Operation Starlite was heralded as a success throughout America’s military establishment and among America’s allies. The death of fifty-four Americans seemed a reasonable price for killing six hundred-some of the enemy. The operation showed that the wily and evil Viet Cong could be beaten with American fire power and mobility. There were Pollyanna predictions of bringing home U.S. troops soon. Few cared that in cities and towns in twenty-six states across the nations, Marine officers donned their dress blues and, accompanied by Navy chaplains, made difficult journeys to see the families of the fifty-four dead to tell them that their sons, their fathers, or their husbands had died heroically for their country. As these fifty-four families grieved their loss, fifty-four names were added to the debit side of the ledger. America’s blood debt to her own people had just taken its biggest single jump to that time. Few Americans or Vietnamese realized it, but Operation Starlite was just the first outpouring of what would become a flood of corpses from Vietnam to the United States.
Fewer than than three months later U.S. Army forces entered a terrible place called the Ia Drang Valley, where they inflicted a defeat on the North Vietnamese Army. But America’s debt made another quantum leap when it increased by nearly three hundred names, and three hundred more grieving families. The total liability, beginning with Major Buis and Master Sergeant Ovnand, was now 2,057.
By the end of 1965 the number would be 2,385.
Withdrawal from Vietnam, which could have been accomplished without too much furor just a few months earlier, had become an unacceptable option for the Johnson administration. How could the American President defend the expenditure of more than two thousand American lives with nothing to show for it?
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the numbers-driven optimist, was besieged by doubt regarding the ability of the United States to win the war militarily by “as early as late 1965 or early 1966.” Yet he made no real attempt to dissuade General Westmoreland from his bloody search-and- destroy strategy in favor of a pacification-driven effort combined with pressure on South Vietnam’s regime du jour to genuinely reform.
The Americans would have many more “victories” the likes of Starlite, but these would be measured in terms of the notorious “body count” rather than by any measure of winning over the Vietnamese people to the concept of Western democracy.
General Westmoreland promised that sooner or later the war would reach a “crossover point,” that the number of casualties inflicted on the communists would someday exceed the number of men they could replace. At this point, argued the general, the enemy forces would rapidly deteriorate in the face of continuing American and South Vietnamese victories. The crossover point proved to be ethereal; it was never reached because American planners had no real grasp of the determination of the Vietnamese people to expel foreigners from their soil. Long after the war, an American exclaimed to General Giap, “General, this war cost you over a million men.” To which the general simply replied, “Yes.”
America spent another ten years, and more than 56,000 additional lives, to follow a failed policy. Like gamblers who have already lost their gambling money, and then the rent money, and the car payment, and then the grocery money, and then borrowed or stole in the hope of changing their luck, the Johnson and Nixon administrations kept signing markers to America for a debt in gore that they hoped a reversal of fortune would justify.
Two months before Operation Starlite and the largest increases of American troops committed to the war, Lyndon Johnson expressed serious doubts to his intimates about whether America could win. Referring to the enemy, he told Senator Birch Bayh, “They hope they will wear us out. And I really believe they’ll last longer than we do.”
Americans have a tolerance for loss, but only to a point. As the number of grieving families passed the 10,000 mark, and then the 15,000 mark, public protest against the war began in earnest and steadily increased. By the time the blood debt hit 30,000 lives, popular opposition widened and support for the war began to melt away. The American crossover point had been reached, a goal the communists long kept in mind. In our case, obviously, it was not a question of losing men faster than we could replace them but a question of losing men faster than we were willing to replace them. Like the French public before it, the American public finally had enough.
Credibility with the American public was difficult to obtain when the administrations kept changing the reasons why Americans were being asked to sacrifice their sons. Hugh M. Arnold’s examination of the official justification of the war found that there were a total of twenty-two separate American rationales: From 1949 to 1962, the emphasis was on resisting communist aggression; from 1962 to 1968, it was on counterinsurgency; after 1968, it was on preserving the integrity of American commitments. The Pentagon Papers have shown us that, according to McNaughton, as early 1965 70 percent of the reason was preserving the integrity of American commitments. This argument might have washed in 1965, but it was unconvincing by 1968.
