on Laos, the DRV, and Cambodia, in that order. Operation Rolling Thunder bombed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on an almost daily basis until 1968, destroying bridges, roads, and any remaining industrial installations American intelligence services could locate. The air force executed 25,000 sorties in 1965, 79,000 in 1966, and 108,000 in 1967. What French bombers had dropped during the two-month Battle of Dien Bien Phu was the equivalent of what the Americans dropped in one day.This was hugely asymmetrical warfare.³¹

Despite the important quantities of modern weapons the DRV received from its communist brethren, the communists were never in a position to inflict anything remotely equal to the violence the Americans inflicted on Vietnamese soldiers, civilians, and the environment. While the People’s Army of Vietnam and the People’s Liberation Armed Force had artillery, carried AK-47s, lugged machine-guns, and later used tanks, they could never drop napalm on American troops or carpet-bomb American cities and industrial complexes with B-52s. Nor did the DRV have sufficient MiGs (Soviet jet fighters), pilots, or surface-to-air missiles capable of stopping American aerial bombing, much less the industries making them. This disproportionate deployment of firepower meant that Vietnamese soldiers and civilians from north to south, including non-Viet peoples, experienced levels of terror and death unknown to the American combat soldiers, let alone the American civilian population. As one senior member of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam later recalled, the massive American bombing campaign ‘translated into an experience of undiluted psychological terror, into which we were plunged, day in, day out, for years on end’:

From a kilometer away, the sonic roar of the B-52 explosions tore eardrums, leaving many of the jungle dwellers permanently deaf. From a kilometer, the shock waves knocked their victims senseless. Any hit within a half kilometer would collapse the walls of an un-reinforced bunker, burying alive the people cowering inside. [. . .] Often the warnings would give us time to grab some rice and escape by foot or bike down one of the emergency routes. Hours later we would return to find, as happened on several occasions, that there was nothing left. It was as if an enormous scythe had swept through the jungle, felling the giant teak and go trees like grass in its way, shredding them into billions of scattered splinters. [. . .] The terror was complete. One lost control of bodily functions as the mind screamed incomprehensible orders to get out.³²

One soldier later recalled that as the ground trembled around him under the weight of B-52 bombs, he could only think of one thing, ‘of my mother giving me a checkered scarf the day I first joined the army. It was terrifying’. Young northern soldiers marching south never forgot their first sight of the war-disabled going the other way on stretchers. Each thought about what it portended for the future: ‘We used to say to each other, “On arrival in the South, try to keep your faces intact”’. The VWP refused to let many of the maimed and disfigured return home for fear of undermining morale, while desperate parents, wives, and family did everything they could to find out why their loved ones had not returned home. Intense trauma, nonstop worry, and insomnia rode roughshod over all of Vietnam, deep into Laos and Cambodia, and across the highlands. And when such lethal weapons struck their human targets, the result was often complete vaporization, ruling out the chance of bringing home a body for a proper burial. One member of a cultural group in the south recalled how he had lost his close friend to a direct rocket hit: ‘Afterward they found a little hair and some scraps of flesh. That was how one of the finest young composers in Vietnam died’. And as in the wake of the Tay Son wars of the late eighteenth century, the spirits of the dead were once again wandering all over Vietnam looking for a place to rest regardless of any political boundaries between north and south.³³

We know much less about how rural civilians survived this savagery. One year into the bombing campaign, the legendary French veteran of the Second World War and scholar of modern Vietnam, Bernard Fall, was appalled by the brutal effects of the air campaign on civilians. In late 1965, he wrote a damning account of the American assault on Vietnamese civilians, the result of his mind-bending trip with pilots on a bombing mission over the south. When a monsoon ruled out the primary enemy target, the squadron of Skyraiders he accompanied were diverted to a secondary one, a so-called ‘communist rest center’ where the planes were to dump their ordnance before returning. The rest center was in fact a Vietnamese fishing village on the Ca Mau peninsula. The planes dived and unleashed several thousand tons of napalm and explosives. Peering out of the cockpit, Fall couldn’t believe what he saw that day: ‘We came down low, flying very fast, and I could see some of the villagers trying to head away from the burning shore in their sampans. The village was burning fiercely. I will never forget the sight of the fishing nets in flames, covered with burning, jellied gasoline’. No one knew how many civilians died that day or were dying in such raids, but Fall was convinced that this ‘impersonalized’ killing (his term) from the sky was resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of non-combatants. In all, according to statistics published recently in Hanoi, the war that started in 1965 and ended ten years later took the lives of 3.1 million of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s PAVN and its National Liberation Front’s PLAF people, civilians and military personnel combined. Two hundred thousand ARVN troops perished. While every single life is precious, only 58,000 Americans died in the conflict, that’s 1.7 percent of the 3.3 million total number of those who died. At 98.3 percent, death was a profoundly Vietnamese experience.³⁴

