CHAPTER THREE

THE RIVER STYX

JANUARY 1964–DECEMBER 1965

Two Vietnamese women do their best to get on with their daily lives despite the presence of newly arrived U.S. Marines patrolling near Danang, April 1965.

HE TODAY THAT SHEDS HIS BLOOD

DENTON WINSLOW CROCKER JR. was born June 3, 1947, the oldest of four children. His father and namesake was a biologist. “He was a colicky little baby,” his mother, Jean-Marie, remembered. “So we were up night and day with him. My husband was a wonderful dad, very loving and attentive. He’d walk the floor with him. And one day he said, ‘He’s a regular little mogul the way he rules our lives.’ So that’s where the name came from. We called him Mogie.”

Mogie was raised in college towns: Ithaca; Amherst; Waterville, Maine; and, finally, Saratoga Springs, to which the family moved in 1960, when he was thirteen. He was very close to his sister Carol. “We had a nice big yard where they played,” his mother recalled. “And he would often include Carol. And she said to me once, ‘Brothers take care of you when you’re afraid of dogs.’ So she depended on him a lot.”

He was an unusual boy. Intelligent, independent minded, and too nearsighted to do well at team sports, he loved books about American history and American heroes. At twelve, he started a diary in which he kept track of cold war events. “I hate Reds!” he wrote, and he admired most those who had proved willing to sacrifice themselves for a cause. President John F. Kennedy’s call for all Americans to ask what they could do for their country had mirrored ideas he’d held since he was a small boy.

“One evening,” his mother remembered, “when I was reading to Denton before he went to sleep, I chose a passage from Henry V: ‘He today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother…And gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here and hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks that fought with us upon St. Crispin’s Day.’ That was the sort of thing that made Denton want to be part of something important and brave.”

Mogie Crocker reads about one of his many heroes, Winston Churchill.

THE ABLEST MEN

TRAGEDY HAD BROUGHT Lyndon Johnson to the presidency in November 1963. And he would not feel himself fully in charge until he had faced the voters the following year. But his ambitions for his country were as great as those of his hero, Franklin Roosevelt. In his first State of the Union address he declared “unconditional war on poverty,” and during his years in the White House he would lead the struggle to win passage of more than two hundred important pieces of legislation—the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, federal aid to education, Head Start, Medicare, and a whole series of bills aimed at ending poverty in America—all components of what he called the “Great Society.”

In foreign affairs, Johnson was admittedly less self-assured. “Foreigners are not like the folks I’m used to,” he once said. To deal with them, he retained in office all of his predecessor’s top advisers—Dean Rusk at State, Robert McNamara at Defense, McGeorge Bundy as his National Security Advisor. “You’re the men I trust the most,” he told them. “You’re the ablest men I’ve ever seen. It’s not just that you’re President Kennedy’s friends, but you are the best anywhere and you must stay. I want you to stand by me.”

Publicly, Johnson pledged that “this nation will keep its commitments from South Vietnam to West Berlin.” But privately, the ongoing struggle in Indochina filled him with dread. “I feel just like I grabbed a big juicy worm,” he told an aide, “with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.”

The president had opposed the coup that overthrew and murdered Ngo Dinh Diem, fearing it would make a bad situation worse. It had. Ambassador Lodge’s optimism about the new Saigon leadership had lasted only a few weeks. The generals were bickering. General Paul Harkins, who had opposed the coup, and Henry Cabot Lodge, who had promoted it, were barely speaking. By mid-December, all the news from Vietnam was bad. There were now as many as one thousand violent incidents a week, three times as many as there had been just a year earlier. “When Diem was overthrown we were so excited,” Le Cong Huan, the NLF fighter who had helped win the victory at Ap Bac, remembered. “We thought we were close to liberating the whole country. We began attacking the enemy day and night. More and more puppet soldiers surrendered or defected to our side. More and more young people joined our armed forces.”

President Lyndon Johnson works the telephone in the Oval Office. “Johnson knew how to woo people,” his eventual vice president, Hubert Humphrey, remembered. “He was a born political lover….He knew how to massage the senators. He knew which ones he could just push aside, he knew which ones he could threaten, and above all he knew which ones he’d have to spend time with and nourish along, to bring along, to make sure that they were coming along.”

“They had grown so powerful in the Delta that they launched an offensive,” Neil Sheehan recalled. “You could hear the arming of the Viet Cong because as we made contact with a Main Force unit back in early ’62, they only had one machine gun per battalion. It was sporadic fire. Later, when you made contact it would build up into a drumfire of automatic and semiautomatic weapons. They destroyed strategic hamlets, were knocking over one outpost after another.”

It had quickly become “abundantly clear,” the head of the CIA admitted, that some of Diem’s province chiefs and top commanders had simply lied about how well the war was going, deliberately misleading the Americans with cheery statistics that had little to do with reality. By some estimates, 40 percent of the South Vietnamese countryside—and with it more than 50 percent of the people—was now effectively in the hands of the Viet Cong. In one province south of Saigon, only 45 of 219 strategic hamlets still provided security to their inhabitants.

There were problems in the cities, too. Catholics, stripped of the special status they had enjoyed under Diem, feared the future and clashed openly with Buddhists. The Buddhists, whose protests had helped bring Diem’s regime to an end, were dissatisfied with the new government, which did not deliver the protection for their faith or the path to peace for which they’d hoped. They were divided among themselves, as well, but a growing faction had come to believe in what came to be called the “Third Force”—a negotiated settlement that would rid their country of its alien American presence.

Robert McNamara pronounced the situation “very disturbing.” If it wasn’t reversed within two to three months, he warned the president, South Vietnam might be lost. He proposed a four-month program, meant to convince Hanoi it was in its interest to halt its support of the Viet Cong: U-2 flights over North Vietnam; ARVN sabotage teams parachuted in to blow up rail and highway bridges; U.S. destroyer patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin to collect intelligence in support of South Vietnamese commando assaults along the North Vietnamese coast. All of it was to be kept secret.

Johnson signed on. He was resolved not to be “the president who saw Southern Asia go the way China went,” he said. “I want [the South Vietnamese] to get off their butts and get out into those jungles and whip the hell out of some communists,” he said. “And then I want ’em to leave me alone, because I’ve got some bigger things to do right here at home.”

ONLY ONE GOAL

THERE HAD BEEN CHANGE and turmoil in North Vietnam, too, just as there had been in Saigon and Washington, though Americans knew little about it. At the Ninth Party Plenum that had coincidentally begun in Hanoi on November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was killed, the politburo had argued over how best to proceed with the war. North Vietnam’s two “big brothers”—the Soviet Union and China—were offering conflicting advice. The Soviets, now championing peaceful coexistence rather than open confrontation with the West, counseled caution. The Chinese accused Moscow of “revisionism” and continued to call for worldwide revolution.

Ho Chi Minh was most sympathetic to the Soviets; he was still concerned that his country remained fragile, and believed it better to wage a protracted guerrilla war than to step up the conflict in the South and force the Americans to take a more active role in the war. He remained a beloved figure, but now he shared power with younger, more impatient leaders.

First Party Secretary Le Duan, closer to the Chinese, argued that the time was right to strike, and outlined a new military strategy, aimed at ending the war in 1964. In the first “Big Battles” phase, the North Vietnamese would massively increase infiltration into the South while the Viet Cong recruited more men and amassed more arms. Then, employing conventional tactics and large unit formations, they would inflict massive losses on the ARVN “puppets.”

By late 1965 or early 1966, when South Vietnamese forces had been sufficiently worn down and demoralized, the second phase, or “General Offensive, General Uprising,” would begin—simultaneous attacks on South Vietnamese cities. The weakened South Vietnamese forces would be unable to resist while the people rose up and seized power in conjunction with the military, just as they had during the August Revolution in 1945. A “neutralist” government under NLF control would then ask the United States to leave.

The politburo debated for two weeks. When Ho raised objections to Le Duan’s plan, the younger man argued that he was too timid; the two most momentous decisions Ho had made—not to oppose the French return to northern Vietnam in 1945 and to accept the temporary partition of Vietnam in 1954—were proof of it, he charged. In the end, Le Duan carried the day, and when the votes were about to be cast and Ho saw that he would lose, he stepped out of the room; from then on, while he would always remain the symbol of the revolution, his actual power over day-to-day operations would diminish, while Le Duan’s increased.

In public, Ho Chi Minh (at the microphone) and Party Secretary Le Duan (at Ho’s left) presented a united front. In private, things were more complex.

In the aftermath of the meeting, as regiments of North Vietnamese troops prepared to move south, Le Duan and his allies methodically purged moderate party members who had differed with them. Hundreds of so-called “rightists” and “revisionists” were demoted, dismissed, imprisoned, or sent to “reeducation camps.” “Uncle [Ho] wavers,” Le Duan said, “but when I left South Vietnam I had already prepared everything. I have only one goal—just final victory.”

GET IN OR GET OUT

UNAWARE of what the communists in Hanoi were planning, American planners wrestled with ongoing problems in Saigon. General Duong Van “Big” Minh, the most important member of the military junta now in charge in Saigon, was proving as independent in his own way as Diem had been in his. Minh wanted to replace the U.S.-financed Strategic Hamlet Program with a new scheme that would allow peasants to remain in their homes, and he wanted fewer American advisers visiting the countryside; they reminded people of French imperialism, he said, and suggested that the Saigon government was altogether too close to a foreign power. And, from Washington’s point of view, he seemed too sympathetic to a proposal by French president Charles de Gaulle that called for a negotiated settlement and a neutral Vietnam. Most of President Johnson’s advisers were against negotiating when South Vietnam’s situation seemed so precarious. “When we are stronger,” Bundy told the president, “then we can negotiate.” Until then, they needed a South Vietnamese government willing to at least try to win.

On January 30, a group of young ARVN officers, led by General Nguyen Khanh, overthrew Big Minh without firing a shot. Khanh was profoundly ambitious and thought reliably hawkish. During his gaudy career he had managed to have fought both for and against the French, to have helped rescue Diem from the 1960 coup, and then to have become actively involved in the coup that overthrew him in 1963.

Johnson did not care about the general’s consistency or his character. “This Khanh is the toughest one they got, and the ablest one they got,” he told a visiting newspaperman. “And [Khanh] said, ‘Screw this neutrality…we ain’t going to do business with the communists….I’m pro-American and I’m taking over.’ Now it’ll take him a little time to get his marbles in a row, just like it’s taking me a little time….We’re going to try to launch some counterattacks ourselves….We’re going to touch them up a little bit in the days to come.”

He sent McNamara to Saigon in mid-March with instructions to show the people of Vietnam that Khanh was “our boy.” “I want to see about a thousand pictures of you with General Khanh,” he told the defense secretary, “smiling and waving your arms and showing the people out there that this country is behind Khanh the whole way.” At one joint appearance, General Samuel Wilson, then associate director for USAID field operations, remembered, Khanh delivered a long, tedious speech in Vietnamese, ending with, “Vietnam muôn năm! Vietnam muôn năm! Vietnam muôn năm!”—“Vietnam, ten thousand years!” At which point, McNamara grabbed one fist and Maxwell Taylor grabbed the other and they held them up, and McNamara leaned over to the microphone and tried to say “Vietnam muôn năm,” but, because he wasn’t aware of the tonal difference, the crowd practically disintegrated on the cobblestones. What he was saying was something like “The little duck, he wants to lie down.”

“No more of this coup shit,” Johnson told his advisers. But despite everything Washington tried to do to stabilize the Saigon government, the generals would continue to jockey for power as Buddhists and Catholics clashed in the streets. Over the next fourteen months, Khanh clung to power as president or prime minister, but he would be forced to form and reform his government seven times. One weary Johnson aide suggested that the national symbol of South Vietnam should be a turnstile.

General Nguyen Khanh and Robert McNamara tour the Mekong Delta aboard a helicopter, 1964. The goal of the defense secretary’s appearances alongside the general was “to promote him to his own people,” McNamara remembered, but “we never realized that encouraging public identification between Khanh and America may have only reinforced in the mind of many Vietnamese the view that his government drew its support not from the people but from the United States.”

It had quickly become clear that the new policy of clandestine sabotage in and around North Vietnam was having no serious impact on Hanoi’s support for the Viet Cong. None of the CIA-trained commandos dropped into North Vietnam were ever heard from again. The Joint Chiefs of Staff urged the president to raise the stakes, to “put aside…the self-imposed restrictions which now limit our efforts,” and take far bolder action. The war should immediately be broadened beyond the borders of South Vietnam, they said, to include air attacks on North Vietnamese supply routes in Laos and Cambodia and bombing of military and industrial targets in North Vietnam. The Chiefs also called upon the president to deemphasize reliance on North Vietnamese troops and send American soldiers into battle instead.

Johnson resisted, fearing that such aggressive moves would pull China into the conflict, just as it had entered the Korean War in 1950. “They say get in or get out,” he complained to McGeorge Bundy, “and I told them…we haven’t got any Congress that will go with us in the war, and we haven’t got any…mothers that will go with us in the war and…I’m just…a trustee. I’ve got to win an election…and then [I] can make a decision.”

But he did agree to increase the number of American advisers from 16,000 to more than 23,000 by the end of 1964. He wanted his own team in Saigon, too. He made Maxwell Taylor his ambassador, and selected forty-nine-year-old General William Westmoreland, a decorated commander from World War II and Korea who had served for six months as General Harkins’s deputy, to lead the American military effort. “Have we got anyone with a military mind that can give us some military plans for winning that war?” Johnson asked McNamara. “Let’s get some more of something, my friend, because I’m going to have a heart attack if you don’t get me something…because what we’ve got is what we’ve had since ’54. We’re not getting it done. We’re losing.”

A May 27th phone call with McGeorge Bundy made clear that Vietnam continued to fill the president with dread.

LYNDON JOHNSON: I just stayed awake last night thinking about this thing—the more I think of it…it looks like to me we’re getting into another Korea. It just worries the hell out of me. I don’t see what we can ever hope to get out of there with once we’re committed. I believe the Chinese communists are coming into it. I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out. And it’s just the biggest damn mess I ever saw.

