Читать книгу Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975 - Max Hastings, Sir Max Hastings, Max Hastings - Страница 30

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 self-critical, and above all, an enemy who has shown that he is willing to pay the price.’ When in December Halberstam informed his office about reporting restrictions imposed by Nhu and his creatures, the Times forwarded the protest to the State Department, which shrugged that Americans in Vietnam were guests of a sovereign state. This much was true: that when the regime persistently dismissed advice and imprecations from the US embassy, MACV and the CIA, it scarcely acted out of character in refusing to indulge hostile – and, in Diem’s eyes, considerably depraved – liberal journalists. Come to that, Jack Kennedy once telephoned the Times’s publisher to lean on him to shift its correspondent.

As for the American military’s pronouncements, Time’s Lee Griggs composed a song about its chief, to the tune of the hymn ‘Jesus Loves Me’:

We are winning, this I know,

General Harkins tells me so.

In the mountains, things are rough,

In the Delta, mighty tough,

But the V.C. will soon go,

General Harkins tells me so.

Homer Bigart wrote in a June 1962 valedictory dispatch for the New York Times that unless Diem mended his ways, either US combat troops would have to be committed, or the Saigon government replaced by a military junta. Newsweek’s François Sully was the daddy of them all, a Frenchman born in 1927 who had been around Saigon since 1945. He was by no means universally beloved by colleagues, and was suspected by some of being a communist, but his connections on both sides were impressive. In one of Sully’s last dispatches before being expelled by Diem, he cited Bernard Fall’s view that the politics were far more important than the tactics, yet the US Army was training the Southerners to resist a Korean-style invasion. Marine helicopters, he said, could not provide the Vietnamese with an ideology worth dying for. The piece was accompanied by a photo of Diem’s female militia captioned ‘The enemy has more drive and enthusiasm.’

Neil Sheehan said of the 1962–63 Saigon press corps: ‘We were a pretty serious bunch of guys: we found ourselves in conflict – very serious conflict – with the [US] command. You got pretty angry with the generals’ lying.’ Sheehan marvelled at the courage of some reporters, the cowardice of others: one New York paper’s reporter, he later recalled, ‘wouldn’t leave Saigon – he bribed operators for carbons of other correspondents’ despatches’. Then there were the adventurers, most of whom arrived somewhat later: a British freelancer ‘carried an M16 and killed people. Sean Flynn exulted about what a glorious thing street-fighting was.’ In Sheehan’s first weeks he himself toted a pistol in the field, ‘then I realised this was crazy’. He also stopped carrying a camera, because he decided that if you kept peering through a viewfinder, you didn’t see what was happening around you – and what might kill you.

Sheehan’s generation of reporters enjoyed a notable advantage over most of their successors in the twenty-first-century war-corresponding business: having themselves served in uniform, they were familiar with weapons and military ways. Nonetheless they recoiled from the racism they observed in many American soldiers, exemplified by a special forces colonel who said, ‘You don’t need to know the gook’s language ’cos he’s gonna be dead. We’re going to kill the bastards.’ Several of the correspondents’ group, Halberstam and Sheehan foremost among them, made national reputations in Vietnam, though some Americans, not all of them uniformed, went to their graves believing that the reporters betrayed their country while winning plaudits from media counterparts around the world.

The news story that unfolded on 2 January 1963 started out as a firefight between Diem’s soldiers and the Vietcong, but turned into a far more significant struggle between the US high command and the Saigon press corps, believers against unbelievers. The killing part was unleashed by Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, since mid-1962 senior adviser to the ARVN 7th Division. Vann, a wire-thin stick of ferocious energy and aggression, was weary of inconclusive encounters with the enemy. After US airborne electronic interceptors pinpointed transmissions from the Vietcong regional 514th Battalion in Ap Bac – ‘north hamlet’ – fourteen miles north-west of My Tho, the colonel was thrilled when Harkins’ headquarters ordered him to orchestrate a massive concentration of force to trap and destroy it: two local Civil Guard battalions; an infantry unit heli-lifted by ten American H-21 ‘flying bananas’, or ‘angle-worms’ as the Vietcong knew them; VNAF Skyraider ground-attack aircraft; five Bell Iroquois ‘Huey’ UH-1 gunships; a company of APCs – tracked armoured personnel-carriers; a battalion of paratroopers.