War militarized both Vietnams. The civil war starting in the south in 1959 had already led the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front/People’s Liberation Armed Force to arm whole villages against each other and to create local militias and labor teams to fortify hamlets, dig trenches around them, and keep night watch. Snipers, assassins, and soldiers waged a low-level war of attrition that killed tens of thousands of administrators on all sides. Both sides adopted campaigns to rally the enemy soldiers, administrators, and civilians. The communists had long perfected the Maoist proselytizing propaganda campaigns toward the enemy (‘dich van’), while the republic imported methods used in Malaya and the Philippines to set up the Open Arms (‘Chieu Hoi’) program to achieve the same goal. However, in doing so, each side provoked violent reactions from the other as it tried to stop people from going over to the ‘other side’. The same was true of the US-backed Phoenix Program that sought to fight the administrative war in the south between 1965 and 1972 by neutralizing the enemy’s civilian administration through persuasion, but also assassination. The Phoenix Program physically eliminated 26,000 people. The VWP/NFL/PLAF sapper, commando, and police teams may well have killed just as many civilian bureaucrats, men and women. Villagers did what they could to stay alive in this ocean of violence and the waves of hate, vengeance, and raw emotions surging all around them. Hundreds of thousands made a dash for the cities. In fact, the percentage of the population living in southern cities had increased from 20 percent in 1960 to 43 percent by 1971, in what Samuel Huntington called ‘forced-draft urbanization’. War, not industrialization, explained this modern phenomenon. But not everyone could get out. Those poor souls who hunkered down in their villages, caring for family members or protecting their land, did their best to keep on good terms with both sides in this savage, seemingly never-ending war of sovereignties. As one assassin recalled, ‘They were very frightened of us. They didn’t dare to say a word’. Who could blame them?³⁵

War militarized northern Vietnam too. Sirens, drills, and bomb shelters became familiar sights and sounds. Whereas the bombing sent southern villagers into the cities, American air attacks on urban areas in the north led the government to evacuate much of the civilian population to the countryside. In the northern cities and countryside, the government recruited massive amounts of labor to help repair bombed-out roads, bridges, and dikes. Militia forces re-emerged in northern society, with some two million people participating in them—10 percent of the DRV’s total population. The draft increasingly consumed the entire male population aged between eighteen and forty. This was particularly the case as the war of attrition decimated the People’s Liberation Armed Force and caused the communists to accelerate the deployment of northern boys to fight in the south (140,000 People’s Army of Vietnam troops from above the seventeenth parallel operated in the south in 1968). The draft hit the male peasant population hardest, though. High-ranking administrators and party officials as well as bribe-paying urbanites were always better at finding ways to keep their sons out of combat. Thousands of their children were sent to Moscow or Budapest to study, just like their republican counterparts heading for the US and France.³⁶

Women were deeply involved in war, too. Not only did they have to replace their drafted husbands or fathers planting rice, but they also filled many of the local militias and assumed administrative tasks. As during the Indochina conflict, they helped to repair roads and dikes, all the while taking care of children and elders. Unmarried women served in the army as nurses and medics. But many also saw combat. This was particularly the case in the south, where the line between the professional army, the PLAF, and the guerilla fighters was always blurred. It was also in the south where the need for combatants was always highest. Northern women went south too. Many did so by joining the DRV Youth Brigade. They found themselves transporting supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. War trauma on the trail was so intense that many women stopped menstruating. Many never married because of the war and later found themselves ostracized for being single. Children too found themselves in the line of fire, especially in the south. Some served as messengers, intelligence agents, and guides—for all sides.³⁷

In the north, the totalizing nature of this war not only broke down gender and age barriers, but it also extended state control over society. Communist surveillance in the cities and countryside increased, as the party organized massive mobilization, emulation, and propaganda campaigns. The police were omnipresent. Literature had to serve the war cause. Opposition to the war was crushed. News of massive numbers of battlefield deaths was censored or delayed so as not to sap civilian morale. The Republic of Vietnam never imposed such control over cultural and political expression, allowing for remarkable critiques of the war and government policy which would have been unthinkable in the north (see chapter 12).