MCGEORGE BUNDY: It is, it’s an awful mess.

JOHNSON:…I look at this [Marine] sergeant of mine this morning, got six little old kids,…and he’s getting out my things and bringing me my night reading and all that kind of stuff and I just thought about ordering those kids in there, and what the hell am I ordering him out there for?…

BUNDY: Yup. Yup.

JOHNSON: Now of course if you start running, the communists…may just chase you into your own kitchen.

BUNDY: Yup. That’s the trouble. And that is what the rest of that half of the world is going to think if this thing comes apart on us. That’s the dilemma. That’s exactly the dilemma.

Polls showed Johnson with a commanding lead over his likely Republican opponent, Senator Barry F. Goldwater of Arizona, a blunt uncompromising critic of what he charged was the administration’s weakness in the face of communist aggression. But Johnson felt he did not yet have the political capital to take further action in Vietnam, and he didn’t want to repeat the mistake he believed Harry Truman had made when he sent troops to Korea without congressional approval. Unless Congress was in at the “takeoff,” Johnson told McNamara, they wouldn’t take responsibility if there were a “crash landing.”

William Bundy—McGeorge Bundy’s older brother and the newly appointed assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs—was asked to chair a committee that drafted a congressional resolution, authorizing the president to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States,” to be sent to Capitol Hill when and if the time was right.

GRANDMA’S NIGHTSHIRT

ON JULY 30, 1964, the South Vietnamese, under the direction of the U.S. military, shelled two North Vietnamese islands in the Gulf of Tonkin. The tiny North Vietnamese navy was put on high alert. What followed three days later was one of the most controversial and consequential events in American history.

On the afternoon of August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox was moving slowly through international waters in the gulf, on an intelligence-gathering mission in support of further South Vietnamese action against the North. When the commander of a North Vietnamese torpedo boat squadron spotted the Maddox, he moved to attack her. The Americans opened fire and missed. None of the North Vietnamese torpedoes hit the American destroyer either. But carrier-based U.S. planes roared in shortly afterward, damaged two of the North Vietnamese boats, and left a third dead in the water.

Ho Chi Minh was shocked to hear of the attack and demanded to know who had ordered it. The officer on duty was officially reprimanded for impulsiveness. No one may ever know who gave the order to fire the torpedoes—or why he gave it. It may simply have been the action of an overzealous squadron commander. But some believe it was secretly Le Duan’s doing, a clumsy attempt at provoking just enough of an American response to transform a civil war into a war of “National Liberation” that would make it easier to draft young men and rally international support. To this day, even the Vietnamese cannot agree.

In Washington, the Joint Chiefs urged immediate retaliation against North Vietnam. The president refused. Instead, the White House issued a warning about the “grave consequences” that would follow what it called “any further unprovoked” attacks—even though Johnson knew the attack had in fact been provoked by the South Vietnamese raids on North Vietnamese islands.

Both sides were playing a dangerous game.

Two days later, on August 4, jittery American radio operators aboard the Maddox monitoring North Vietnamese radio traffic thought they heard that a “military operation” was imminent. (Actually, they’d mistranslated the conversation they’d heard; Hanoi had simply called upon torpedo boat commanders to be ready in case of a new raid by the South Vietnamese.)

The Maddox and another destroyer, the Turner Joy, braced for a fresh attack. So did the White House. Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, U.S. commander for the Pacific, proposed that in the event of a second attack the destroyer commander be empowered to pursue the North Vietnamese torpedo boats to their base and then destroy it.

The USS Maddox at sea, four months before her fateful confrontation with North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin

Robert McNamara telephoned the president. He thought the admiral’s suggestion precipitous. “There will be ample time for us, after a second attack,” he told Johnson, “and you can then decide how far you wish to pursue the attacker into his base area.” Instead, he said, “I personally would recommend to you, after a second attack on our ships, that we do retaliate against the coast of North Vietnam some way or other.”

LYNDON JOHNSON: What I was thinking about when I was eating breakfast:…when they move on us and they shoot at us, I think we not only ought to shoot at them, but almost simultaneously pull one of these things that you’ve been doing, on one of their bridges or something.

ROBERT MCNAMARA: Exactly. I quite agree with you, Mr. President….

JOHNSON: But I wish we could have something that we’ve already picked out, and just hit about three of them damn quick, right after.

No second attack ever took place, but the sonar operators convinced themselves one had. The attack was “probable but not certain,” Johnson was told. Since he believed it had probably occurred, the president decided it should not go unanswered.

That evening, he asked for time on all three television networks. “Aggression by terror against the peaceful villagers of South Vietnam has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America,” he told the country. “Yet our response, for the present, will be limited and fitting. We Americans know, although others appear to forget, the risk of spreading conflict. We still seek no wider war.”

The next day, Johnson flew to Rochester, New York, where he was to make a campaign speech. Secretary McNamara reached him at the airport with the results of the first American air raid on North Vietnam.

ROBERT MCNAMARA: The reaction from North Vietnam and China is slight so far. Less than I would have anticipated.

LYNDON JOHNSON: How many planes did you lose?

MCNAMARA: We lost two aircraft…and possibly a third….Two other aircraft were damaged. One pilot got out of the plane.

That pilot was Lieutenant Everett Alvarez from Salinas, California. He was aboard the carrier USS Constellation when his squadron of A-4 Skyhawks was ordered to attack torpedo boat installations and oil facilities near the port of Hon Gai. For the first time, American pilots were going to drop bombs on North Vietnam.

“When we approached the target coming down from altitude,” Alvarez recalled, “it was obvious that they could pick us up on their radar. I remember my knees shaking. And, I was saying to myself, ‘Holy smokes, I’m going into war. This is war.’ I was a bit scared. But once we went in and they started firing at us, the fear went away. Everything became smooth, deathly quiet in the cockpit. My plane was like a ballet in the sky, and I was just performing. And then I got hit.”

Alvarez ejected from his spiraling plane and splashed into the Gulf of Tonkin. Coastal militiamen captured him and turned him over to the North Vietnamese military. “One fellow was “yelling at me in Vietnamese,” he remembered. “I started talking to him in Spanish. Don’t ask me why. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Anyway, after they discovered ‘USA’ on my ID card they started speaking to me in English.”

In this grainy snapshot taken from the deck of the Maddox, three attacking North Vietnamese vessels can be seen on the horizon, July 30, 1964.

He assumed he would be treated as a prisoner of war. “I was sticking to the code of conduct and gave them my name, rank, service number, and date of birth. But they quickly reminded me that there was no declaration of war. So I could not be considered a prisoner of war. And I says to myself, ‘You know what? They’re right.’ ”

Everett Alvarez was the first American airman to be shot out of the sky over North Vietnam—and the first to be imprisoned there.

Now, the president sent up to Capitol Hill the resolution he had asked William Bundy to help draft two months earlier. On August 7, 1964, three days after the capture of Alvarez and the president’s address to the nation, the Senate passed what came to be called the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Only Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon voted against it. Not a single congressman opposed it in the House.

Lieutenant Everett Alvarez, the first American pilot to fall into enemy hands, photographed in Hanoi by a Soviet photographer in 1967. The diminutive guard behind him was called “Elf” by Alvarez and his fellow prisoners.

The resolution, Johnson told his aides, was like “Grandma’s nightshirt—it covers everything.” He now felt himself empowered to undertake combat operations in Southeast Asia—whenever he felt such action was necessary.

Goldwater could no longer plausibly claim that Johnson was too timid when dealing with North Vietnam, while those voters concerned that the United States was in danger of becoming too deeply involved admired the president’s measured response. Johnson’s approval for his handling of the war jumped overnight from 42 percent to 72 percent. The American public believed their president.

Le Duan and his comrades in Hanoi did not. They knew the attacks had not been “unprovoked,” and had little faith in the president’s claim that he sought no wider war. They resolved to step up their efforts to win the struggle in the South before the United States escalated its presence by sending in combat troops. For the first time, Hanoi began sending North Vietnamese regulars down the Ho Chi Minh Trail into the South.

The diplomat John Negroponte was then a junior official in the Saigon embassy. “Shortly after I got there,” he remembered, “we got the first reports of North Vietnamese troops coming into the South. A couple of prisoners were captured from a North Vietnamese unit up near Hue. A lot of us sat back and said, ‘Whoa, this is a significant change.’ But when our consul in Hue sent his report in about the capture of two North Vietnamese noncommissioned officers, the reaction in Washington was, ‘Mr. Hebley shall not communicate directly with Washington anymore. He must vet all his reports through Saigon.’ They didn’t want that bad news during the 1964 election campaign. Mr. Johnson didn’t really want any particular surprises during that period.”

But as Johnson and Goldwater campaigned across the country, there were surprises nonetheless. In mid-October, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was overthrown by members of his own party. The next day, China exploded its first atomic bomb. “We can’t let Goldwater and Red China both get the bomb at the same time,” Johnson told an aide. “Then the shit would really hit the fan.”

“There are those who say you ought to go north and drop bombs,” he told his campaign crowds. “We don’t want our boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. We are not about to start another war and we’re not about to run away from where we are….As far as I am concerned, I want to be very cautious and careful, and use it only as a last resort when I start dropping bombs around that are likely to involve American boys in a war in Asia with 700 million Chinese.”

The 1964 campaign: For months, the Republican presidential nominee, Senator Goldwater (bottom) charged that President Johnson (top) was weak and vacillating in Vietnam, but when LBJ ordered airstrikes after the Gulf of Tonkin incident he muted his criticism for a time. “We’re all Americans and stick together,” he assured Johnson.

On the last day of October, communist guerrillas shelled the American air base at Bien Hoa. Five Americans died, and thirty were wounded. Five B-57 bombers were destroyed on the ground, and fifteen more were damaged. Senator Goldwater said it was time for the president to admit that the United States was already fighting an undeclared war in South Vietnam—and to get about the business of winning it. Ambassador Taylor urged the president to retaliate with an airstrike against a MiG base in North Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs advised him to go much further—to mount an immediate all-out air attack on ninety-four targets in the North and to dispatch Army and Marine units to South Vietnam, as well.

He refused. Election day was just two days away. On November 3, Lyndon Johnson won the presidency in his own right and by a landslide, with forty-six states to Goldwater’s four. It was the largest popular vote and the greatest victory margin in history up to that time.

Within a month, the president would approve what was called a “graduated response”—limited air attacks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and “tit for tat” retaliatory raids on North Vietnamese targets. But he would not undertake sustained bombing of the North until the South Vietnamese got their own house in order. Johnson doubted that airpower alone would ever work and feared that he would eventually have to send in ground troops, though he was not yet willing publicly to say so.

NOTHING EXCEPT MY OWN CONSCIENCE

MOGIE CROCKER was seventeen in the autumn of 1964 and had been restless since the summer. After the Gulf of Tonkin incident he had confided to his sister Carol that he wanted to join the Navy but knew his parents would not sign the consent form that would allow a seventeen-year-old to enlist. His country seemed to be edging toward war and he saw it as his duty to be part of the worldwide struggle against communism.

“At that point,” Carol recalled, “I couldn’t understand why this would be so important to him. The war wasn’t that prominent in the world I was traveling in. There was some discussion at home. It was on the news. But it seemed like a very distant war at that time. And that was part of the mystery to me of why it was important to him.”

Mogie’s parents tried to persuade him that he could be more useful to his country with a college education than simply as one more soldier. He was adamant and resolved to run away from home.

“He was home the night before,” his mother remembered. “And we had a regular family supper. He said he’d rather be home than go to youth group at church. So that was pleasant. And then Monday morning he left for school. And I watched him leave from the back window. That night he didn’t come in for supper and he hadn’t called, which was very unusual because all the kids were good about keeping in touch.”

Mogie’s parents eventually found a letter, addressed to “Mum and Dad”: “After weeks of thought I have come to the decision that I must run away and join the service. Please do not search for me! It will only cause many people a lot of useless trouble as I will fight my way out if anyone tries to capture me. Believe me when I say that nothing except my own conscience has made me do this.”

Without American military help, he wrote, Southeast Asia was sure to fall to the communists. He wanted to help the Vietnamese “keep their freedom.” He was not ready for college, and wanted to earn his own way in the world “while helping people at the same time.”

I still believe that individual freedom is the most important thing in the world and I am willing to die to defend that idea.

Don’t be too upset by my running away and don’t pay attention to the jerks who may try to say you’re bad parents. I will write you as soon as I am eighteen at which time you could not get me out of the service. My main concern in running away is how it would affect you, so please don’t worry.

Try to understand my decision.

      Love,

      Mogie

“When my parents started to share with us that they didn’t know where he was,” Carol Crocker recalled, “and that they had called the police and that his bicycle had been found, it took on a really unreal feeling for me. I actually remember going into my room and looking under my bed and telling him to come out. I assumed he was hiding somewhere. There was no way he had actually left. I eventually happened to look in my piggy bank and he had taken the money I had and left a note for me. He hadn’t indicated where he’d gone or why. But he had promised he would pay me back. I’m not sure he ever did.”

The police chief issued a thirteen-state missing-person bulletin. Mogie’s parents contacted their congressman, recruiting centers, the FBI. Their church offered special prayers. Mogie did not call, did not write. The Crockers hoped they might hear from him on Christmas, and when they didn’t, his mother wrote him a long letter. “I pray, my darling son, that Jesus will strengthen and comfort you in whatever you are doing and fill your heart with love of all that is good,” she wrote. “And I shall still be waiting to fly to the door and hug you and call out to our home—and the world—‘Mogie is home!’ ” Then she folded the letter and put it away. She had no idea where to send it.

Mogie was in Montreal. He had hoped to board a ship there and somehow join British forces fighting communists in Malaya. He had left home with only thirty dollars—twenty-five his mother had just given him for painting the front porch and the five he’d stolen from his sister’s piggy bank. It hadn’t gone far. He’d slept several nights in a church, then landed a job as a stock clerk in a department store, but couldn’t earn enough to pay his rent. Shortly after New Year’s, he boarded a bus for New York City. It passed within two blocks of his house in Saratoga Springs, but he was too proud to get off.