With no credible collateral to offer American families for their losses, the Johnson administration’s position on the war became very slippery and, when the violence of the 1968 Tet Offensive horrifically added to the debt, that position became untenable. In the two-and-a-half years between Starlite and the Tet Offensive the Vietnamese communists learned how to fight the Americans. They learned to deal with American fire power in the same manner in which they dealt with that of the French. They used “grab-them-by-the-belt” tactics—that is, when engaged they moved in as close as they could to their enemy in order to negate the effects of supporting arms, which would endanger American troops when employed too close to American lines. And they quickly learned ways around our highly vaunted technical advances, one at a time. They also knew that they could never defeat the United States militarily, nor her South Vietnamese ally as long as it had American backing. As with the French, they didn’t have to. Their goal was merely to not lose while they increased the number of coffins flowing toward America. That strategy hit dead center on America’s weakest strategic underpinning, the morale of her population.
Bloodshed among the South Vietnamese climbed to enormous proportions. It is estimated by one scholar that between 1965 and 1974 there were more than 1.1 million civilian war casualties in South Vietnam, of which more than three hundred thousand were deaths. With a population of approximately seventeen million, this represents deaths of about 1.8 percent of the population. The same percentage applied to the United States would have resulted in approximately 3,600,000 dead. The greater number of civilian casualties were caused by the intense and impersonal weaponry of the U.S. military and the ARVN. Nearly every South Vietnamese family was touched negatively by the war. It is fair to say that the Vietnamese peasant cared as little for the ideology of the North as he did for that of the South. But the VC worked on popular non-ideological support and tried very hard to pacify the people in their favor.
The U.S. military and ARVN continued to expend lives and treasure on a search-and-destroy policy that was too much search and too little destroy. So while the American government tried to explain away the blood debt to the American and Vietnamese peoples with the debased coinage of body count, the VC and NVA justified theirs to their fellow Vietnamese with the sounder currency of nationalism. It is one of the great tragedies of America and of Vietnam that American policymakers were not more familiar with Vietnam’s long history of dealing with foreign invaders. America’s enemy, at least after 1965, consistently and successfully portrayed the war as the result of American colonialism and painted the South Vietnamese as American puppets. Many Vietnamese who had no use for ideology of any shading found their traditional xenophobia fueled by a lengthening list of grievances over the war’s death and destruction.
The Marines and Army got into it early about pacification vis-à-vis conventional warfare in Vietnam. The Marines, who had decades of experience with the former, argued passionately in favor of pacification, along with its siblings, population control and counterinsurgency. The difference was institutional. The U.S. Army of the era was trained to fight masses of Soviet tanks on the central German plain, or to resist a Korea-style invasion. U.S. Army General Samuel “Hanging Sam” Williams, one of the early progenitors of the ARVN, trained it in this fashion. U.S. Army Colonel Harry Summers, in his book On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, describes the four pages in the U.S. Army Field Service Regulations, 1939 edition, regarding guerrilla war. Four pages! The Marines had an entire book devoted to insurgency warfare, the Small Wars Manual. Generals Krulak and Walt, and other senior officers, got their training as young officers under Marines who had fought insurrections led by Aguinaldo in the Philippines, Sandino in Nicaragua, and Charlemagne in Haiti. They understood that Vietnam was more political war than military. The U.S. Army’s institutional memory on insurrection was generally confined to their 19th century campaigns against Native American tribes. General Phil Sheridan’s infamous, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” reflected the search-and-destroy philosophy of that era.