The Tet Offensive of 1968: The Limits of Conventional Warfare³⁸

If Johnson was dismayed by his failure to force the communists to accept the existence of the Republic of Vietnam, Le Duan was just as frustrated by his inability to topple that state. Neither side, however, was serious about negotiations, despite attempts by just about everybody to bring Hanoi and Washington together. Advocates of war led by Le Duan, Le Duc Tho, and Nguyen Chi Thanh pushed instead for a major offensive that would trigger the general uprising they needed to bring down Nguyen Van Thieu, the president of the enemy Republic, expand the Central Office of South Vietnam’s territorial control, and signal to the Americans that they could not win the war militarily and should leave. Such a grandiose offensive would also help turn public opinion against the White House. Le Duan’s entourage apparently worried, too, that military officers associated with Vo Nguyen Giap might oppose such a bold strategy in favor of a policy of protracted guerilla warfare. Thus, in order to push through what became the Tet Offensive (a series of conventional military assaults on southern urban centers), Le Duan’s allies renewed their ‘anti-revisionist’ attacks, placing dozens of Giap’s allies under house arrest on trumped-up charges of being ‘pro-Soviet’, indeed ‘traitors’.

In December 1967, the Vietnamese politburo approved the final plans for the Tet Offensive. The new commanding officers for this surprise attack were generals Van Tien Dung and Hoang Van Thai (Nguyen Chi Thanh had died of a heart attack that July). The politburo launched its offensive in early 1968 as people celebrated Tet (the new lunar New Year) across the country. Starting in mid-January, 20,000 People’s Army of Vietnam troops attacked the American base of Khe Sanh (located just below the seventeenth parallel), in a violent battle designed to drive the Americans out of this strategic area through which supplies flowed to the National Liberation Front. The People’s Army of Vietnam finally took the city from the Americans in July 1968, one of the longest and most intense conventional battles since Dien Bien Phu.

But for the Vietnamese Workers Party in Hanoi this offensive on Khe Sanh also sought to pin down the Americans, as the communists unleashed PLAF conventional and commando attacks on cities across the south, including Saigon, Da Nang, and Hue. People’s Army of Vietnam soldiers participated mainly in the assault and occupation of Hue. The combined American–Army of the Republic of Vietnam response was rapid as troops participated in street fighting for the first time since the outbreak of the war against the French in 1946–7. The Battle of Hue was particularly violent. Not only did PAVN/PLAF troops go up against American/ARVN ones in the imperial city, but the four week PAVN/PLAF occupation of the imperial city led to the assassination of hundreds of Republic of Vietnam administrators and the massacre of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of innocent civilians caught in the cross-fire and hate that engulfed the city. The war of sovereignties struck the cities with a vengeance.

In the end, the urbanites did not rise up as Le Duan had predicted and the mainly People’s Liberation Armed Force troops were in no position to hold the cities for long against the combined American–Army of the Republic of Vietnam onslaught. Militarily, the various offensives at Tet were massive failures although the People’s Army of Vietnam scored a major victory at Khe Sanh. An estimated 40,000 (some PAVN, but mainly PLAF) troops died in the Tet assaults of 1968. The People’s Liberation Armed Force never truly recovered from these defeats. And from this point onward, the north had to send its own troops to fight and die in the south. The Vietnamese politburo did, however, score a major public relations victory with ‘Tet’. Photographs of American soldiers pinned down in rubblestrewn Hue streets and evening television images of People’s Liberation Armed Force commandos penetrating the American embassy in Saigon led many Americans to wonder why victory was not at hand as promised. Journalists became more critical in their reporting, following in Bernard Fall’s footsteps. Congressional support declined as the antiwar movement began to gather steam in the US, Western Europe, and Japan. By late 1968, 45 percent of Americans thought intervention was a mistake. Johnson’s war had received such bad press that he agreed to halt the bombing and open negotiations with the communists in Hanoi in Paris. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam agreed to talks on 4 April 1968, but not before the American president had made the stunning decision not to run for a second term. A year later, in September 1969, Ho Chi Minh passed away in Hanoi without seeing the Vietnam he had declared independent in 1945 reunited.³⁹

THE PARIS ACCORDS AND THE DIFFICULTY OF ENDING WARS⁴⁰

Nixon and the Return to Indirect Containment?