He was gone about four months, his mother remembered. “When he finally called us, he was in New York City at a Y. And he told us that he had to give a cigarette lighter to the manager for security to make the phone call. But he still was determined and said that he would not come home unless we agreed to sign for him. And he wouldn’t be eighteen until June. Well, we said we’d sign for him. And he did come home. My husband felt it was an honor-bound agreement. I was hoping that I could change his mind.”

A LITTLE DIEN BIEN PHU

MARINE LIEUTENANT PHILIP BRADY arrived in Saigon just a few days after Lyndon Johnson’s election, one of the new advisers sent to help shore up the South Vietnamese military. He was eager, he remembered, “to get into the first war I could find.”

There were still so few advisers in Vietnam that General Westmoreland could greet each batch personally. He was an impressive-looking square-jawed man with an impressive record: some of the men he’d led in Tunisia, Sicily, and Normandy during World War II called him “Superman”; he’d fought with distinction in Korea, commanded the 101st Airborne, and served as superintendent of West Point. Time called him “the sinewy personification of the American fighting man.”

“General Westmoreland told us that we were down on the five-yard line and we just needed a few more to go to get the touchdown,” Brady remembered. Ambassador Taylor briefed the newcomers too. “He said he’d been through battles and wars and he had the clear sense, the professional judgment, that this thing was going to be wrapped up and we were going to carry the day.”

Brady was assigned to assist Captain Frank P. Eller, senior adviser to the Fourth Battalion of the South Vietnamese Marine Corps, an elite unit whose members wore distinctive camouflage uniforms and called themselves the “Killer Sharks.” Eller had been in country for six months, long enough to come to admire the fighting qualities of the men he helped to lead.

Brady came to admire them too. “You were told that you were going over there to guide, educate, and elevate these little fellows on how to really fight a war. But when you got there you saw that they already knew exactly how to fight. You were there simply, fundamentally, to guide assets they didn’t have—American airstrikes, American artillery. They knew exactly what to do. They knew how to fight.”

Tran Ngoc Toan, still on active duty in 1973, nine years after he nearly died at Binh Gia

Among the men he came to know best was the platoon leader Tran Ngoc Toan, the son of a trucker, who had escaped life with a hostile stepmother by entering the South Vietnamese military academy at Dalat. He’d been fighting the communists for more than two years, had been among those who’d attacked Ngo Dinh Diem’s palace during the 1963 coup, and was frankly suspicious of Americans, who seemed to him to have a “superiority complex.” But he liked Philip Brady. “He was a tall guy and big,” Toan recalled. “I told him, ‘You are not my adviser, you are my helper.’ And also, ‘You are so tall and big that I want you to stay away from me because if you get too close some Viet Cong sniper will shoot at you and hit me.’ ”

Brady, Toan, and the Fourth Marine Battalion were stationed near the Bien Hoa Air Base in reserve, waiting to be called into action. Reports reached them of the sudden hit-and-run raids by platoon-sized enemy forces that had plagued the South Vietnamese for years. But there were new rumors now, of larger enemy units moving through the countryside as well. Le Duan’s plan for a swift and decisive victory was well under way.

In Saigon, the ruling generals remained preoccupied with vying for power. On December 20, Ambassador Taylor called in General Khanh and four of his rivals. “We Americans are tired of coups,” he told them. “You have made a real mess. We cannot carry you forever, if you do things like this.” After Taylor’s dressing-down, Khanh complained to an American newspaperman that the United States was now acting like a colonial power, and told a national radio audience that he refused ever to fight “to carry out the policy of any foreign country.”

Four days later, on Christmas Eve, two guerrillas dressed in South Vietnamese army uniforms managed to drive a car filled with explosives into the parking area beneath the Brinks Hotel, in the heart of downtown Saigon. It was home to scores of American officers. Two died. Fifty-eight were injured.

Clearly, things were not improving for the South Vietnamese regime.

Meanwhile, for weeks, more than two thousand Viet Cong Main Force troops, members of the 271st and 272nd Regiments, had been filing quietly out of the Central Highlands in small groups. Fed and sheltered by village sympathizers along the way, they marched undetected some 125 miles into Phuoc Tuy, a supposedly “pacified” coastal province less than 40 miles southeast of Saigon. Main Force units from elsewhere joined them there, and forty tons of heavy weapons were unloaded on the coast under cover of darkness—mortars, machine guns, and recoilless rifles, capable of blasting tanks. The communists had never attempted anything on this scale before.

Their target was the strategic hamlet of Binh Gia, surrounded by jungle and rubber plantations and home to some six thousand Catholic, anticommunist refugees from the North, many of them the wives and children of South Vietnamese army personnel. The communist plan was to seize the hamlet and then annihilate the forces Saigon was sure to send to retake it.

Before dawn on December 28, their advance units easily overwhelmed the village militia and occupied Binh Gia. When two crack South Vietnamese ranger companies were helicoptered in the next day, they were ambushed and shot to pieces. Another South Vietnamese unit counterattacked, but failed to drive the communists out of the village.

On the morning of the 30th, the Fourth Marine Battalion was flown in to relieve and reinforce the battered rangers. By then, the enemy had withdrawn into a rubber plantation east of the hamlet. Frightened residents crawled out of their hiding places and greeted their liberators with bananas and tea. The South Vietnamese Marines moved through the streets. “We saw things we’d never seen before,” Brady recalled, “like commo wire used for field phones and all kinds of things that you normally didn’t see in the aftermath of a battle with the Viet Cong. They had put together two thousand, twenty-five hundred men, the largest force they ever had. This was new, not an overnight thing, very carefully planned.”

Under the protection of a U.S. gunship, men of the South Vietnamese Fourth Marine Battalion move toward the strategic hamlet of Binh Gia, just abandoned by the Viet Cong, July 30, 1964.

That evening, a helicopter with four men aboard, flying above the neat rows of thickly planted rubber trees east of the hamlet, spotted communist positions and came in for a closer look. “It was flying high first, and then lower,” Colonel Nguyen Van Tong, a political officer in the NLF’s Ninth Division, remembered. “The commander of our antiaircraft company asked for the order to shoot. A minute later [the helicopter] was hit and burning, and fell down on our position.”

From Binh Gia, Philip Brady also saw it fall. “All of a sudden, you could see the tracers come out of the plantation, hit the helicopter, and it crashed.” Reached by radio, the South Vietnamese colonel in command of the area ordered that a patrol be sent to the crash site to see if anyone had survived. Both Captain Eller and the Vietnamese battalion commander, Major Nguyen Van Nho, argued that it was unlikely. They were ordered to start toward the downed helicopter the following morning anyway.

Grateful residents welcome the Marines with cups of tea.

Binh Gia, scene of the 1965 South Vietnamese defeat that helped persuade General William Westmoreland that U.S. combat troops were needed if the Saigon government was to survive

Meanwhile, Colonel Tong remembered, “I came to the place where the airplane was shot down and I saw four dead Americans. Their bodies were burned. I told my soldiers to bury them. Later on, I would realize how valuable the lives of American advisers were. They sent in a whole puppet battalion to rescue four dead Americans.”

At eight a.m., a company-sized Marine patrol set out on foot for the crash site. Captain Eller went along in case an airstrike was needed. They found the charred helicopter and four mounds marking the hastily dug graves of the Americans. The company commander ordered his men to establish a tight perimeter while four men dug up the dead. As they worked, enemy troops appeared among the trees and opened fire. Seventy-five-mm recoilless rifle shells exploded among the rubber trees, scattering branches and shards of wood everywhere. Mortar shells fell among the Marines. Major Eller called in Huey gunships and Skyraiders to provide suppressive counterfire and radioed to the senior American adviser in the area to tell him that he and his men had been ambushed. A bullet struck the rim of Eller’s helmet and shattered. Fragments from it tore off most of his nose. Hastily bandaged but bleeding badly, he and what was left of the company started back toward Binh Gia. Twelve dead Marines were left behind.

At noon, Major Nho and three companies—326 men—started back toward the crash site. Philip Brady went with them. Tran Ngoc Toan led the first company. Communist snipers appeared between the trees, fired a shot or two, then withdrew, luring the Marines further and further into the plantation. They reached the downed helicopter at about two o’clock. Fearing another ambush, Brady urged Nho to go no further, but the major sent Toan and his men still deeper into the plantation in search of a likely landing zone.

An American chopper soon dropped into the clearing. The crew jumped out and lifted the four American corpses into the helicopter. Toan appealed to them to carry the twelve South Vietnamese dead away as well. They refused—another chopper was on the way, they said, then lifted off and clattered away over the trees.

But no helicopter came. The Marines stayed with their dead comrades. The shadows of the trees grew longer. Rather than wait any longer, Brady suggested they carry the bodies back to Binh Gia. Major Nho refused. “I was getting a little bit antsy,” Brady recalled, “because we were losing light and we were outside of our artillery range. I told the battalion commander we had to go. Nho ignored me. At about 4:30 I tried again. Again, he ignored me.” One of Brady’s Marines spotted shadowy movement among the trees just beyond the plantation’s edge. “Clearly, the enemy weren’t gone,” Brady said. “So at 5:25, I went to the major, and said, ‘Major, we have to get out of here now.’ And Nho said, ‘Don’t you forget I am a major and you are a lieutenant.’ He turned on his heel and walked away. Ten minutes later all hell broke loose.”

Mortar shells rained down on the Marine positions. Bugles blew and wave after wave of enemy troops advanced toward the Marines from three sides. Brady called in Skyraiders and gunships, but the foliage was too dense to spot the communists as they rushed from tree to tree.

Major Nho was killed. So were twenty-eight more of the Fourth Battalion’s thirty-five officers.

Toan was shot through the thigh, then through the calf. He kept firing at the figures running toward him through the trees. “I didn’t feel any pain at all,” he remembered. “I didn’t have time to think about it. They kept coming, and I was still fighting as a soldier.”

“Ultimately, there were just a few of us left,” Philip Brady remembered. “So we tried to get out. Twenty-six of us in the company I was with broke through. I think only eleven of us ultimately made it back to Binh Gia.”

Tran Ngoc Toan, unable even to stand, had to be left behind. All that night, the enemy moved among the rubber trees, carrying away their wounded, gathering up American weapons, stripping the dead of their boots and uniforms and shooting any South Vietnamese Marines they found alive. Lying next to a corpse, Toan did his best to play dead. A communist soldier kicked him to see if he was still alive, then fired a burst from his submachine gun. One bullet passed through his side, setting his shirt on fire but somehow missing any vital organs. When the enemy finally began to withdraw into the jungle, Toan was almost exultant. “I’m still alive!” he remembered saying to himself. He lay still until he was sure the enemy had gone. Then, cradling his rifle in his arms, he began crawling toward Binh Gia, just under a mile away. It took him three days to get there. Ants and maggots fed off his wounds. He finally spotted friendly paratroopers. He hadn’t the strength to speak and had to pound on a rubber tree to attract their attention. The first man to reach him recoiled. “His wounds stink!” he said. “He smells like a dead rat.” Only when Toan reached what was left of his unit did he allow himself to feel any pain.

When it was all over, 196 South Vietnamese Marines had been killed, wounded, or reported missing out of a 326-man battalion. “I’ll never forget those sights,” Colonel Nguyen Van Tong remembered. “Everywhere we went we saw corpses of the Saigon soldiers.” Just thirty-two Viet Cong bodies were found on the battlefield, though many more are thought to have been killed and carried away.

The big question after Binh Gia, an American officer at headquarters said, was how a thousand or more enemy troops “could wander around the countryside so close to Saigon without being discovered. That tells you something about this war. You can only beat the other guy if you isolate him from the population.”

Hanoi was exultant. “The battle at Binh Gia was a historic landmark in the war,” Colonel Tong believed. “If the Americans had not got involved, we would have entered Saigon within a year.” Ho Chi Minh called Binh Gia “a little Dien Bien Phu.” Le Duan was convinced that his new offensive, aimed at drawing South Vietnamese units away from their bases and wiping them out one by one, was working. Once that had been achieved, he hoped to encourage an uprising so widespread and so bloody that the United States would have no choice but to withdraw and accept neutrality—which could quickly be turned into reunification under communist rule. “The liberation war of South Vietnam has progressed by leaps and bounds,” Le Duan said. “After the battle of Ap Bac the enemy knew it would be difficult to defeat us. After Binh Gia the enemy realize[s] that he [is] in the process of being defeated by us.”

After-action report: Lieutenant Philip Brady explains to a reporter what has just happened at Binh Gia, New Year’s Day, 1965. Behind him are some of the South Vietnamese Marines he helped lead out of the trap the enemy had sprung. The communists were so successful by then, Brady recalled, that “the Vietnamese officers I talked to in the [South Vietnamese] Marine Corps figured they had six months before the end.”

WE’LL DO WHAT WE HAVE TO DO

MACV AND THE SAIGON EMBASSY were understandably alarmed. “Some kind of action had to be taken to save the situation,” John Negroponte remembered. “Most of us saw Saigon as an underdog. There were entire villages being emptied from the countryside and moving into the provincial and district capitals. The situation was terrible. Our reports were being forwarded to Washington and people were reading them.”

Citizens of Hanoi cluster around a New Year’s display that hails the recent “Binh Gia Victory” and proclaims that “our army is undefeatable because it is a people’s army that our party builds, leads, and educates.”

On January 27, 1965—twenty-six days after Binh Gia and just a week after President Johnson’s inauguration—McGeorge Bundy handed the president a memorandum. The current policy was clearly not working, it said. The Viet Cong were on the move and on the rise, supplied—and now steadily reinforced—by North Vietnam. And Saigon still had no prospect of a stable government. If an independent South Vietnam was to survive, the United States needed to act fast.