American intelligence was significantly mistaken about enemy strength in Ap Bac, estimated at 120 guerrillas. In addition to a reinforced company of the 514th VC Battalion, there was also present an over-strength company of the main force 261st, on its way to an operation elsewhere. This was considered an elite unit: women said that if you had to marry a soldier, it was best to choose one from the 261st. Its men were thoroughly experienced, having an average of more than two years’ service, senior cadres as much as five years. The total number of full-time Vietcong guerrilla fighters in the South had more than doubled since the previous year, to fifty thousand, the overwhelming majority in the Mekong delta. Although they relied heavily on captured arms, an increasing volume came by sea. Disguised fishing trawlers from the North delivered 112 tons of arms and ammunition in 1962, and this total would rise steeply to 4,289 tons in 1963–64 – far more than moved down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The 261st Battalion was largely composed of ‘returnees’ from exile in the North. It was led by Hai Hoang, whose real name was Nguyen Van Dieu, a popular commander considerate towards his men. Second-in-command was Tu Khue, tall, gaunt, bald and stern. A company commander, Bay Den, had an unusually smart social background in Saigon: his sister once arrived to see him, poled to the 261st’s camp in a rented sampan. She was appalled to find her brother digging a trench, and begged him to give it all up and come home. Den shook his head: he was committed, he said, and indeed he stayed until killed in action.

The Vietcong around Ap Bac on 2 January mustered 320 fighters, who had been tipped off that an attack by Saigon forces was coming. What John Vann did not know – though he would have welcomed the prospect – was that communist province chiefs had ordered Dieu and his comrades not to pull back as usual when the ARVN struck, but instead to stand and fight. Thus, foxholes and bunkers had been dug along the treeline fronting the hamlet. The defenders were well-armed and ammunitioned, mostly with captured American weapons: .30-calibre machine-guns, Browning automatic rifles, M-1 carbines, .45 Thompson sub-machine-guns. Most of the twelve hundred peasants in the adjoining hamlets of Ap Bac and Tan Thoi fled into the nearby swamps on hearing that a battle was imminent, but some thirty stayed to carry ammunition and casualties. The board was set for Vann’s game to be played.

Who were the human checkers on his side that morning? From beginning to end of the war, South Vietnam’s soldiers took most of its strain, grief and losses. Nothing did more to alienate peasants from the Saigon government than the draft, which stole workers from the paddy fields and made many newly-minted soldiers oppressors of country people in a region that was not their own, and thus to which they owed nothing. There were ghastly tales of ARVN callousness, some possibly true: of two riflemen wagering a pack of cigarettes on who could hit a child riding a water buffalo. In the war’s early years, 1955–59, only twenty-to-twenty-two-year-olds were conscripted, for twelve months. This was then increased to two years, and in 1964 to three. Once inducted, many South Vietnamese never escaped from green fatigues except in a wheelchair or body bag. A common factor between the US and the two Vietnams was that in all three societies, children of privilege were excused from military service. In the South their families paid a bribe, while in the North the offspring of senior cadres were dispatched to higher education abroad. Though the Southern army consumed 15 per cent of the nation’s GDP, its soldiers were paid a pittance. Most were posted to fighting units after five or six weeks’ perfunctory training, assured that they could learn on the job. An officer spoke for most of his comrades when he said: ‘The communists seemed to know why they were fighting, and we did not. Our political training emphasised Diem’s personality but not much else.’

John Vann’s plan for the morning of 2 January 1963 might have won a staff college commendation, had all its human elements acted as programmed. Instead of performing a balletic pincer movement, however, they descended on the battlefield as randomly as toys kicked out of a box. Early-morning fog delayed the infantry airlift, so that Civil Guard troops advancing on foot were first to bump the Vietcong, soon after 0700. When their leaders were shot down, they hugged the earth during a long, desultory exchange of fire. The government province chief, who was personally directing them, refused to order forward his second battalion. Soon after 1000, against Vann’s orders H-21s carrying an infantry company clattered down onto the paddy within easy shot of the ‘Victor Charlies’. Vietcong recruits were told they should not fear helicopters, soft targets made of cardboard pasted to metal frames. That morning at Ap Bac, this must have seemed true: communist fire quickly downed two of the old H-21s and mortally injured a third. A Huey that tried to rescue their American crews was shot full of holes, before toppling alongside the other wrecks.

The hapless infantry were going nowhere, stuck on open ground swept by enemy fire. Almost every helicopter in the sky above the battlefield was taking hits, and neither air strikes nor misdirected artillery fire made much impact on the defenders of Ap Bac. From a circling L-19 spotter plane Vann watched in raging frustration as his operation floundered in mud, blood and chaos. Ly Tong Ba, a captain commanding a company of armoured personnel-carriers, refused to advance to rescue the stranded infantry and aircrew: Vann’s histrionics over the radio roused his pride against succumbing to hectoring. ‘I’ve got a problem, Topper Six,’ Capt. Jim Scanlon, the adviser with Ba, radioed Vann ruefully. ‘My counterpart won’t move.’

‘Goddammit, doesn’t he understand this is an emergency?!’

‘He says “I don’t take orders from Americans.”’

Vann bellowed into the handset, ‘Ba! If you don’t get your vehicles across the canal I shall tell General Le Van Ty to sling you in jail!’