When the Republican Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, arrived in the White House in January 1969, they were confident that they could end this unpopular war, bring American troops home, refocus American foreign policy on more important matters, and do so honorably without losing international credibility. They also recognized that direct intervention had been very expensive. However, Nixon’s negotiating position in Paris followed the same objectives as his predecessor—the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had to recognize the Republic of Vietnam’s right to exist as an independent sovereign state, end its support of the southern insurgency, and withdraw its troops from republican territory.

The politburo dispatched its special representative, Le Duc Tho, to lead its negotiations in Paris. Tho demanded the withdrawal of US troops from the south, no more bombing, and refused to negotiate with the Nguyen Van Thieu ‘regime’ now in charge of the republic. To strengthen its negotiating hand, in June 1969 the communist party in Hanoi also created a counter-Republic of Vietnam for the south, the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam, or the PRG. The politburo had first approved of and handed the creation of this new southern republic to COSVN on 21 January 1968, on the eve of the Tet Offensive (as they had been convinced there would be a successful uprising). The party simultaneously ordered the creation of a second national front, the Alliance of National, Democratic, and Peace Forces. The communists used these two new political entities as well as the already existing NLF to divide their enemies on the diplomatic front and to win over increased southern support for the creation of a coalition government for South Vietnam on their terms. Hanoi would negotiate with Washington while the PRG would serve as the counter-‘republican’ instrument through which the politburo would position itself to create an alternative to the Republic of Vietnam. As official historians put the double-speak, the party diplomacy ‘is one but also two; two but also one’.⁴¹

In order to achieve what the White House called ‘peace with honor’, Nixon and Kissinger adopted a four-pronged strategy. Firstly, they saw an opportunity in the violent breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance coinciding with their entry into the White House. Things had become so bad between the two Eurasian communist giants by mid-1969 that each had set its nuclear sights on the other. The Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 had convinced Mao that the Soviets, not the Americans, had become the number one enemy. In fact, as Mao reined in his Cultural Revolution in early 1969 in order to focus on the Soviet threat, he realized that he needed the Americans to contain his northern neighbor and to help to modernize the badly neglected Chinese economy. Nixon and Kissinger were just as keen on downplaying ideology in favor of realpolitik.

The Soviets also wanted détente. High on Moscow’s list was ending the costly nuclear arms race in order to focus on improving the domestic economy. Nixon welcomed this idea, too. Starting in late 1969, the White House opened bilateral talks with the Soviets leading to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Agreement (SALT I) in May 1972, which was essential to improving relations between Moscow and Washington. This followed after Nixon’s trip to Beijing in early 1972, during which he managed to reset Sino-American relations on the road to normalization. In exchange, Nixon asked Mao and Brezhnev to help bring their fellow communists in Hanoi to the negotiating table. Although the Chinese and Soviets continued to support the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, each now cautioned their ally against continuing the war indefinitely.

Secondly, bringing the ‘boys home’ from Vietnam had been one of Nixon’s major campaign pledges. In June 1969, he withdrew the first contingent of American troops. By 1972, only 24,000 American soldiers remained in Vietnam. But in order to compensate for the exiting American troops, Nixon simultaneously implemented a policy of assisting the Republic of Vietnam to train and arm more of its own soldiers. By 1969, thanks to American support, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam had increased its regular divisional army to 400,000 men, while the People’s Army of Vietnam forces below the seventeenth parallel exceeded 80,000. Nixon also provided enormous military aid to the ARVN, including new bombers, artillery, ammunition, machine guns, vehicles, and petrol. This is how Nixon sought to ‘Vietnamize’ the war effort and extricate the United States from its direct involvement in the war.

Thirdly, to push the Democratic Republic of Vietnam further, Nixon and Kissinger expanded the war into western Indochina by making a concerted effort to destroy communist bases in Laos and Cambodia and to sever the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Nixon greatly increased the bombing of Cambodia in 1969, continued the air assault on Laos, and supported US/ARVN incursions into Cambodia and Laos in 1970 and 1971. This policy certainly hurt the DRV’s war effort and triggered intense clashes in Laos. B-52 bombing devastated rural Cambodia as the VWP renewed its support of Cambodian communists (which had been on hold since 1954; see chapter 13). And Nixon also made it clear that he would, if necessary, resume bombing the north, the fourth part of his strategy, if the Vietnamese communists did not negotiate in good faith.