The administration faced two choices, Bundy wrote. It could go along as it had been going and try to negotiate some kind of settlement—probably nothing better than the neutral Vietnam they could have had years earlier. (“Surrender on the installment plan,” Bundy called it.) Or it could use American military might to force the North to abandon its goal of uniting the country. Bundy and McNamara favored the military option; unless the president chose it, they said, South Vietnam would fall.

Johnson agreed. Stable government or no stable government, he said, “We’ll do what we have to do….I don’t think anything is going to be as bad as losing.” But he wanted a pretext before he ordered further action.

He got one a little over a week later, when guerrillas struck a U.S. helicopter base and barracks at Pleiku in the Central Highlands near the border with Cambodia, killing 9 American advisers and wounding 137 more with mortar fire, satchel charges, and homemade grenades. McGeorge Bundy, in Vietnam on a fact-finding mission, surveyed the damage—wrecked helicopters and body parts strewn across the area—and convinced himself that Hanoi had ordered the attack as a provocation designed to coincide with his mission. He telephoned the White House and urged a retaliatory airstrike on the North. (In fact, Hanoi had had nothing to do with the attack, and the NLF commander who ordered it had never heard of Bundy or his mission.)

Bundy had a receptive audience in Washington. “We have kept our gun over the mantel and our shells in the cupboard for a long time now, and what was the result?” Johnson told the members of the National Security Council. “I can’t ask our American soldiers out there to continue to fight with one hand tied behind their backs.” He approved an airstrike on an army barracks sixty miles inside North Vietnam.

The clandestine communist radio promised that U.S. servicemen would soon have to “pay more blood debts,” and on February 10 the Viet Cong blew up a hotel in Qui Nhon, killing twenty-one Americans and pinning twenty-three more beneath the rubble.

The president called for the evacuation of more than eighteen hundred American dependents and ordered a second airstrike. This time, one hundred U.S. Navy fighter bombers, based on carriers in the South China Sea, as well as Air Force planes based in Thailand and South Vietnam, hit more North Vietnamese military targets—ammunition depots, supply depots, and assembly areas.

Anxiety about what seemed to be happening spread around the world. France, which had spent nearly a century in Vietnam, called for an end to all foreign involvement there. The British prime minister urged restraint. Many leaders of the president’s own party agreed, though not yet in public.

In a private memorandum, Vice President Humphrey warned the president that the American public “simply can’t understand why we would run grave risks to support a country which is totally unable to put its house in order.” The best course would be to reduce, not expand, America’s involvement, he wrote. He reminded Johnson that because he had just won a great victory at the polls, “1965 is the year of minimum political risk for the Johnson administration.” Escalating the war further would only undercut the Great Society, damage America’s image overseas, and end any hope of improving relations with the Soviet Union. Johnson did not respond; instead, he barred his vice president from all discussions of Vietnam policy for several months.

Twenty days later, on March 2, 1965, the United States began a systematic bombardment of the North, code-named Operation Rolling Thunder. It was meant to be a “mounting crescendo” of air raids, Maxwell Taylor wrote, aimed at boosting South Vietnamese morale, providing a substitute for sending in American ground troops—and forcing Hanoi to negotiate a peace on American terms.

“The thesis behind Rolling Thunder,” Samuel Wilson, then a deputy assistant to Robert McNamara, recalled, “was that as we ratcheted up the tempo and the volume of this effort against the North Vietnamese sooner or later they would cry uncle, say this is enough. And then there’d be a pause and we would begin to negotiate our way out of this situation. This became an article of faith: if we punish them enough they will want to give up. This article of faith was based on a fallacious assumption: They weren’t going to give up. They read us better than we read them.”

Once again, the president insisted on strict secrecy. The American people were not to be told that the administration had changed its policy from retaliatory airstrikes to systematic bombing—that the president had, in fact, widened the war. Operation Rolling Thunder would continue on and off for three years, during which U.S. aircraft would fly a million sorties and drop nearly three-quarters of a million tons of bombs on North Vietnam.

At Pleiku, Colonel John C. Hughes of the U.S. Army Fifty-second Aviation Battalion shows McGeorge Bundy and General Westmoreland the extent of the damage done to his command by communist guerrillas. “Like other civilian visitors” confronted with carnage, Westmoreland remembered, Bundy found it hard to “comprehend the primitive countenance of insurgency warfare.”

Johnson still hoped that he could find North Vietnam’s breaking point without having to commit ground troops. “I’m going up old Ho Chi Minh’s leg an inch at a time,” he assured an early critic, South Dakota senator George McGovern.

But General Westmoreland, who had initially been hesitant about committing ground troops to Vietnam, now asked for two battalions of Marines—3,500 men—to protect the Danang air base from which U.S. fighter bombers were hitting the North.

Ambassador Taylor, who had once called for ground troops, now objected to the whole idea. “Once you put that first soldier ashore,” he wrote, “you never know how many others are going to follow him.” But the president felt he had no choice but to give Westmoreland what he asked for; he was not prepared to withdraw and knew he would be blamed if more American advisers died. The government of South Vietnam was not to be consulted; the United States of America had larger considerations.

On March 6, Johnson telephoned one of his oldest friends in the Senate, Richard Russell of Georgia, to let him know what was about to happen.

LYNDON JOHNSON: We’re going to send the Marines in to protect the Hawk battalion, the Hawk outfit at Danang, because they’re trying to come in and destroy them there, and they’re afraid the security provided by the Vietnamese [is] not enough….I guess we’ve got no choice, but it scares the hell out of me. I think everybody’s going to think, “We’re landing the Marines. We’re off to battle.” Of course, if they come up there, they’re going to get them in a fight. Just sure as hell. They’re not going to run. Then you’re tied down. If they don’t, though, and they ruin those airplanes, everybody is going to give me hell for not securing them, just like they did the last time they were made afraid.

RICHARD RUSSELL: Yeah.

JOHNSON: So, it’s a choice, a hard one, but Westmoreland [comes] in every day saying, “Ple-e-e-ase send them on.” And the Joint Chiefs say, “Pl-e-e-ase send them on.” And McNamara and Russell say, “Send them on.”…What do you think?

RUSSELL: We’ve gone so damn far, Mr. President, it scares the life out of me. But I don’t know how to back up now. It looks to me like we just got in this thing, and there’s no way out. We’re just getting pushed forward and forward and forward and forward.

JOHNSON:…I don’t know, Dick….The great trouble I’m under—a man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere. But there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam. There’s not a bit.

U.S. Marines rush ashore at Danang, ready for combat.

General Khanh had finally been displaced by another military coup just a few weeks earlier. There was a new premier, a civilian this time, Dr. Phan Huy Quat. Before dawn on March 8, Quat placed a call to his chief of staff and liaison with the U.S. embassy, Bui Diem, the mandarin’s son who had sided with anticommunist nationalists while still a student at Saigon University. “You have to come to my home right away, because there are urgent things to do,” Quat said.

When Bui Diem got to Dr. Quat’s home, he found his friend Melvin Manfull, the political officer of the U.S. embassy, waiting for him. “Dr. Quat didn’t even ask me to sit down,” Bui Diem recalled. “He said, ‘There are three Marine battalions landing in Danang right now.’ I was flabbergasted. I said, ‘But why?’ He calmed me down. ‘We’ll talk about that later. But now I need you to draft a communiqué with Mr. Manfull. Be as brief as possible. Just describe the facts and affirm our concurrence.’ We did it but I was very unhappy.”

That same day, two Marine battalions landed at Danang, on the coast of South Vietnam, some 100 miles south of the border with the North.

John Flynn, a reporter for Life magazine, covered the landing:

As the Americans waded ashore, children broke through lines of Danang police to yell, “O.K.!”—the only English expression they know. And just as the Marines were earnestly digging in along the beach, setting up a defense line against the kind of greeting for which their conventional training had prepared them—an attack by the Viet Cong—along came some pretty Vietnamese girls with garlands of flowers….Happily, the Vietcong did not choose [that] moment to attack….

There have been reports that the Communists are sneaking in heavy artillery pieces to increase their shooting radius around the base. “If the clowns do that,” [Brigadier General Frederick J.] Karch growls, “we’ll just have to move out to the next ridge.”

The reception committee, hastily arranged by the South Vietnamese government

Lieutenant Philip Caputo, from the Chicago suburb of Westchester, Illinois, flew into Danang with the rest of the Third Marine Division a day or two later. Like most of his fellow Marines he was filled with confidence: “We thought that the mere fact that we were there, that the U.S. Marine Corps had landed and our reputation, especially from World War II and Korea, was so ferocious that the Viet Cong were just going to say, ‘Well, it’s all over, guys, and we quit.’ Some people said, ‘We’ll be out of here in three months.’ We actually thought that we’re going to go out on a couple of patrols, give ’em a kick in the pants and stomp on ’em a little bit, and that’ll be that.”

Once Caputo was settled in, he saw that Vietnam was very different from Illinois.

What struck me was how beautiful it was. There were just these endless acres of jade-green rice paddies. And these lovely villages inside groves of bamboo and palm trees. And way off in the distance bluish jungled mountains. It looked like Shangri-La. And I remember seeing this line of Vietnamese women, or schoolgirls I think they were, with those white ao dais flowing in the wind. They actually looked like angels come to earth or something like that. So it was really quite striking but a little unsettling because how can a place like this, so beautiful and so enchanting, be at war?

Seeing foreign troops marching past his village, an old man emerged from his home, shouting, “Vive les Français!” He thought the French had returned.

“The problem around here,” the U.S. Marine captain leading the patrol told a reporter, “is who the hell is who?”

Many South Vietnamese welcomed the Marines. Duong Van Mai recalled that her father was very pleased that they had come. “We were such a small country and the Americans had decided to come in to save us, not only with their money and resources, but even with their lives. We were very grateful. We thought with this kind of power the Americans are going to win.”

A mother rushes her baby to safety as U.S. Marines storm the village of My Son near Danang, April 1, 1965.

But a good many Americans in country were unhappy. “As a voting member of the Saigon Mission Council,” Samuel Wilson remembered, “I was opposed to the entry of American ground combat forces. I felt if the Vietnamese had to beat the Viet Cong off with a bloody stump, they had to do it themselves. We had to do everything we humanly could to help them, but we could not win it for them. I think we crossed the River Styx at that point.”

Philip Brady remembered attending the Majestic Theater in Saigon with the young Vietnamese woman who would become his wife, and “seeing the newsreels of the first Marines landing at Danang and saying to myself, ‘Go back. Go back.’ There was no question that this was a big, big mistake. If we had not intervened, the war would have ended by 1965. And you would not have had the losses of life. Millions of Vietnamese were lost after that. And how many Americans?”

Brady’s friend Tran Ngoc Toan, the South Vietnamese Marine who had fought alongside him and survived his wounds after Binh Gia, shared that view. “In the deepest part of every Vietnamese mind is the idea that the foreigner is an invader,” he said. “So when the Americans came in, the Viet Cong could recruit more people to join the struggle against them.”

Le Duan had failed to topple the Saigon government before the Americans intervened. But their arrival infused the North Vietnamese with new patriotic fervor. The party announced its “Three Readiness Campaign,” which called for “readiness to join the army, to partake in battle, to go wherever the fatherland deems necessary.” Mobilization drives doubled the size of the North Vietnamese army.

“My understanding was that the U.S. Army was the most powerful in the capitalist world,” one communist commander recalled. “The war would be cruel. We predicted that it would not be easy. When the Americans came, we had to find a way to fight and beat them. I would not say that I could have foreseen how cruel the war would be. That, I was unable to imagine.”

COPING WITH WAR

Le Minh Khue, second from left, and members of her volunteer unit in 1965

Le Minh Khue was born in 1949 and orphaned as a small child. Her parents were victims of the brutal North Vietnamese land reforms of the mid-1950s. They were village schoolteachers, but, because their grandfathers had been mandarins at the imperial court, they were denounced by the communists as members of the hated landlord class and made prisoners in their home. When Khue’s father fell ill and asked permission to go to a hospital, he was refused—and died. Her mother was forced to hand over her child to her sister, who was a loyal party member, and died alone four years later. “They weren’t murdered, they weren’t beaten,” Khue said of her parents. “But they died in sadness, in misery, because of the spiritual violence that was done to them.”

Le Minh Khue was brought up in a village in Sam Son, south of Hanoi, that was adjacent to a military encampment. Not long after Operation Rolling Thunder began, she went on a field trip with her schoolmates. That day, American bombers trying to hit the camp hit her village instead. The North Vietnamese were not yet accustomed to bombing and had built no shelters. Khue returned that evening to what she remembered as “the most horrible scene I ever witnessed.” People had huddled beneath trees for safety with their children or tried to find shelter in a pond. Scores died. She helped carry their remains to the road, where they were laid out so friends and family could try to identify them. U.S. aircraft returned the next day, and another bomb killed her favorite schoolteacher. “Those were the two worst days of my life,” she remembered. “I don’t think people can imagine how ferocious the war was.”

A recruiter turned up in the village a few days later, calling on young boys and girls to join the revolution and fight the Americans. “My head was full of a spirit of adventure,” Khue recalled, “but I was too young. I was sixteen and you had to be seventeen. So I lied about my age and signed up.” Her foster parents applauded her decision. They “had pure emotions and loved the revolution,” she remembered. “No policy promulgated by the party could be a mistake. They taught me to love my country.”

Khue was assigned to a unit called the “Anti-American Youth Shock Brigade for National Salvation,” and along with thousands of other young people was sent south to work keeping open the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In her backpack was a gift from her foster father: she and he had always shared a love of American literature, and as she was about to leave he had pressed on her a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s novel about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls. “I liked the resourcefulness of Robert Jordan, the hero who destroys the bridge,” she remembered. “I saw how he coped with war, and I learned from that character.” She would find herself coping with war for nine harrowing years.

THE WEAKEST LINK

When the Students for a Democratic Society organized the first large antiwar demonstration on the Washington Mall on April 17, 1965, they also preapproved the slogans on the placards protestors were permitted to carry.

“THE AMERICAN PEOPLE,” Dean Rusk warned not long after the Gulf of Tonkin confrontation, “are already beginning to ask what are we supporting.” President Johnson agreed. “The weakest link in our armor is public opinion,” he said.

