"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War. Tom Burns

figure who will appear as a model for a character in several novels that will be discussed in these pages. The SMM was to enter Vietnam quietly and assist the Vietnamese, not the French, in unconventional warfare, with the French being retained as friendly allies.

      The following years saw Ngo Dinh Diem as the USA’s favorite anti-Communist, although his increasingly autocratic rule alienated American leaders, who tried to link US financial and military aid to governmental reforms on his part, which he resented and often ignored. When he and especially his powerful brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, who were Catholics, began to repress the protests of the Buddhist majority, which led to the self-immolations of Buddhist monks that shocked world opinion, the popularity of the government dropped to an all-time low. Popular discontent focused on Nhu and his outspoken wife, known as Madame Nhu (who notoriously referred to the Buddhist monks’ suicides as “barbecue”). Eventually, the Ngo brothers would be ousted by a coup of conspiring military commanders with the direct connivance of the CIA and its experienced operator Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, a veteran of the Indochina war.

The Pentagon’s secret study shows that “Kennedy knew and approved of plans for the military coup d’état that overthrew President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963.”27 The Ngo brothers were assassinated only a few weeks before Kennedy himself perished by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas (it is noteworthy that Kennedy had championed the Catholic anti-Communist Diem back in the 1950s, well before he became the US president). The Pentagon study points out that Diem’s ouster presented an excellent opportunity for the US to disengage from South Vietnam and the taint of propping up an oppressive and anti-democratic government, but the effect was that US officials discovered that the war against the NLF had been much worse than had been thought and decided that it therefore ought to do more, not less, for the South Vietnamese government. The Pentagon Papers concludes that “by supporting the anti-Diem coup the US had inadvertently deepened its involvement.”28

The argument for direct military intervention was based on the alleged aggression of North Vietnam, which continued to be cited as an example of Communist bad faith. US officials always claimed that the National Liberation Front, the so-called Viet Cong, was merely the southern arm of North Vietnam and was controlled by Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital. In fact, the NLF was founded and sustained as a southern organization of resistance to Diem—a CIA report of December 1964 confirmed the NLF’s indigenous origins at that late date.29 Butterfield, in his chapter on the origins of the insurgency in the Pentagon Papers account, confirms that “the war began largely as a rebellion in the South against the increasingly oppressive and corrupt regime of Ngo Dinh Diem.”30 He goes on to argue that North Vietnam was “concentrated on its internal development.” The cadre members who remained in the south after the division of the country were ordered to engage only in “political struggle.” They evidently believed that they would eventually wrest control of the country through elections or through the collapse of the Diem regime from its own internal weakness.31

In any case, the Pentagon study makes it clear that the provocation for war initiated with the Americans: “an elaborate program of covert military operations against the state of North Vietnam” began in February 1964.”32 Covert operations included U-2 spy plane reconnaissance, the kidnapping of people for intelligence information, parachuting psyche war and sabotage teams into North Vietnam, commando raids to blow up bridges, and the bombardment of coastal installations by PT boats.33 Bombing raids that began in Laos against North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao (Communist guerrilla) troops were a prelude to the bombing of North Vietnam by the Johnson administration “to bring more military pressure against North Vietnam.”34 The bombing of North Vietnam increased as the NLF rebellion was prosecuted successfully in the South.35 The inability of the post-coup Saigon government under General Khanh to compete politically with Hanoi negated the possibility of a political settlement between the Vietnamese themselves, because it was believed that “it would result in a Communist take-over and the destruction of the American position in South Vietnam.36 What American officials and politicians insisted was the North Vietnamese “aggression” that prevented a peaceful settlement must be seen in this context.37

The pretext for the hot war came with the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident (August 1964), in which two US Navy destroyers in North Vietnamese waters, on a spying mission for the NSA, were said to have been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. A top secret analysis of the incident completed in 2000, however, “concluded that the second attack, the one actually used to justify the war, never took place.” Instead, NSA officials withheld 90% of the information on the incident from the Johnson administration officials, except for what “supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers.” The alleged attack, based on this misinformation, led to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which justified President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on North Vietnam without a formal declaration of war from Congress, as required by the US Constitution.38

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed on August 7, 1964, unanimously in the House and with the only two dissenting votes in the Senate cast by Wayne Morse and Ernest Greuning, who would later become leading opponents of the war. The resolution gave the executive broad authority to act and had no time limit, but it gave misleading assurances that the US would not escalate its involvement. Senator Morse said the US had provoked the attacks on the ships in the Tonkin Gulf by escorting South Vietnamese boats too close to the shore, charged the government with a “snowjob” about the attacks on northern coastal installations, and correctly foresaw disastrous consequences. Historian Robert D. Schulzinger notes that between August 1964 and July 1965, the US passed the “point of no return” in Vietnam, with the role of troops changing from advisors to combatants and the number of troops doubling.”39

The shift from advisors to combatants is one way of officially dating the beginning of the American Vietnam War. In March 1965, General Westmoreland, in what Stanley Karnow calls “one of the crucial decisions of the war,” requested a detachment of 3,500 Marines to be based in Da Nang, purportedly to protect the air base, which was the beginning of his repeated requests for more men. The build-up would reach almost 200,000 men by the end of that year. This first contingent of American ground forces (i.e. not counting the Special Forces units and other personnel already acting as advisors to the South Vietnamese Army) stirred up no political opposition because President Johnson presented it as a temporary expedient.40 In accordance with Johnson’s newly aggressive posture, the era of the US advisors to South Vietnam in the first half of the 1960s therefore drew to a close, and with the arrival of these combat troops a new phase of the war began with optimistic but generally ineffective operations both in the air and on the ground, which lasted until the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive of 1968, when the earlier optimism began to be replaced by serious doubt.

      General Maxwell Taylor, a commander in the Korean War, wanted these early combat troops to maintain merely a defensive role, authorizing patrols into a surrounding but limited area, but General William C. Westmoreland, an administrative commander with little experience in combat leadership, had no confidence in the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) and insisted that US forces actively seek out and engage the enemy—the notorious “Search and Destroy” strategy, which prevailed from 1965 forward. In one of few major battles of the war, the Army’s 1st Air Cavalry Division