Despite the carrots and sticks, negotiations in Paris remained laborious and drawn-out. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s leaders refused to concede that there could be two Vietnams. Le Duc Tho repeated over and again that the Geneva Conference agreements of 1954 had only provisionally divided Vietnam, and that only the creation of a coalition government, including the PRG, the NLF, and the Republic of Vietnam, could solve the problem. Nixon continued to persistently back only the sovereignty of the Republic of Vietnam led by Nguyen Van Thieu. Hanoi’s chief negotiator, Le Duc Tho, however, refused to negotiate with Nguyen Van Thieu or to include him in a coalition government. For the communists, the leaders of the southern republic were illegitimate. And on the question of not joining the coalition, Thieu paradoxically agreed entirely with his communist adversaries. Not only would his participation in a southern coalition undermine the republic’s sovereignty, but Thieu was convinced that such a coalition would allow the communists to eventually take control from the inside. Added to this, Thieu, like his predecessors in the run-up to the Geneva Conference, also had to worry about the Americans negotiating a deal behind his back.

However, if Le Duc Tho refused to budge in Paris, it was also because the communists were not in a strong enough position on the ground in the south to negotiate effectively. International opinion may have turned on the Americans, but the Army of the Republic of Vietnam plus the Americans had decimated the communists’ People’s Liberation Armed Force in the south since 1968 and kept the People’s Army of Vietnam on the run. The Open Arms and Phoenix programs had wreaked terrible damage on the administrative front, weakening the Central Office of South Vietnam’s ability to control people and territory. Hundreds of thousands of peasants had fled to the cities, while others sought shelter in Army of the Republic of Vietnam-controlled zones. If the communists had controlled over four million people between 1961 and 1969, those numbers dropped to one and a half million by 1969 and then to only 229,000 people by 1971. One communist cadre in the south said that after the Tet Offensive, communists there ‘hardly controlled any land at all’; it was a ‘nightmare’. Moreover, the Republic of Vietnam’s government with Thieu at the helm seemed to be making a comeback with its liberal agrarian policy, ‘Land for the Tiller’. The economy had picked up and elections seemed to hold the promise of a brighter future.⁴²

Only military force could provide the DRV with the territorial control it needed to negotiate. As a result, before going any further diplomatically in Paris, the politburo launched a massive, conventional-style military attack on the south in early 1972 which was designed to recapture territory, destabilize Thieu’s government, and turn American public opinion further against Nixon in the lead-up to the fall elections. With a clear nod to the Soviet Union and thankful for its increased military aid, the Vietnamese politburo asked General Vo Nguyen Giap to lead this offensive. On 30 March, Giap sent twelve heavily armed combat divisions across the seventeenth parallel in what the Americans christened the Easter Offensive. One hundred and twenty thousand communist troops supported by Soviet-supplied tanks and artillery raced southward until the Army of the Republic of Vietnam held them in An Loc, a small town located 140 kilometers north of Saigon. In a very violent battle, the PAVN troops attacked in wave after wave as ARVN artillery fire and American bombers pounded them mercilessly. The battle continued until July, when Giap called off the attack. While the innermost party conflict over strategy remains a mystery, Giap was clearly no more a ‘dove’ than Le Duan was and it seemed he could abandon guerilla tactics in favor of full-blown conventional war at the cost of tens of thousands of his soldiers’ lives.

Furious, Nixon and Kissinger unleashed a massive bombing campaign against Hanoi (Operation Linebacker) and mined Haiphong harbor to stop Soviet arms shipments coming in by sea. This intensive bombing of Hanoi brought Le Duc Tho back to the negotiating table, but it also provoked international condemnation. Antiwar sentiment exploded on American campuses, while Europeans began to think that the White House had lost its moral compass. Most ominously for Nixon, Congress began to assert its constitutional control over the power of the purse and thus the executive branch’s ability to make war.⁴³