Most Americans still understood little about Indochina, rarely knew anyone actually involved in the fighting, and saw no reason to question the government’s assertion that the United States had vital interests some eight thousand miles from home. The administration was initially most concerned with criticism by those who wanted the war prosecuted more aggressively. Still, there was a small but slowly growing number of people who had begun to oppose the war for a number of reasons—because they thought it unjust or immoral, or they believed it was unconstitutional or simply not in the national interest.

The first manifestations of opposition to the war were small and scattered. In Manhattan, a dozen young men burned their draft cards to protest the war. Pickets from the Women Strike for Peace and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom circled the White House. “The first protest I went to was at a Dow Chemical facility in suburban Chicago,” Bill Zimmerman recalled. “Dow was manufacturing napalm. They were dropping napalm on villages in Vietnam. It was a very disappointing experience, because only forty people came. We seemed very out of place and very ineffectual, impotent even, standing outside with just forty people.”

But two weeks after U.S. Marines landed at Danang, members of the University of Michigan faculty organized a night-long discussion about the war’s escalation between teachers and more than two thousand students. One of the organizers of the teach-in was a graduate student named Carl Oglesby, who had just been made president of a new national leftist organization, Students for a Democratic Society—SDS. The revolution in Vietnam, he told the crowd, was “inspired by the monied few who exploit their power” over the masses. In backing the Saigon government, the United States was thwarting the people’s will and supporting “bureaucratic corruption, governmental indifference, [and] police-state suppression of honest dissent.”

New Yorkers court arrest by publicly burning their draft cards in Manhattan’s Union Square, November 6, 1965. A statute enacted that August—and ultimately validated by the U.S. Supreme Court—had called for anyone who “knowingly destroys [or] knowingly mutilates” his draft card to be punished. Three of the four men were convicted and sentenced to six months in prison.

The Michigan teach-in was not a one-sided event; seventy-five students marched through the crowd chanting, “Better dead than red.” But one young woman, perched on her boyfriend’s motorcycle at the back of the crowd, summed up the impact the discussion had on most of those who attended: “I’d never really thought very much about this, but after tonight I think we should get out of Vietnam.”

Soon, there were teach-ins on scores of university campuses all over the country. Antiwar feeling was still a minority view among young people. Throughout the war, national polls would show that Americans under thirty were more likely to support the war than those fifty and older.

But when the SDS called for a mass demonstration in Washington that April, it succeeded beyond its sponsors’ dreams.

“I didn’t want to go,” Bill Zimmerman recalled, “because I didn’t want to be disappointed in the same way again and go all the way to Washington and stand outside the White House with forty people. Twenty-five thousand people attended that rally.” (It was the largest peace demonstration in U.S. history up to that time.) “And that suddenly told me and others I was working with at the time that it might be possible to build an antiwar movement.”

ENOUGH, AND NOT TOO MUCH

NOTHING Mogie Crocker’s parents could say or do since he had come home had shaken his determination to serve, and recent developments in Vietnam had only strengthened his resolve. “It was quite astounding to think that he had that degree of commitment,” his mother remembered. “But it made sense in what we knew of him, as drastic as it was.”

He’d hoped to become a member of the elite Special Forces, but his age barred him: there were no seventeen-year-old Green Berets, even with their parents’ permission. And he turned down the opportunity to attend Army language school. He wanted to become a paratrooper and get into combat. His parents finally, reluctantly, agreed to let him go, and on March 15—less than a week after the arrival of the first Marines in Vietnam—Denton Crocker Jr. entered the U.S. Army. “He bounced down the steps one morning and was off to Fort Dix,” his mother recalled. “And it was in a way a sort of relief that the conflict and the anxiety over whether he would or would not go was done. And he was happy. And we just tried to believe that this was the right thing for him to do.”

Already by late March, it had been clear that the bombing campaign alone was not working. Troops and supplies continued to steadily filter down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And in South Vietnam there were more rumors of coups, more riots in the Saigon streets.

“We are faced with waging a war on a cooperative basis in a sovereign country in which we are guests,” General Westmoreland told his staff. But he nonetheless felt it was time to “put our own finger into the dike.” “The enemy was destroying battalions faster than they could be reconstituted,” he recalled. “The South Vietnamese [were] beginning to show signs of reluctance to [fight] and in some cases their steadfastness under fire [was] coming into doubt.”

American forces would not guarantee victory, but without them, he warned, “defeat was only a matter of time.” He and the Joint Chiefs called for more troops, thousands of them.

The president was cautious. As always, he wanted to do “enough, and not too much.” But on April 1, he quietly agreed to send two more Marine battalions—and changed their mission from base security to active combat, “undertaking offensive operations to fix and destroy the VC in the Danang area.” For the first time, American troops were formally being asked to fight on their own in Vietnam.

Johnson did not want that fact revealed to the American public. But the bombing of the North and rumors of harsher measures to come had heightened concern around the world. UN Secretary-General U Thant proposed a three-month ceasefire. Seventeen nonaligned nations called for negotiations “without preconditions.” Great Britain, America’s closest ally, publicly offered to reconvene the Geneva talks that had divided Vietnam in 1954, with the goal of reuniting it. A handful of Democratic senators, including Mike Mansfield, George McGovern, and Frank Church of Idaho, also urged Johnson to negotiate a settlement.

At Johns Hopkins University on April 7, Johnson sought to persuade the world of America’s good intentions—and again to calm American fears of a wider war. “In recent months,” he said, “attacks on South Vietnam were stepped up. Thus, it became necessary for us to increase our response and to make attacks by air. This is not a change of purpose. It is a change in what we believe that purpose requires.” Nothing was said about the new orders sending Marines directly into combat or the ongoing discussions about how many more Americans were going to be sent into battle. Instead, the president called for “unconditional discussions” with Hanoi, and as an old New Dealer, proposed a massive development program for all of Southeast Asia.

The task is nothing less than to enrich the hopes and the existence of more than a hundred million people. And there is much to be done.

The vast Mekong River can provide food and water and power on a scale to dwarf even our own TVA.

The wonders of modern medicine can be spread through villages where thousands die every year from lack of care….

We hope that peace will come swiftly. But that is in the hands of others than ourselves.

We will use our power with restraint and with all the wisdom that we can command. But we will use it.

We have no desire to devastate that which the people of North Vietnam have built with toil and sacrifice….This war, like most wars, is filled with terrible irony. What do the people of North Vietnam want?

Philip Brady would hear the president’s speech while hunkered down outside a village from which enemy fire was coming. “I had a little transistor radio,” he remembered, “and I’m sitting there listening to LBJ. At the same time we’ve got to lay some nape on the village. So I’m calling in the nape, and listening to the president talk peace. It was surreal.”

“Old Ho can’t turn me down,” Johnson assured an aide on his way back to Washington. But Hanoi immediately dismissed his offer of talks and development aid as a “wornout trick of deceit and threat.” There was a brief flurry of diplomatic activity by both sides, but North Vietnam would not negotiate unless the United States withdrew and Saigon agreed to share power with Hanoi. For its part, the United States would not talk unless Hanoi first recognized South Vietnam as an independent nation.

In early May, while his advisers and the Joint Chiefs debated how rapidly American participation in the war should be escalated, Johnson deployed the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team to Vietnam, the first Army combat outfit to be dispatched and the one to which Mogie Crocker would initially be assigned.

The president was less concerned with Vietnam that month than with a civil war much closer to home, in the Dominican Republic, where rebels sought to overthrow a right-wing dictator friendly to the United States. Johnson sent in eight hundred Marines to protect American citizens—and then another twenty-three thousand to ensure that the Dominican Republic did not “become another Cuba.” To justify his action, Johnson claimed that the American ambassador had called him while crouching under his desk as bullets flew through the windows, that “a band of communist conspirators” was leading the uprising, and that “some fifteen thousand innocent people were murdered and shot and their heads cut off.” None of it was true. A ceasefire soon brought an end to the fighting, but critics charged the president with indulging in gunboat diplomacy and with being willing to exaggerate and deceive to justify military action. The New York Herald Tribune expressed concern over what it called LBJ’s “credibility gap,” a phrase that would haunt him for the rest of his time in the White House.

ON HIS WAY

THAT SUMMER, before shipping out to Vietnam, Mogie Crocker came home for a visit. “We were at dinner one evening,” his mother recalled, “and just talking in generalities about the war. And he said, ‘Of course if I were Vietnamese I probably would be on the side of the Viet Cong.’ I puzzled over that. And my husband did, too. I suppose Mogie was relating it to our American Revolution, that he saw their need for their own freedom. But as an American citizen, he also saw the larger picture of trying to prevent communism.”

Private Mogie Crocker, home in Saratoga just before shipping out for Vietnam, with his youngest sister, Candy, and brother, Randy

Mogie’s sister Carol recalled something else. They were watching television together late one evening, sitting on the floor, when Mogie suddenly held his face in his hands. “I don’t want to go back,” he said. “I was dumbstruck,” Carol remembered, “and said to him, ‘But this is what you want to do.’ It had never occurred to me that he was torn about this, that he was afraid. It confounded me that he had made so many sacrifices and yet was afraid and yet was determined to go.”

The whole family turned out to see him climb aboard a bus bound for Fort Dix, New Jersey, the next stop on his way to Vietnam. “Occasionally Mogie looked toward us,” his mother remembered, “and we would smile and wave, but already the loud idling of the engine, the barrier of the dark sealed windows isolated him….I blew a kiss and waved again. The bus moved quickly out of sight.”

MORE HERE THAN WE THOUGHT

THE GROWING PRESENCE of American combat troops in Vietnam attracted flocks of American reporters, eager to report details about what had until then been a largely secret war. The State Department’s strictures on reporting had been eased; there was now no press censorship, as there had been in World War II. Reporters just had to agree to follow military guidelines, so as not to compromise the security of ongoing operations, and were allowed to categorize American casualties only as “light,” “moderate,” or “heavy.”

It would prove to be dangerous work. Seventy-four journalists and photographers would die covering the fighting in Southeast Asia.

Joseph Lee Galloway, a twenty-three-year-old UPI reporter from Refugio, Texas, had arrived in Vietnam that spring. “I thought that if there is going to be a war and if it’s going to be my generation’s war and I’m a journalist, I’ve got to cover it,” he recalled. “Forty-five years along it’d be a lot easier to explain why I went than if I hadn’t gone at all. That’d be like walking out of the movie at the most critical moment to buy a bag of popcorn. And I thought I needed to get there in a hurry, because once the Marines landed I thought this was going to be over and done with and if I’m not careful, I might miss it.”

He stopped in Saigon just long enough to sign a form promising not to reveal troop movements or casualty figures while a battle was under way. Then he headed for the air base at Danang, from which American warplanes were taking off daily to bomb North Vietnam under the watchful eye of the Marines. “They quickly figured out you can’t just guard an air base,” Galloway remembered. “You’ve got to spread out because the enemy’s going to mortar it, they’re going to shoot rockets. So you’ve got to reach out fifteen or twenty miles. And once you’re doing that you’re no longer guarding an air base, you’re operating in hostile territory. The local guerrillas knew the terrain far better than the Marines did, and ran circles around them. So we went on a lot of operations where it was a lot of long hot walks in the sun with not much action except enough to just keep you on edge and keep you running.”

Philip Caputo was among the men assigned to those operations. “It wasn’t so much the Viet Cong that were intimidating at that point as it was the terrain,” he recalled. “Just getting through the jungle, going from Point A to Point B, was so difficult. It was terribly hot. There were snakes and bugs all over the place. The staff officers lived in a world of two-dimensional maps, and we lived in the three-dimensional world. With their little grease pencils on their maps they would tell you that you were supposed to slash through some area. It once took us four hours to move half a mile, cutting through this bush with machetes. Generally speaking, no military operation ever goes according to plan. But sometimes there’s at least a resemblance to what actually happens. These very seldom resembled it. And that’s when you began to realize that, you know, there’s more here than we thought.”

Joseph Galloway’s first Vietnam press card, issued by MACV

Sometimes Joe Galloway went along on patrol. “You’d get to the bottom of the valley and there’d be three enemy snipers at the top of the hill,” he remembered. “And they would fire three rounds and run down the other side while you ran up that hill with a battalion of Marines. And over and over and over until half of the Marines were heatstroke casualties. So there was a lot of wasted effort and energy, it seemed to me.”

A BOMBSHELL

The president and his advisers mull over General William Westmoreland’s troop request in the summer of 1965. Left to right: Under Secretary of State George Ball, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, President Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.

NEITHER THE CONTINUING BOMBING nor the growing likelihood of full-scale American intervention seemed to intimidate Hanoi. Le Duan, having failed to win the war before the United States sent in ground troops, hoped that he could still wear his enemy down by waging “Big Battles,” and that the American public, like the French public before them, would eventually weary of a costly, bloody war being waged so far from home. By contrast, he said, “the North will not count the cost.”

His confidence was bolstered by the stepped-up help American intervention had forced the Soviet Union and China to offer him. Moscow agreed to supply vast amounts of modern weaponry and materiel; Hanoi would one day boast the most formidable air defense system of any capital city on earth. And China agreed to send support troops, freeing North Vietnamese soldiers for combat in the South. In the end, 320,000 Chinese would serve in North Vietnam.

“We will fight,” Le Duan promised, “whatever way the United States wants.”

Meanwhile in South Vietnam, things were still growing still worse. In May, the Viet Cong—supported now by four regiments of North Vietnamese regulars—were destroying the equivalent of one South Vietnamese battalion every week. The desertion rate among South Vietnamese draftees climbed steadily.

In June, there was yet another Saigon coup. Two ambitious young officers had overthrown the civilian government—Army General Nguyen Van Thieu and Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky. They were, William Bundy remembered, “the bottom of the barrel, absolutely the bottom of the barrel.”

Saigon again seemed only weeks from complete collapse.

