Vietnam. Max Hastings

a unit in Long An province was led by a woman named Kim Loan, whose husband had been killed by government troops. She became a local folk heroine, imbued with supposedly mystical powers. On one occasion she killed a policeman who tried to arrest her while shopping. On another she fled through the back door of a beauty parlour, and when soldiers scoured a nearby hamlet for her, climbed a tree, changed into a bird and flew. Frank Scotton challenged the old man who told him that story, saying, ‘You can’t really believe that?’ The Vietnamese smiled and responded that while he could not know for sure, ‘she got away, didn’t she?’

      Savagery remained the communists’ principal weapon. The Vietcong once entered a village in Lai Cay, denounced twenty inhabitants of both sexes as government spies, beheaded them and threw the bodies in the street, each with a scrap of paper attached, describing their alleged crimes. Elsewhere a hamlet chief was tied to a stake and disembowelled in front of the assembled villagers; his pregnant wife was eviscerated, their children beheaded. Such atrocities were artistically crafted to persuade peasants that the price of resistance to the revolution was much worse than mere death.

      Brutality was not confined to one side, of course. Doug Ramsey conducted a survey among students in Long An province and found that between a quarter and half had lost relations to the activities of Saigon’s security forces. In the course of 1962–63, government troops killed 150 inhabitants of a single village in the Mekong delta. Of these, an estimated sixty were associated with the NLF, but the rest were not. Among thousands of political prisoners held in appalling conditions in South Vietnam’s jails and camps, some in a wing of Saigon zoo, there were many innocents. Of legal processes there were none.

      Though urban areas remained firmly under government control, in the countryside the guerrilla struggle seesawed, with control of villages and entire regions frequently changing hands. Saigon acquired an arsenal of new weapons and equipment, and sometimes used these effectively. In late August 1962, guided by a defector, Southern troops overran an NLF training base at My Phuoc Tay, killing 150 cadres and trainees; surviving recruits fled back to their villages. American helicopters dramatically increased ARVN tactical mobility, so that they ranged into rural areas where the communists had for years held unchallenged sway. But capability and will were not the same thing: many South Vietnamese units declined to patrol where they might be ambushed, and flinched from pressing firefights. In 1963 the Vietcong began to receive arms shipped in quantity from North Vietnam, including some recoilless rifles and mortars, often landed from the sea, especially in the Mekong delta.

      In cities, cadres laboured to prepare the masses for a popular uprising. Children were often used to toss grenades into cafés or markets. Government intelligence remained poor, and communist activists were skilled in concealing their identities. As a VC courier, ten-year-old Truong Mealy was sometimes sent into a town to meet a code-named figure in a restaurant, clutching half a banknote to identify himself to a contact bearing the other half. If he or others of his kind were caught, their knowledge was confined to the first name of their Party teacher. Only senior NLF cadres knew the names of province chiefs.

      The tempo of the war was rising: after two years in which the impetus of the armed struggle had come chiefly from Southern hostility to the Saigon government, Hanoi’s influence and resources were becoming ever more conspicuous. Northern leaders scented rotting flesh, a stench of terminal decay, drifting upcountry from Saigon’s presidential palace. They had become impatient to expedite funerary arrangements for the Diem regime. So, too, were important people in Washington.

      7

       1963: Coffins for Two Presidents

      1 SMALL BATTLE, BIG STORY: AP BAC

      Alongside the swarms of American advisers, diplomats, fliers, special forces, electronic eavesdroppers and spooks setting up shop in Vietnam, ever more journalists came – men and a few women who would exercise at least as much influence on the story as the warriors and politicos. The swelling press corps reflected an awareness among their employers that the investment being made by the US deserved more attention at the sharp end than it had hitherto received. Saigon bureaux got not quite the A Team, such as then went to Washington, Paris, Moscow, London, but A-Team wannabes. Most were young, green, pretty bright, fiercely ambitious, and they fell in love with the romance of Saigon: men like David Halberstam of the New York Times, Malcolm Browne and Peter Arnett of AP, François Sully of Newsweek, Neil Sheehan of UPI who shared desk space with Halberstam and became his close friend.

      Sheehan was in Japan, finishing his draft hitch with the US Army, when he persuaded UPI’s Tokyo bureau to let him earn $10 a throw pulling night shifts. Then the news agency’s Saigon correspondent quit, and Sheehan got the job. He was a Massachusetts farm boy, born in 1936, strikingly handsome, who won a scholarship to Harvard before becoming a precocious alcoholic. After 1961 he never touched a drink, but he arrived in Vietnam the following year still a little high on a faith in the United States, born out of his elevation to the Ivy League, that would be sorely tested during the years that followed. ‘Saigon was a very nice place that hadn’t then been mucked up by Americans,’ he said. ‘For the first six months I was not at all afraid. I thought it was thrilling, skiing over rice paddies in a helicopter. I was a child of the Cold War. We all felt the same way. Americans could do no wrong. We went there to stop these evil communists trying to take over the world. We had very little grip on reality. We felt this country deserved support.’

      A cluster of the young correspondents, who swiftly acquired beautiful Vietnamese girlfriends, lived as a ratpack, dining together at L’Amiral, Souri-Blanche or Bistro Brodard, where they had a special table bearing a sign ‘Réservé pour la presse’; sharing cyclos or tiny blue-and-cream Renault taxis to briefings, helos to battle. Plenty of unattributable information was available from advisers, diplomats and the ubiquitous Lou Conein: in Sheehan’s laconic phrase, ‘Lou liked to talk.’ Ivan Slavitch, a soldier who commanded the first Huey helicopter unit, would sometimes call and say ‘Come out for breakfast,’ which was a coded tip that an operation was on. However, ‘most Vietnamese wouldn’t speak to you – they didn’t want to get into trouble’.

      The US Army sucked up much of the precarious electricity supply, so that when air-conditioners went down, the reporters sweated profusely onto their shirts, typewriter keys, stories. They made small fortunes from submitting expenses at the official currency-exchange rate while changing dollars on the black market, though Sheehan stayed clean because he was fearful of expulsion. Halberstam later urged him to title his Vietnam book The Last Frontier, ‘because it was the last place to have fun, to fool around with somebody else’s country’. Though the correspondents loved the place, most adopted an increasingly earnest view of their mission, having identified a chasm between the relentless optimism of the US military, especially its 1962–64 commander Gen. Paul Harkins, and the realities as they observed them.

      From an early stage, MACV propagated wilful falsehoods and suppressed inconvenient truths, such as the fact that US aircrew were flying combat missions in VNAF cockpits, belatedly revealed when the Indianapolis News published letters home from Air Force captain ‘Jerry’ Shank which made nonsense of official denials. Shank wrote: ‘What gets me the most is that they won’t tell you people what we do over here … We – me and my buddies – do everything. The Vietnamese “students” we have on board are airmen basics … They’re stupid, ignorant sacrificial lambs, and I have no use for them. In fact I have been tempted to whip them within an inch of their life.’ The use of napalm was unacknowledged until photos of its flame sheets appeared in the press. Peter Arnett later revealed the use of CS lachrymatory gas, which was seized upon by hostile propagandists to mean poison gas, in the face of deafening MACV and Pentagon silence.

      Halberstam, then twenty-eight, started out as a True Believer, but by the autumn of 1962 had grown sceptical, writing in the New York Times: ‘This is a war fought in the presence of a largely uncommitted or unfriendly peasantry, by a government that has yet to demonstrate much appeal to large elements of its own people. The enemy is lean and hungry, experienced in this type of warfare, patient in his campaign, endlessly