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

both sides. Thereafter, the NVA and NLF forces would avoid large battles with American forces, owing to the superiority of American firepower and air support in such confrontations, preferring to engage their enemy using hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, in which they were successful. On the American side, punitive excursions beyond the original perimeter soon escalated, accompanied by annual incremental increases in troop levels. The “Americanization” phase of the war had begun in earnest.

In the 1980s, conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan attempted to “rewrite” the history of the Vietnam War as a noble cause doomed by faint-hearted policies that ensured that the US would not prevail, a notion that many military men and civilians would claim thereafter, expressed in the popular phrase “they wouldn’t let us win.” What they evidently thought had been lacking was a policy that resembled Air Force General Curtis LeMay’s notorious advice to “bomb ‘em back to the stone age.” Given the international pressures of the period, however, of which Johnson and his advisors were well aware, unrestricted warfare waged on a civilian population was never an option. During the 1964 presidential campaign, the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater had talked about using nuclear weapons in Vietnam, making the incumbent Johnson appear so restrained by comparison that the latter was actually elected as the “peace candidate.”41 Johnson, however, soon gave into the pressures of the civilian advisors he had inherited from Kennedy and waged a more aggressive war to achieve the long desired but elusive military victory, including, one month before the landing of the first ground forces, a long-range bombing campaign, “Operation Rolling Thunder,” designed, in the expression of the period, “to bring North Vietnam to its knees.” In their persistence in the use of bombing to secure submission, however, the US leaders seriously underestimated Vietnamese endurance. Stanley Karnow wrote that President Johnson “eventually failed because he misjudged the enemy’s capacity to withstand pain, believing there was a threshold to their endurance.” 42

General LeMay, Defense Secretary McNamara, and presidential advisor Walt W. Rostow firmly believed in the effectiveness of long-range bombing to win the war. Significantly, all three men had participated directly in the long-range bombing campaign of Germany during World War II: McNamara had masterminded the campaign, LeMay had commanded it, and Rostow had selected targets. And yet, so-called “precision bombing” during that war had a poor record: the postwar U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey found that both civilian resistance and German industrial production actually seemed to increase after the bombing. It was the inaccuracy of this strategy that eventually led to “area bombing,” which increased civilian casualties, and, as Paul Fussell has suggested, led “inevitably, as intensification overrode scruples, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”43 The lone dissenter among Johnson’s civilian advisors was George Ball, who had apparently learned something from his participation in the bombing campaign of the earlier war. As a result of his dissension and persistent opposition to escalating the Vietnam War, however, Ball became increasingly isolated from Johnson’s “hawks” and from the president himself.

The other civilian advisors only disagreed with General LeMay’s call for the unrestricted nature of the bombing of the previous war. They supported bombing but insisted on selected targets to avoid population centers and the international censure that would surely follow. They mistakenly thought, however, that bombing would—again, in the face of evidence from the last war, which suggested that such attacks actually hardened the will of the enemy—weaken the morale of the civilian population and make Ho Chi Minh give in, or at least negotiate a settlement on favorable terms. The strategy of a limited bombing campaign would also have the advantage of being easier to control from Washington, where the targets were actually selected on a daily basis by Johnson and his civilian advisors.44

Air power would turn out to be militarily effective only toward the end of the US intervention, in the “Linebacker” campaign (1972) ordered by Nixon in response to the NVA’s major three-pronged offensive against South Vietnam after the withdrawal of nearly half a million US troops. Without the American presence on the ground, the NVA commander, General Giap (the victor of Dien Bien Phu), who had successfully waged the war for the north up to that time, finally adopted “the conventional, large-unit tactics that American air-forces are highly trained to counter.”45 This more unrestricted bombing campaign, however, which illegally extended the war into Cambodia, only temporarily saved South Vietnam from collapse. Despite earlier fears of losing prestige by abandoning the intervention in Vietnam, the bombing aroused, as critics had anticipated earlier, worldwide condemnation and accusations of genocide.

In 1967, a large operation involving thousands of American and South Vietnamese forces, called “Operation Cedar Falls,” was launched with the aim of finding the long suspected headquarters of the NVA.46 It failed in that elusive objective but it did uncover an extensive underground network of tunnels in the area called the Iron Triangle, which revealed the extent of the military resistance to Diem in the south. In the same year, McNamara testified to a Senate subcommittee that the bombing raids had not achieved the twin objectives of reducing the flow of supplies from north to south and undermining the morale of the North Vietnamese, which were their original justification.

The turning-point of the war has been seen by most commentators as the Tet Offensive of January 31, 1968, the all-out NVA and NLF surprise attack on South Vietnamese and American government installations in Saigon and other cities that was, according to historian David Schmitz, “arguably, the most important event of the Vietnam War,”47 for it changed the American public’s perception of the possibility for victory and forced the US government to reevaluate. At great human cost to the oppositional forces—more than 80,000 of their troops were killed or captured—units from both north and south drove into the seven largest cities of South Vietnam and thirty provincial capitals from the Delta to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) but were eventually repulsed after savage fighting. The Tet offensive was designed by the North Vietnamese planners to instigate a general insurrection among the South Vietnamese population, in which mission it failed. On the other side, the outcome was regarded by the US press as an American military victory but a psychological and political defeat.48 In the end, Halberstam insists, “it was not American arms and American bravery or even American determination that failed in Vietnam; it was American political estimates, both of this country and of the enemy.”49

      The year of the Tet Offensive revealed that the war was tearing American society apart. In March, Lieutenant William Calley led Charlie Company of the Americal Division’s 11th Brigade into the group of villages known as My Lai and perpetrated the massacre of up to four-hundred civilians, an atrocity that shocked the American public. The general feeling was: how could our boys behave like Nazis? President Johnson, buffeted by a long series of setbacks, announced that he would not seek re-election. Violence escalated at home as protests against the war became ever more numerous and aggressive. In August, a group of antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic convention in Chicago was savagely set upon by Mayor Daly’s police as the nation watched on television. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke out against the war and encouraged a united effort by civil rights and antiwar organizations, was assassinated in April. And Robert Kennedy, who was expected to step in as the Democratic candidate to bring a halt to the war, was assassinated in June.

In November, Richard Nixon, with only 43% of the vote, was elected president, promising an “honorable” end to the war (as Eisenhower’s Vice-President back in 1954, Nixon had wanted to send American troops to bail out the French at Dien Bien Phu, an idea that was squelched by Eisenhower). Instead of withdrawing from the war, Nixon instead extended it for several more years, undermining