Westmoreland asked for enough fresh U.S. troops to bring the total to 175,000 and permission to send them into combat wherever they were needed. He also called for planning to begin to “deploy even greater forces if and when required.”

His cable was “a bombshell,” Secretary McNamara wrote. It “meant a dramatic and open-ended expansion of American involvement. Of the thousands of cables I received during my seven years at the Department of Defense this one disturbed me the most….We could no longer postpone a choice about which path to take.”

For seven weeks the president and his advisers argued over how to respond to Westmoreland’s urgent request for still more troops, differing mostly over how many should be sent, and how fast. Precisely what political objectives sending reinforcements would or would not achieve received scant attention.

Only Under Secretary of State George Ball argued against further escalation. “Your most difficult continuing problem in South Vietnam,” he told the president, “is to prevent ‘things’ from getting into the saddle, or, in other words, to keep control of policy and prevent the momentum of events from taking over….Before we commit an endless flow of forces to South Vietnam we must have more evidence than we now have that our troops will not bog down in the jungles and rice paddies—while we slowly blow the country to pieces.”

General William Westmoreland with three Hawk antiaircraft missiles at Danang, 1965. Once, when asked by a reporter what the answer to insurgency was, he answered, “Firepower.”

Johnson thanked Ball for his opinion but rejected his counsel.

General Dwight Eisenhower told Johnson that since he’d now “appealed to force…we have got to win.” Dean Rusk warned that if the United States abandoned South Vietnam, “the communist world would draw conclusions that would lead to our ruin and almost certainly to a catastrophic war.”

Johnson convened a bipartisan group of elder statesmen who had served both Republican and Democratic administrations that came to be called “the Wise Men.” It included Dean Acheson, Harry Truman’s secretary of state; General of the Army Omar Bradley; Arthur Dean, who had helped negotiate an end to the Korean War; and John McCloy, the former American proconsul in occupied Germany. They all but unanimously urged Johnson to stay the course and commit whatever troops were necessary. “We are about to get our noses bloodied,” McCloy told McNamara, “but you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to go in.”

In the end, the president sent Westmoreland fifty thousand more men, pledged another fifty thousand by the end of 1965, and still more if they were needed.

He would not bomb industrial plants around Hanoi, as the Joint Chiefs urged him to do, hoping to retain the threat of doing so as a trump card. Nor would he ask Congress for further funds or declare a state of national emergency or impose any new taxes or call up the Reserves or extend the terms of service for those already in uniform. Key Great Society legislation still hung in the balance—the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, aid to Appalachia, the Clean Air Act—and he did not wish Congress to be distracted by an open debate about a distant war.

At a July 28 presidential press conference a reporter asked, “Does the fact that you are sending additional forces to Vietnam imply any change in the existing policy of relying mainly on the South Vietnamese to carry out offensive operations and using American forces to guard American installations and to act as an emergency backup?”

Johnson’s answer was terse and dismissive: “It does not imply any change in policy whatever. It does not imply any change of objective.”

The president wanted as little attention as possible paid to what he was about to unleash. But Horace Busby, one of his closest aides, spelled out what was really happening. “The 1954–1964 premises, principals, and pretexts no longer apply,” he told Johnson. “This is no longer South Vietnam’s war. We are no longer advisers. The stakes are no longer South Vietnam’s. We are participants. The stakes are ours—and the West’s.” The eleven-year struggle that had begun with a handful of U.S. advisers under President Eisenhower, and then had become a “partnership” between Saigon and Washington under President Kennedy, was now to become an American war.

General Westmoreland exuded confidence in public, but privately he warned his superiors that the United States was “in for the long pull.”

He liked to compare South Vietnam to a wooden house. “Termites”—Viet Cong guerrillas—were chewing away at its foundation, he said, while “bully boys”—Main Force Viet Cong units and regular troops from North Vietnam—were waiting to move in with crowbars to tear the weakened structure down. To keep the structure from collapsing, he planned to use American troops to hunt down and destroy the bully boys, while the ARVN—nearly half a million strong, American armed and trained, supported by regional and local militias—saw to the security of the countryside behind the American shield.

On August 30, Westmoreland outlined a “three-phase sustained campaign.”

First, as fresh American forces continued to gather, the “losing trend” that South Vietnam had been experiencing would begin to be reversed, military bases and major cities and towns would be secured, and the ARVN would be rebuilt and strengthened. That phase was already under way.

Phase Two would begin in early 1966—a series of offensive operations that would clear the enemy from the countryside, destroy its Main Force units, and allow for the expansion of pacification—bringing the rural populace under the protection of the Saigon government.

Then, if Hanoi still did not see the hopelessness of its cause, U.S. forces would obliterate the remnants of resistance—a process Westmoreland hoped could be completed by the end of 1967.

To fight the steadily expanding war, Army enlisted men were to serve a one-year tour of duty in Vietnam, rather than serve for the duration, as their fathers and grandfathers had in World War II. Westmoreland explained the reasoning: it “gave a man a goal” and was good for morale, he said; it spread the burden of Army service around; and it would help forestall public pressure to “bring the boys home.”

It would also result in higher casualties. Twice as many grunts would die in the first six months of their tours, when they were still learning how to fight, than in the six months that followed. Looking back after a dozen years, a veteran officer would say, “We don’t have twelve years’ experience in this country. We have one year’s experience twelve times.”

Officers served only six months in combat, just half as long as the men they led—it was called “punching their ticket,” a step up the promotion ladder. One general said that the Army “couldn’t have found a better way…to guarantee that our troops would be led by a bunch of amateurs.”

VIETNAM IN MINIATURE

CBS correspondent Morley Safer reports from the village of Cam Ne, set ablaze by U.S. Marines. His report so enraged the Johnson administration that Dean Rusk argued, without a shred of evidence, that Safer had staged the whole event because of “ties to the Soviet intelligence apparatus.”

MOST EARLY TELEVISION REPORTS from Vietnam echoed the newsreels people had flocked to see during World War II: enthusiastic, unquestioning, good guys fighting—and defeating—bad guys. But at dinnertime on August 5, 1965, Americans saw another side of the struggle in which their sons were now engaged. CBS correspondent Morley Safer and his crew went on patrol with Marines near Danang. The mission was to search a cluster of four hamlets from which earlier patrols had been fired upon for caches of arms and rice meant for the guerrillas—and then destroy them all. After the TV screen had been filled with images of weeping children and frightened old people and Marines flicking their cigarette lighters to set fire to the roofs of huts, Safer summed up what Americans at home had just witnessed for the first time.

The day’s operation burned down one hundred and fifty houses, wounded three women, killed one baby, wounded one Marine, and netted these four prisoners. Four old men who could not answer questions put to them in English. Four old men who had no idea what an ID card was. Today’s operation is the frustration of Vietnam in miniature. There is little doubt that American firepower can win a victory here. But to a Vietnamese peasant whose home…means a lifetime of backbreaking labor, it will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side.

The next morning, President Johnson called his friend Frank Stanton, the president of CBS.

“Hello, Frank, this is your president.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Frank, are you trying to fuck me?”

Safer had shat on the American flag, Johnson said; he was probably an agent of the Kremlin, and had to be fired. The Marines claimed that the whole event had been staged by the network. A major at the Danang press office called CBS the “Communist Broadcasting System.”

But two days after the operation, Safer interviewed one of the Marines who’d burned Cam Ne.

MORLEY SAFER: Do you have any private doubts, any regrets about some of those people you are leaving homeless?

MARINE: You can’t have any feelings of remorse for these people. They are an enemy until proven innocent….I feel no remorse. I don’t imagine anybody else does. You can’t do your job and feel pity for these people.

When some viewers registered their shock, General Westmoreland admitted, “We have a genuine problem which will be with us as long as we are in Vietnam. Commanders must exercise restraint unnatural to war and judgment not often required of young men.”

Philip Caputo remembered taking part in missions like the one Safer’s crew had filmed: “You kind of thought at first that it was going to be like the GIs rolling through Paris after the liberation, with all these good-looking girls throwing flowers and kissing you. It sure didn’t work out that way. I remember once going into this one ville in the middle of the night and finding an entire Vietnamese family cowering in a bunker. They had dug these bomb shelters inside their houses for good reason. And they were terrified of us, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘Well, I wonder if, back in the colonial days, when the Redcoats barged into Ipswich, Massachusetts, this is how Americans must have felt, looking at these foreign soldiers barging in. I hated those sorts of operations.”

THE ONLY WAY

FROM THE FIRST, General Westmoreland understood that while his most pressing mission was to destroy the North Vietnamese army, his ultimate goal was to win control of the countryside and help foster support for the Saigon government, without which an independent anticommunist South Vietnam could not survive. He and other American officials agreed that pacification was vital but were unable to come to a consensus on how best to implement it.

Multiple official organizations were already at work in rural areas—MACV, the CIA, the United States Information Agency, and the Agency for International Development (USAID). Each had its own agenda. USAID’s was the broadest. Its workers were engaged in everything from building schools and hospitals to resettling the steadily growing number of refugees fleeing the battlefield and administering the Chieu Hoi—“open arms”—Program, which encouraged communists to defect.

American reporters, eager for combat stories, generally paid little attention to pacification, but in September, when Jimmy Breslin, a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune who spent a journalistic lifetime looking for fresh angles, got to Vietnam, he made a point of calling on Samuel Wilson, then serving as the associate director for field operations for USAID, at his Saigon apartment.

Breslin got an earful. Wilson, only temporarily a civilian, was an authority on guerrilla and counter-guerrilla warfare, a forty-one-year-old veteran who had served three years behind enemy lines in Burma with Merrill’s Marauders. He saw the conflict in Vietnam as “a political struggle with violent military overtones,” and was openly scornful of those in the military who thought pacification a mere sideshow and believed that simply unleashing conventional American military forces like the First Infantry—the “Big Red One”—would somehow solve things: “ ‘We’ll flatten these bastards and then go home.’ Oh Christ, what a waste of time,” he said. “You roll in the Big One here and do you know what you’re doing? Just taking the tarpaulin off the field so you can start to okay a ball game. This is a political fight….Once the Viet Cong get into a hamlet and establish this VC infrastructure,…you can roll in the Marines and bring all the firepower in the world with you. For that month that you’re in there, you own the hamlet. But when the tail end of that column leaves the hamlet, the VC own it again. So how can you win here with a gun?”

Wilson couldn’t help but grudgingly admire the way the communists won the people’s loyalty: “They do it with a tight, cohesive organization. They give a man dignity. Even if he’s the chairman of the firewood-organizing committee, he gets a chance to conduct a meeting once a month and be on top….The other government, the one that runs [South] Vietnam? It stops at the district level. Saigon? That’s [just] a word to most of these farmers. Once in his life the farmer might meet his district chief.”

Wilson believed it was his job—and that of the hundreds of civilians currently working for USAID all across the country—to try to bridge the gap between that far-off government and “the man behind a water buffalo,” who, he believed, wanted security, schools, social justice, and economic opportunity. Only when real progress was made toward achieving these goals “can you make [the people] understand [that] the only way they can have a decent life is to have a decent government.”

“If we don’t do that,” he said, “we win nothing.”

Three young college students who had volunteered to spend a summer working with USAID joined the conversation. All had been shot at. “It’s the initiation,” one said. He’d signed up, he added, “because it’s a much more useful thing to do than student demonstrations.”

What did they think they had accomplished?

“Quite a bit,” a second worker answered. “The picture changed in our area. Not forever. You’ve got to remain working, but it did change.”

A third said that while in his area they’d managed to boost the monthly numbers of defectors from two to nineteen, he wanted Breslin’s readers to know that “the American military…should get their ass kicked. The indiscriminate use of airpower here is hurting our effort. A lot of civilians have been killed by airstrikes that don’t accomplish a thing except to make some general feel good.”

Wilson was fiercely proud of the work his men were doing. “I know there’s no sex appeal in it,” Wilson told Breslin. “We can’t give out big stories about operations we went on and how many people we killed. But I’m going to tell you something. I’ve tried it both ways. I killed more sons-of-bitches than you’ve [ever] seen. Killed all the time….And I’m telling you what we’re doing here is the only way….You can win a war with these kids, not with any soldiers.”

Wilson worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, for twenty months, helicoptering from project to project, making sure that promised aid—seed, poultry, pigs, building materials, and the like—reached the rural people for whom it was intended and making it clear to everyone where it came from. At day’s end, about to head back to Saigon, he liked to drive that point home by asking the local people, “Tell me, my friends, what have the Viet Cong done for you today?” During one inspection tour he found himself in the middle of a fierce firefight. When it ended, the communist battalion commander was found collapsed on the ground with massive wounds to his leg and shoulder. While they waited for a helicopter to evacuate the wounded man, Wilson offered him a cigarette, saw that he was given morphine, and then asked him about himself. He’d begun fighting for the Viet Minh at twelve, he said, had nearly died from fever, been wounded five times. As the evacuation helicopter approached, Wilson asked his customary question, “Tell me, my friend, what did the Viet Cong ever do for you?” The man glared and spat at him: “They gave me the chance to sacrifice.”

THE GOOD I HAVE PERSONALLY SEEN

IN SEPTEMBER, Mogie Crocker called his parents from San Francisco just before taking off for Vietnam. He told them he had been assigned to the 173rd Airborne, so when a TV news report showed men belonging to that unit setting up camp, his mother remembered, “we looked desperately, thinking maybe we could get a glimpse of him. But we didn’t, and after that, as the battles began to be more severe and serious and the casualties grew greater, we made a conscious decision not to watch the news on television.”

Eighteen-year-old Private First Class Denton W. Crocker Jr. at jump school, Fort Benning, Georgia, September 1965

Men of the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne arrive in Cam Ranh Bay, July 29, 1965.

Private First Class Mogie Crocker got to Saigon in late September. He’d been reassigned: “I am now with the 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Div.,” he wrote home. “Since the last letters I have seen a lot of Vietnam, and what a beautiful country it is. The jungle highlands were the most breathtaking (that isn’t a figure of speech either; our driver was a maniac). Some of the places we passed through are An Lhe, Nha Trang, Qui Nhon, and our present base Cam Ranh Bay.”