The End

Although the Easter Offensive had failed to bring down the southern Republic, the communists left 100,000 People’s Army of Vietnam troops below the seventeenth parallel whether Washington liked it or not, and in so doing increased its territorial control. These were probably the offensive’s real objectives. Having secured their military position in the south, in July 1972 Le Duc Tho dropped the call for Nguyen Van Thieu’s removal as leader of the Republic of Vietnam and agreed that he could now join him in an eventual coalition government. Le Duc Tho also played the politburo’s political card, the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam. The politburo had already placed two trusted communists, Huynh Tan Phat and Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, in charge of this counter-republic and its foreign policy. The USSR, China, and other communist states accorded the PRG full diplomatic recognition, as did many non-aligned nations which had refused to support one side or the other in the Cold War since acquiring their independence. Knowing that Nixon desperately wanted to announce a peace agreement before the upcoming presidential elections, Tho demanded that the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam take part in the creation of a tripartite commission with the Republic of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front to preside over future elections and any accords.⁴⁴

The agreement Kissinger and Le Duc Tho finally hammered out turned on two main conditions: 1) the implementation of a ceasefire and the withdrawal within sixty days of all remaining American troops while Hanoi would return American prisoners of war and 2) the creation of a tripartite commission, the National Council of Reconciliation and Concord, that would consult to resolve the future of the ‘south’. It included the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam, the Republic of Vietnam, and the National Liberation Front. The People’s Army of Vietnam troops remained below the seventeenth parallel.

Unsurprisingly, Nguyen Van Thieu opposed the draft agreement submitted to him in October by the Americans. He rejected any deal that left enemy troops in Republic of Vietnam territory and further compromised the republic’s sovereignty via the creation of a national council. Having won a landslide presidential victory in early November, Nixon rallied to Thieu’s point of view and reneged on the draft agreement. Nixon now insisted that the communists withdraw their troops first before signing the accord. When they refused, Nixon ordered B-52s to rain bombs all over the north in December 1972. In all, the eleven-day Christmas bombing dropped 36,000 tons of explosives over the north, an act that elicited international opprobrium, but failed to reassure Thieu. Nor did it remove People’s Army of Vietnam troops from the south or reduce their territorial control. In short, Nixon wanted out, and Thieu could do little to stop the Americans and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam from signing an agreement.

For Thieu, 1973 was starting to look at lot like 1953. There was a major difference, however. Unlike the French, who, after the negotiated end of the First Indochina War in 1954, had made little commitment to supporting the State of Vietnam thereafter, in 1973 Nixon promised continued military assistance to the Republic of Vietnam and pledged to drop bombs once more if the communists violated the agreement and made it very clear that he would not hesitate to do so. The Vietnamese politburo believed him, at least for the time being, as did Nguyen Van Thieu. On 27 January 1973, the US and the DRV signed a ceasefire document identical to the earlier one. The Republic of Vietnam’s Nguyen Van Thieu and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam’s foreign minister, Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, added their signatures.

The agreement lasted only a few months, however. While Army of the Republic of Vietnam and People’s Army of Vietnam troops below the seventeenth parallel jockeyed for positions and control of territory, recent scholarship, based on Vietnamese communist documentation, leaves no doubt that the politburo, led by Le Duan and Vo Nguyen Giap, chose to resume war in late March 1973 and made it official, after yet another round of internal debate, in July 1973. Vo Nguyen Giap joined Le Duan to push for a final conventional war to bring down the Republic of Vietnam. Several top-ranking communist leaders in the south had already flaunted the accords, despite the politburo’s threat of severe sanctions. But with the party’s final decision to go to war, all was forgotten.⁴⁵

The only thing that could now stop the two Vietnams from resuming civil violence was the belief that Nixon would intervene militarily. However, events in Washington rapidly ruled this out. Congress’s passing of the War Powers resolution in late 1973 restricted the American president’s ability to wage war. Secondly, the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 suddenly removed him from the picture. Thirdly, in August 1974, Congress slashed military aid to the RV in yet another move to stop an unpopular war and reassert their power as the legislative branch of the American government. Neither the Soviets nor the Chinese communists objected to the Vietnamese communists’ plans to take the south by force. And by late 1974, the politburo was convinced that Nixon’s replacement, Gerald Ford, would not intervene in their war in Vietnam. This time, they were right. In early 1975, Ford looked on as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam sent another 100,000 People’s Army of Vietnam troops pouring across the seventeenth parallel. The Americans began frantically evacuating their personnel. Despite fighting valiantly in some areas and folding lamentably in others, the Republic of Vietnam could not stop the offensive. On 30 April 1975, after brutal battles leading up to Saigon’s outskirts, PAVN troops entered and occupied the presidential grounds of the southern capital, ending the most violent Vietnamese civil war in its long, divided history.⁴⁶