A pacification process worthy of the name with a concomitant reform within the South Vietnamese government might have saved the effort. By leaving the enemy main-force units to rot in the mountains and jungles, and by dealing with the majority of the population that resides on the coastal plain, perhaps some real political progress could have been made. Such a plan would certainly have reduced both American and Vietnamese civilian casualties and prolonged public support for the war. But Army General Westmoreland was the boss, and he had the support of the President and even an increasingly doubtful Robert McNamara. President Johnson himself had been a lukewarm supporter of pacification. The President was an impatient man, anxious to get the war won and over with. His ear was bent toward those who promised victory on the World War II model. CIA Director John McCone remarked about his first meeting with the President on the subject of Vietnam, “Johnson definitely feels that we place too much emphasis on social reforms, he has very little tolerance with our spending so much time being ‘do-gooders …’” Nonetheless, by the 1966 war conference in Honolulu, Westmoreland was told to place more emphasis on pacification. The deputy ambassador to Vietnam, William J. Porter, commented at the conference that the watchword in Washington was to be pacification.” Presidents Johnson of the United States and Thieu of South Vietnam issued the “Honolulu Declaration” on February 8, 1966. It restated and confirmed this policy.
Despite these words from the top, General Westmoreland did little to change his large-unit philosophy. The general nearly doubled his requirements for battalion-size operations in the coming months, which severely reduced the assets available for pacification. He told General Walt that pacification did not have universal application within Vietnam and certainly not if it was “to the detriment of our primary responsibility for destroying main force enemy units.” So the meat grinder operations continued and the casualty lists grew and grew until the United States was forced into a humiliating withdrawal from the country.
The noted military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “…even the ultimate outcome of a war is not always to be regarded as final. The defeated state often considers the outcome merely a transitory evil, for which a remedy may still be found in political conditions at some later date.” Will this be the case with Vietnam?
Consider the following: The West has won the Cold War, of which the Vietnam War was an important part. In the 1960s more than 60 percent of the world’s population lived under governments that were, or claimed to be, communist. By 2000, except for Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and China, these governments are gone. Vietnam and China seem to be moving haltingly toward market economies, which can only flourish in liberal political surroundings. Cuba’s government will arguably change after the passing of Fidel Castro. North Korea remains a wild card, as do several totalitarian but non-communist regimes, such as Syria, Iran, Libya, and Belorus. It is beyond the scope of this book to determine the effect that economic loss to the Soviet Union in support of their client state, Vietnam, had on its own downfall. Suffice to say that the Evil Empire is dead.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was born behind the American bulwark in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. It has grown from five member countries in 1967 to a total of nine nations, including Vietnam, which joined in 1995. It includes such economic tigers as Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand as well as struggling nations such as Vietnam and Myamar. For those nations for which data is available, per capita income is an average of two hundred thirty times higher than it was during the 1960s, and life expectancy at birth has risen from an average of fifty-six years to sixty-nine years.
One of the first things that an American veteran of the war notices upon returning to Vietnam is the Pepsi Cola logo that entirely covers the shuttle buses that tourists take from the airplane to the terminal. Then there are the billboards. The first two on the way to Hanoi in 1997 were for BMW and MasterCard, hardly socialist icons. In the cities one sees signs for Hewlitt-Packard, Compaq, and Kodak. Whole city blocks are devoted to shops that sell Japanese and Korean appliances. The farmers now own land, and individuals own businesses. There are golf courses, high-rise office buildings, and luxury beach resorts. Everyone wants to be a capitalist. All the flight attendants on Vietnam Airlines speak excellent English and one other Asian language. Many Vietnamese in the cities, including small children, seem to want to say “Hello” in English. Other differences that a veteran will notice are the absences. Except for the occasional gate guards at military installations there are no armed men afoot. There is no barbed wire, no sandbags, no parachute flares at night, and no sounds of helicopters. There is scant evidence of the war even at the former American fire bases. All one can find at Con Thien, Khe Sanh, Gio Linh, and other battlefields and bases is the occasional sandbag shred sticking up from the ground and some shallow indentations where fighting holes once were.
Vietnam is at peace, it is unified, and is unlikely to be a threat to the region or the world. U.S. Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, returning from a trip to Vietnam, announced in March 2000 that the prospects of a military alliance between Vietnam and the United States were good.