Three years earlier, Cam Ranh Bay—a vast anchorage conveniently located a little less than halfway between Saigon and South Vietnam’s northern border—had been home only to a handful of fishermen living along a pristine beach. Now, thanks to American contractors and a legion of mostly female Vietnamese construction workers, it was a sizable American community—fifteen miles long and almost five miles wide—with twenty thousand residents; five deepwater piers, each capable of offloading four thousand tons of weapons and supplies every twenty-four hours; ten-thousand-foot runways from which bombers took off regularly to hit targets in the North, and a two-thousand-bed hospital, the largest in Vietnam. Similar installations were under construction all along the coast, at Vung Tau, Qui Nhon, Quang Ngai, Chu Lai, and Phu Bai. The United States seemed to be settling in for a protracted conflict.

News of antiwar protests at home disturbed Mogie.

Dear Dad,

Thank you for your letter; it was very interesting, especially the part telling of the demonstrations. We who are in Vietnam find these protests very hard to comprehend, and many people here are quite bitter about them….What is taking place in America, that causes men like Saul Bellow and John Hersey to support these people? It would seem that we are in a period corresponding to the pathetic decade prior to 1939, when intellectuals supported the appeasement of Nazi Germany. Certainly there are mistakes and wrongs committed in Vietnam, however these are dwarfed by the good I have personally seen being done. The belief I have in our present policy has been completely confirmed by what I have seen here, and…I am of a mind to extend for another year when the time comes. My chief worry is that these pacifist bleatings might effect even a small change in government policy at a time when we appear close to success.

    Much love,

    Mogie

At Cam Ranh Bay, Mogie was disappointed to find himself ordered to serve as an armorer—cleaning, repairing, and trouble-shooting weapons—rather than as a regular infantryman in a line company. He hoped, he said, “to find a way to change this situation.” He was determined to see combat.

AIN’T NO SUCH THING

THAT SAME SEPTEMBER, the First Cavalry Division—16,000 men, 435 helicopters, and 1,600 vehicles—began arriving at An Khe, its new headquarters carved out of the grasslands at the edge of the Central Highlands, thirty-five miles from the sea. Its heliport was so vast and smooth it came to be called “the Golf Course.”

Their numbers would have been still greater and their support wing much stronger if the president had called up the reserves and extended their terms of service; five hundred skilled pilots, helicopter crew chiefs, and mechanics had been left behind because they had too little time left. The division did their best to make up in panache what they lacked in personnel.

“We’d all rather ride to work than walk to work,” Joe Galloway recalled. “That applies to soldiers and journalists alike. So we reporters all hustled up there to cover these guys. They were swashbuckling with their Stetsons and their spurs and their boots. They’d been trained in air-mobile warfare using helicopters to the absolute maximum benefit. Moving artillery, leapfrogging troops, chasing the enemy, driving him crazy—this was something new and it was going to change the way we did war.”

As the First Cavalry got used to its new surroundings, thousands of North Vietnamese regulars were moving south into the Central Highlands along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Lo Khac Tam was a platoon leader in the Sixty-sixth Regiment of the People’s Army of Vietnam, one of the first one hundred graduates of the North Vietnamese military academy to volunteer to lead regular troops into South Vietnam. They all had signed their applications in blood. “I had a girlfriend before I went south,” he remembered. “She heard I was going to the front and gave me a ring to wear. I just left, did not look back. Tried to forget my life back home. We needed to set that aside. We walked to the Central Highlands—it took two months. I was a Communist Party member and a leader and had to keep the men moving. We cooked our rice in the morning, and carried some cooked rice to eat during the day. We had very little salt, and some dried fish. We missed vegetables. We found taro leaf. Back home we fed it to the pigs, but on the trail we ate it. We did not know the exact destination, just to head south. We were excited to be among the first soldiers from the North to fight the Americans, and this kept up the morale. But I worried about the men, how difficult the trip was. It was so simple in the French war—the French did not have such powerful weapons, they were not so scary as what we would be facing from the Americans.”

Brigadier General Chu Huy Man (in the helmet), architect of the North Vietnamese campaign in the Ia Drang Valley, moves through the Central Highlands with his men later in the war.

General Chu Huy Man, commander of the gathering forces, had a simple but audacious plan. His troops—the equivalent of a division of North Vietnamese and NLF regulars, more than five thousand soldiers backed by artillery and support units—would establish a base on and around the Chu Pong Massif, a jumble of thickly forested mountains and ravines fifteen miles long that straddles the Cambodian border south of the Ia Drang River.

Then, one regiment would attack Plei Mei, one of several U.S. Special Forces outposts near the Cambodian border. The outpost was defended by a twelve-man team of U.S. Green Berets, an equal number of ARVN Special Forces, and some four hundred militiamen drawn from the indigenous hill people. Meanwhile, two more regiments would ambush the ARVN relief column that was sure to be sent to rescue Plei Mei along the single road running through the region. The rest of Man’s troops would wait for the airborne Americans who now seemed sure to follow. “We would attack the ARVN—but we would be ready to fight the Americans,” General Man said. “We wanted to lure the tiger out of the mountain.”

The fighting began on the evening of October 19. North Vietnamese regulars destroyed a South Vietnamese patrol near Plei Mei, overcame an ARVN outpost, and then opened fire on the camp itself from three sides. Under cover of darkness, sappers had slipped to within forty yards of the perimeter wire, dug trenches for themselves, and set up automatic rifles and 125mm antiaircraft machine guns.

The families of the militiamen lived alongside their men, and when the shooting began women and children fled down into underground shelters. Nine of the twelve Green Berets were hit. Their commander radioed for help. Fifteen more Green Berets and 160 South Vietnamese rangers were helicoptered in two days later, commanded by Major Charles Beckwith, a former college football player and veteran of guerrilla fighting in Malaysia, known to his fellow soldiers as “Chargin’ Charlie.”

Joe Galloway managed to talk a helicopter pilot into flying him into the besieged camp the next day. “There were mortars landing,” he remembered. “There were machine gun bullets whipping all over the place.” Major Beckwith was not especially pleased to see him. “I need everything in the world,” Beckwith said. “I need ammo. I need medevac. I need someone to carry my wounded out. I need supplies coming in, food. I need medicine. Everything. And what has the Army in its wisdom sent me but a godforsaken reporter?”

Beckwith led Galloway over to a .30-caliber air-cooled machine gun and showed him how to load it and how to clear it when it jammed. “You can shoot the little brown men outside the wire,” he said. “You may not shoot the little brown men inside the wire; they are mine.” Galloway protested that he was a civilian noncombatant. “Ain’t no such thing in these mountains, son,” Beckwith replied. Galloway settled in behind the machine gun.

The camp’s defenders would endure 178 hours of mortar and recoilless rifle fire and repeated assaults by ground troops trying to get through the wire. They beat them all back, and after American bombs and napalm turned the surrounding terrain into a moonscape, the enemy finally withdrew.

Major Beckwith remembered how hard and how relentlessly the enemy had fought. “I’d give anything to have two hundred VC under my command,” he told a reporter. “They’re the finest, most dedicated soldiers I’ve ever seen.” (They were not, in fact, Viet Cong; they were North Vietnamese troops.)

Defenders of the besieged Plei Mei Special Forces camp watch U.S. airpower blast North Vietnamese positions.

Within the walls, an American adviser prepares a mortar position while South Vietnamese militiamen look on.

South Vietnamese rangers, sent to relieve the siege of Plei Mei, run a gauntlet of enemy sniper fire as they enter the camp’s perimeter.

Meanwhile, just as General Man had hoped, the ARVN had dispatched a mechanized force to rescue the men at Plei Mei. The North Vietnamese ambushed the column as planned, but after that everything went wrong. Tanks fired heavy canister into the jungle on either side of the road, blasting men and parts of men up into the splintered trees. Artillery was walked methodically along ahead of the column. Airstrikes set the adjacent forest ablaze.

The North Vietnamese retreated from Plei Mei, with First Cavalry helicopters in hot pursuit. “For two weeks they were hopscotching all over that valley,” Galloway remembered, “just driving these people like coveys of quail.”

Major Charlie “Chargin’ Charlie” Beckwith at the siege’s end. When it was all over, he remembered, “it was estimated there were eight hundred or nine hundred dead North Vietnamese regulars in front of the camp. I don’t know the exact number and I didn’t run around counting them. Eventually, a bulldozer came in and just covered everything up.”

INTO THE VALLEY

ON THE MORNING of November 14, helicopters belonging to the First Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry—George Armstrong Custer’s old outfit—took off from their base at An Khe in the Central Highlands and flew west toward the Chu Pong Massif.

Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore, a forty-three-year-old Kentucky-born Korean War veteran, had been told that there was a large base camp somewhere on its slopes. His orders were to take his understrength unit—29 officers and just 411 men—find the enemy, and kill him.

There were two clearings large enough for Moore to bring in eight choppers at once. He chose the one closest to the mountain—Landing Zone X-Ray, roughly the size of a football field.

Before Moore and his men began setting down in the clearing, twin batteries of 105mm howitzers that had been lifted by helicopter to a fourth clearing six miles away blasted the trees and grasslands around both landing zones to confuse and intimidate any enemy soldiers who might be hiding there.

Moore made a point of leading from the front. He was the first man off the first chopper. He sent four six-man squads one hundred yards in all four directions. The mountain was so beautiful, one soldier remembered, it reminded him of some national park back home.

Within minutes, Moore’s men captured a deserter. Terrified and trembling, he said there were three battalions of soldiers on the mountain—sixteen hundred men—who wanted very much to kill Americans, he said, but so far had been unable to find any.

Moore established his command post behind one of the huge termite mounds that dotted the landscape. It would take until midafternoon for all of his men to be ferried in. He couldn’t wait. “We had to move fast,” Moore remembered, “had to get off that landing zone and hit [the enemy] before he could hit us.” He sent two companies up the slope toward the hidden enemy.

Colonel Moore had no way of knowing that instead of sixteen hundred enemy soldiers on the mountain, there were three thousand—seven times his strength. Platoon leader Lo Khac Tam and his unit had only reached the hillside base a day or two earlier, after their two-month trek. “We had put up our hammocks and were supposed to have a few days to rest,” he remembered. “But then swarms of helicopters came to our area. Everyone thought we might not survive, but I was a leader and so I had to push that thought away. I had to give orders to my men.”

The Ia Drang campaign: North Vietnamese forces, based in the forests that blanketed the Chu Pong Massif, besieged the Special Forces camp at Plei Mei, fought the Americans to a draw at Landing Zone X-Ray, and then successfully ambushed them at Landing Zone Albany.

Tam’s men—like Moore’s men in the landing zone—were new to combat. They were ordered to fix bayonets. “It was going to be a modern battle,” Lo Khac Tam recalled, “but we were told the bayonet symbolized our fighting spirit.”

Within minutes, the Americans were under attack from hundreds of North Vietnamese soldiers. A platoon leader who found himself fighting his way up a ravine remembered that “at any given second there were a thousand bullets coursing through that small area looking for a target. A thousand bullets a second.”

An overeager second lieutenant led his platoon of twenty-eight men too far away from the rest of his company and found himself surrounded. The lieutenant was killed. The sergeant who took over for him was shot through the head. Sergeant Ernie Savage took over and called in a ring of close-in artillery fire that kept the enemy at bay. By late afternoon, only seven of the trapped platoon’s men were still capable of firing back.

Repeated efforts to break through and rescue them failed. During one of them, Second Lieutenant Walter Marm Jr., all alone, attacked and destroyed an enemy machine gun and killed the eight men in charge of firing and protecting it before a sniper shot him in the face. He survived and was awarded the Medal of Honor.

By late afternoon, Moore was engaged in three simultaneous struggles—to defend the landing zone, attack the North Vietnamese, and find a way to rescue his trapped patrol. He established a perimeter and radioed for air support and reinforcements. As dusk began to fall, a company from the Second Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry was helicoptered in. One of the men aboard caught a glimpse of men in khaki. He thought to himself that “things must be desperate if we’re bringing in guys without giving them time to change into their fatigue uniforms. Then, I realized their rifles were pointed at us; that was the enemy.”

Lieutenant Colonel Harold G. Moore was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions in the Ia Drang Valley. “There is no glory in war,” he recalled, “only good men dying terrible deaths.”

That night, Joe Galloway asked to be allowed onto a chopper taking ammunition and water to the besieged Americans. Colonel Moore agreed to let him come because he believed “the American people had a right to know what their sons were doing in this war.”

As the helicopter approached the battlefield, Galloway was sitting on a crate of grenades, peering out into the darkness. “I could see these streams of light coming down the mountain,” he remembered, “little pin-pricks of light. This was the enemy approaching for the next day’s attacks. They had little oil lamps tied to the back of their packs so that the guy behind them knew where to follow.”

The chopper dropped into the clearing. Galloway jumped off. The helicopter lifted off again and disappeared into the night sky. Galloway lay belly down in the grass, unsure where to go. A voice came out of the darkness: “Follow me and watch where you step. There’s lots of dead people on the ground and they’re all ours.” American dead, shrouded with ponchos, lay near Moore’s command post, where Galloway bedded down.

The night was punctuated by artillery barrages and dropped flares, called in to keep the North Vietnamese from mounting a full-scale attack.

That came at six thirty the next morning. “I had sat up and thought about cooking me a little canteen cup of coffee,” Galloway remembered. “But I hadn’t quite got to it when the bottom fell out. There was just an explosion of fire, small arms, bombs, artillery, B-40 rockets, AK47s, machine guns. And people are screaming and yelling and calling for medics and for Mother. A din that’s unimaginable. You open your mouth to pop your ear-drums. I just flattened out on the ground because all that was being fired seemed to be coming right through the command post at about two, two and a half feet off the ground.”

Hundreds of Vietnamese regulars were rushing through the grass and stunted trees toward the Americans. “Look at ’em all! Look at ’em all!” one American shouted. They wore webbed helmets camouflaged with grass, another remembered, and looked like “little trees” as they ran at him, blowing whistles, screaming, firing as they came. “They were trying to overrun us,” Galloway remembered. “And they came close. They kept coming. And they were good soldiers. Anyone who didn’t understand that was likely to die in that place.”

The fighting was close-in and savage, Lo Khac Tam remembered. “We used bayonets, and suffered terrible losses. When an American soldier got wounded they tried to pull him away, but some of their wounded could not be evacuated. The more they retreated, the more we advanced. I did not order it, but some of my soldiers killed the wounded Americans—I encouraged them to take prisoners, but my men did kill some of them, out of hatred, and I could not control all of them.”

The North Vietnamese kept coming. Defeat seemed very near. Colonel Moore radioed out a coded message, “broken arrow,” which meant that an American unit was in danger of being overwhelmed. “But we had three things going for us,” Galloway recalled. “We had a great commander and great soldiers. And we had air and artillery support out the ying-yang. We had it and they didn’t.”

Each of Moore’s units marked its position with colored smoke to keep from being mistaken for the enemy by the American airmen who were on their way. “We knew that the Americans used smoke to signal where their line ended, and we tried to get inside that line of smoke,” Lo Khac Tam remembered. “We had to get close. If we didn’t, we would be killed right away.”

The colonel would call in eighteen thousand artillery shells over the course of the battle. Some of them landed just twenty-five yards from his men. Helicopter gunships fired three thousand rockets into the enemy. The forward air controller called for every available aircraft in South Vietnam to come to the aid of a unit in trouble. Warplanes were stacked at 1,000-foot intervals above the battlefield, from 7,000 to 35,000 feet, impatiently awaiting their turn to strafe or bomb or burn.

The reporter Neil Sheehan flew in on a helicopter that morning and remembered that from the air Landing Zone X-Ray looked “like an island in a sea of red-orange napalm and exploding shells.” “By God,” Colonel Moore said, “they sent us over here to kill communists, and that’s what we’re doing.”

At one point, Galloway ducked behind the termite mound where Moore continued to call in airstrikes. “Napalm, seen from afar, has a certain chilling beauty to it,” he remembered.

It’s blossoms of fire, beautiful reds and oranges and yellows. But in our case we saw it from much, much too close. I looked up and there were two F-100 super-sabers that were supposed to be going north to south. Instead, they were coming east to west, aiming directly at our command post. The lead aircraft is already lifting off. He’s dropped two cans of napalm and it’s coming toward us—loblolly—end over end over end. They impacted maybe twenty yards from us on the edge of the clearing. The fire splashed out and these kids, two or three of them plus a sergeant, had dug a hole or two over there. I looked as the thing exploded and I felt the heat on the side of my face and two of them were dancing in that fire. And there’s a rush, a roar, from the air that’s being consumed and drawn in, as this hell come to earth is burning there, and as that dies back a little then you can hear the screams of these men. I just got up and ran in that direction. I go on over into this burning grass and someone yells “Get this man’s feet.” And I reach down and the boots crumble and the flesh is cooked off of his ankles. And I feel those bones in the palms of my hands. I can feel it now. You never forget it. We picked him up and we brought him to the aid station. And they shut down the LZ about then. They couldn’t bring any more choppers in because the fire was too heavy. And for about two, two-and-a-half hours we had to listen to that man scream. He had sucked the fire down and burnt his lungs. And the doc shot him with all the morphine he had. But all the morphine in the world won’t stop pain like that. He died two days later, a kid named Jim Nakayama out of Rigby, Idaho.

Wounded survivors of the “lost platoon”—Second Platoon, Company B, First Battalion, Seventh Cavalry—are helped from the battlefield after their rescue. “They were like men who had come back from the dead,” Joe Galloway remembered. “Their fatigue uniforms were ripped and torn; their eyes were bloodshot holes in the red dirt that was ground into their faces.”

By ten o’clock that morning, the North Vietnamese assault had been beaten back. The survivors from the trapped platoon were rescued that afternoon. They had been pinned to the ground and under fire for more than twenty-four straight hours, so long that they had to be coaxed into getting to their feet again.

On the morning of the next day, enemy soldiers hurled themselves against the same sector of Moore’s line four more times—and were obliterated by artillery and machine gun fire. “When I saw my soldiers dying I felt deep sorrow for them,” Lo Khac Tam remembered. “But I didn’t cry. I held back my tears. The war we fought was so horribly brutal that I don’t have the words to describe it. I worry, how can we ever explain to the younger generation the price their parents and grandparents paid?”

Unable finally to pierce the cavalry’s perimeter, the rest of the North Vietnamese withdrew into the forest and made their way back into Cambodia, leaving behind a ghastly ring of their dead surrounding the landing zone—634 corpses, shot, blasted, blackened by fire. Many more had been dragged away.

Private Jack Smith, a supply clerk with the Second Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry who arrived on the last day of the battle for X-Ray, remembered that dead North Vietnamese lay so thickly in front of the American positions that he could have walked on them for a hundred feet.

After three days and two nights of combat, helicopters began lifting out the American survivors and gathering up the dead. Seventy-nine of Hal Moore’s men lost their lives at Landing Zone X-Ray and another 121 were wounded.

A television reporter found Colonel Moore on the battlefield and asked him if he’d like to say something to the people back home. Moore, near tears, did his best. “Please convey to the American people what a tremendous fighting man we have here,” he said. “He’s courageous, he’s aggressive, and he’s kind. And he’ll go where you tell him to go. And he’s got self-discipline. And he’s got good unit discipline. He’s just an outstanding man. And having commanded this battalion for eighteen months—you must excuse my emotion here, but when I see some of these men go out the way they have…I can’t tell you how highly I feel for them. They’re tremendous.”

Neil Sheehan agreed. “I saw them fight at Ia Drang. Here were these young men who’d had no combat experience before, thrown into a ferocious battle, in which they fought like veterans. It always galls me when I hear the World War II generation called ‘the greatest generation.’ These kids were just as gallant and as courageous as anybody who fought in World War II.”

Hal Moore refused to leave until every single man in his command had been accounted for. He had been the first of his men to step onto Landing Zone X-Ray, and he made sure he was the last to leave it. As his chopper lifted off, he recalled, he felt only “guilt that I was still alive.”

After the North Vietnamese withdrew from the battlefield, Lo Khac Tam remembered, he and a friend got lost and took shelter in a cave. They were hungry, thirsty, and emotionally drained. They stayed there for two days before rejoining their men. “Nothing could have prepared us for a battle like that,” he remembered, and his friend, who had fought the French, said that nothing he’d seen in that war could compare to it. “This was different.”

“The [North Vietnamese] units were enveloped in an atmosphere of gloom,” one colonel recalled. Some men would not leave their rope hammocks. Some refused to wash. One soldier wrote a poem expressive of their plight: “The crab lies still on the chopping block / Never knowing when the knife will fall.”

Still, as Colonel Moore himself said, “The peasant soldiers [of North Vietnam] had withstood the terrible high-tech firestorm delivered against them by a superpower and had at least fought the Americans to a draw. By their yardstick, a draw against such a powerful opponent was the equivalent of a victory.”

GRAB HIM BY HIS BELT

COMBAT IN THE IA DRANG VALLEY was not quite over. The morning after the fighting ended at Landing Zone X-Ray, a massive strike by B-52 bombers was scheduled to drop twenty tons of five-hundred-pound bombs on the slopes of the Chu Pong Massif. All American troops were ordered out of the area, and Jack Smith’s unit—some five hundred men—made its way six miles through forest and elephant grass to a second landing zone called Albany, from which helicopters were to fly them back to base.

Just as they reached it, scores of communist snipers tied into the top branches of trees opened fire. So did machine gunners perched atop termite mounds and mortar crews hidden in the tall grass. Twenty men were hit within seconds. Everyone else dove for cover. The Americans did their best to shoot back—and some shot one another because they could not be sure of their targets.

Jack Smith found himself so close to an enemy machine gunner that he was able to poke his rifle through the grass into the man’s face and blow his head off. All around him, wounded men were screaming. He tried to help and was soon covered with blood. When ten or twelve guerrillas emerged suddenly from the grass, he played dead. One of them lay down on top of him and started to set up his machine gun. “He probably couldn’t feel me shaking,” Smith remembered, “because he was shaking so much. He was, like me, just a teenager.”

An American grenade killed the gunner—and wounded Smith in the head. Then, a mortar shell damaged his legs. He lay helpless in the grass all night, hoping that the American shells now being fired into the landing zone would not find him, listening to wounded men crying for help and trying not to attract the attention of the Viet Cong who moved through the grass shooting the wounded Americans.

Jack Smith made it out alive. But out of some 425 men involved, 155 were dead and 124 more were wounded.

The battle at Landing Zone X-Ray had demonstrated to the North Vietnamese that they could inflict heavy casualties even when confronted by massive American firepower. The successful ambush at Landing Zone Albany taught them another important lesson: getting close to the Americans negated their advantages in weaponry. “The way to fight the American was to ‘grab him by his belt,’ ” one North Vietnamese commander explained, “to get so close that [his] artillery and airpower was useless.” Each suggested to Le Duan that his forces could hold their own in the “Big Battles” that he still believed were the way to victory.

MACV insisted that the battles in the Ia Drang Valley, the first major encounter between American and North Vietnamese forces, constituted a U.S. victory. “It appears the little bastards just don’t have the stomach for a fight,” one colonel said. “They’ve had enough and bugged out.” But privately, Washington and Saigon were worried. In spite of the Americans’ ever-increasing mobility, the enemy had been able to choose the place and time of battle and only American airpower had saved Moore’s battalion from annihilation. From the first, the intelligence on which basic decisions had been made had been uniformly bad. There were now twelve NLF regiments in South Vietnam, not just five; nine North Vietnamese regiments, not three. And, despite months of bombing, three times as many North Vietnamese regulars were now slipping south of the demilitarized zone as originally believed.

Meanwhile, American casualties were climbing. When Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina visited Saigon shortly after the battles, General Westmoreland boasted, “We’re killing these people at a rate of ten to one.” Hollings warned him, “Westy, the American people don’t care about the ten. They care about the one.”

The U.S. Army was still so unprepared to deal with large numbers of casualties that the telegrams stating that someone had been wounded or killed were simply delivered to their stunned families by taxi drivers. When Hal Moore’s wife, Julia Compton Moore, learned of it she went personally to every grieving home at Fort Benning, Georgia, consoling widows and comforting distraught children. And she attended every funeral. Her complaints and those of other commanders’ wives eventually led the Army to send out two-man notification teams—a uniformed officer and a chaplain.

General Westmoreland sent an urgent cable to Washington, asking for 200,000 more troops. Again, “the message came as a shattering blow,” Robert McNamara remembered. “It meant a drastic—and arguably open-ended—increase in U.S. forces and carried with it the likelihood of many more U.S. casualties”—and even at this elevated level there was no guarantee that the United States would ever achieve its objectives.” He hurried to Saigon to confer.

His chronic public optimism was now slightly tempered. “We have stopped losing the war,” he told the press before flying back to Washington. But “the decision by the Viet Cong to stand and fight, recognizing the level of force we can bring to bear against them, expresses their determination to carry on the conflict that can lead to only one conclusion: It will be a long war.” Aboard the plane he wrote another memo to the president. Once again, he offered Johnson two options: try to negotiate the kind of compromise he had rejected earlier (and abandon hope of an independent, non-communist South Vietnam), or accede to Westmoreland’s request and hope for the best. There could be one thousand American casualties a month.

“A military solution to the problem is not certain,” he told the president; no better than “one out of three or one in two. Ultimately we must find…a diplomatic solution.”

“Then, no matter what we do in the military field,” Johnson asked, “there is no sure victory?”

“That’s right,” the secretary answered. “We have been too optimistic.”

Johnson chose the second option, anyway.

Meanwhile, hoping the Soviets might somehow help bring Hanoi to the bargaining table, McNamara urged the president to declare a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam. Over the objections of the military, who worried it would give the enemy time to rebuild its defenses, Johnson agreed to stop the bombing on Christmas Eve. If it achieved nothing else, he said, it would show the American people that before he committed more of their sons to battle, “we have gone the last mile.”

THINKING OF YOU

ON NOVEMBER 13, the day before the fighting in the Ia Drang Valley began, the Crocker family drove to the WTEN television studio in Albany. The station had offered to record Christmas greetings for local servicemen who were far away in Vietnam. “Christmas always meant a great deal in our family,” Mogie’s mother remembered. “We had lots of secrets and lots of preparations. And we sent packages to Mogie early. But this was a chance to speak to him directly.”

The Crocker family films its Christmas greeting for Mogie.

“We dressed up for the cameras,” Mogie’s sister Carol, then fifteen years old, remembered. “The idea was that we would each just say something about what we were doing and wish him well. It made it so real that he was far away.”

The family took their places on a living room set, fitted out for the holidays.

Mogie’s father, Denton Sr., spoke first and wished his son a Merry Christmas.

His mother said, “Merry Christmas, darling, we sent your packages and there’s one that’s waiting for you at home. It’s a record of fife-and-drum music that we got for you at Williamsburg.” She introduced Mogie’s younger sister, Candy, seven, who confided that “my teacher isn’t very nice and she always is crabby and I don’t like school at all.” On the other hand, she said, she was now a Brownie. Eight-year-old Randy stumbled through the Cub Scout oath.

Carol Crocker remembered the experience being almost unbearable. “The awkwardness, the sadness, the strangeness that this was how we were communicating with him, made it very real and very sad and very painful and very frightening for me. I didn’t want to think that this was how we had to talk to him. I didn’t want to be there.”

She managed to say a few words: “Happy Christmas, Mogie. I think I’m getting skis for Christmas, so when you get home we can get together sometime.”

Mogie’s father assured his son that seven packages were coming in the mail. “I hope you get at least some of them by Christmastime. We do all wish you a very Merry Christmas and we’ll be thinking of you on Christmas Day.”

His mother signed off for the family. “We miss you, sweet-heart.”