The Vietnamese belatedly ordered forward his company, which spent the ensuing two hours struggling to cross dykes and canals: the little captain forever afterwards argued that neither Vann nor Scanlon recognised the difficulties of overcoming the water obstacles. When the M-113s’ .50-calibre machine-gunners finally engaged, several were shot off the exposed steel hulls by Vietcong whose positions were so skilfully camouflaged in the banana and coconut groves that few attackers glimpsed an enemy all day. When one carrier attempted to use its flamethrower, the crew proved to have mixed the fuel wrongly, so that the jet drooped to a trickle. Around 1430 the armoured crabs began to pull back; a further two helicopters were forced down by enemy fire.

Vann’s L-19 made repeated deck-level passes as he strove in vain to identify Vietcong positions, and to energise the stalled ground movements. At 1805 a mass parachute drop from seven USAF C-123s yielded a crowning disaster: the troops landed half a mile off their intended DZ, within easy range of Vietcong in Tan Thoi, whose fire ploughed into them, killing nineteen paras and wounding thirty-three, including two Americans. When darkness fell, the communists still held almost all the ground they had occupied at first light, and experienced no difficulty in slipping away to the sanctuary of the nearby Plain of Reeds.

The guerrillas did not have the day’s fight all their own way, losing eighteen men killed and thirty-five wounded, most to artillery and air strikes. On Saigon’s side, however, three Americans had been killed and five wounded, along with sixty-three Vietnamese dead and 109 wounded. Back in May’s Landing, New Jersey, a seven-year-old boy cried out in excitement as he watched a TV clip of a helicopter door-gunner in action, ‘Look, there’s my daddy!’ Just six hours later, a telegram arrived to report the death of his father, crew chief William Deal, in a Huey outside Bac.

The media experience of next day, 3 January, however, exercised a greater influence on the history of the war than did the battle itself. Paul Harkins, MACV’s supremo, descended on IV Corps headquarters to cheerlead a renewed assault on Ap Bac. He told David Halberstam and Peter Arnett, ‘We’ve got [the Vietcong] in a trap, and we’re going to spring it in half an hour.’ Unfortunately, the journalists knew that the enemy were long gone, and thus that the South Vietnamese ‘assault’ was a pantomime. Harkins’ remark suggested that the general was either a fool or a wilful deceiver – probably the former, because he never looked further into any situation than he wished to see.

A few miles away, matters got worse. Neil Sheehan and Nick Turner of Reuters reached the previous day’s battlefield to find the Southern soldiers unwilling to handle their own and the Americans’ dead: the disgusted journalists themselves loaded the corpses aboard helicopters. Then, as they talked to US brigadier-general Robert York, an Alabaman World War II veteran, artillery support for the new ‘assault’ started to thump in around them, blasting up geysers of mud. York said to Sheehan, ‘Jesus Christ, run for your life, boy.’ They bolted across the rice paddy before throwing themselves to the ground, Sheehan convinced that he was about to die. When the shelling stopped they rose covered with filth. York remained almost pristine, however, having adopted a press-up posture in the dirt. He shrugged, ‘I didn’t want to get my cigarettes wet.’ Sheehan said ruefully, ‘Never mess with a man who’s so calm under fire.’ Fifty rounds had landed in the vicinity, killing four ARVN soldiers and wounding twelve. The enraged infantry battalion commander drew his pistol and shot in the head the young lieutenant acting as forward observer for the artillery.

The defeat at Bac was less militarily significant than – for instance – a 1960 action at Tua Hai in Tay Ninh province, in which the communists also beat a much larger government force. The difference was that at Tua Hai there had been no foreign witnesses, while now the sharpest correspondents in Vietnam were in the bleachers. Sheehan wrote later, ‘We knew this was the biggest story we had ever encountered.’ The dispatches of himself and Halberstam quoted anonymously an American adviser who condemned the Southern showing on 2 January as ‘a miserable damn performance’, at a moment when Harkins was still insisting that Bac was a victory. Few people, including the general, doubted that the dismissive words came from John Vann, and he demanded the colonel’s head.

MACV finally decided that it would be more prudent to allow this galvanic but famously indiscreet officer to complete his tour in March as scheduled. Vann’s influence on the war would thereafter wax and wane until its dramatic termination almost a decade later, but in 1963 he played a critical role in providing authoritative briefings to Sheehan, Halberstam and others about the bungling and pusillanimity that characterised Southern operations, and the deceits practised to conceal these. The colonel warned Maj. Gen. Bruce Palmer that Harkins was allowing himself to be duped by Saigon’s officers, who routinely assaulted objectives they knew to be untenanted by the enemy. It was nonetheless the Harkins version that Maxwell Taylor and Robert McNamara chose to believe. Frances Fitzgerald later wrote in her influential history Fire in the Lake: ‘The United States had … made the Saigon government into a military machine whose sole raison d’être was to fight the Communists. The only difficulty was that the machine did not work.’ The ARVN was not an army ‘but a collection of individuals who happened to be carrying weapons’. This was an overstatement, but contained a core of truth.

The Ap Bac affair prompted extensive media comment. Arthur Krock wrote in his syndicated column on 9 January: ‘No amount of US military assistance can preserve independence for a people who are unwilling to die for it.’ Richard Hughes, a Hong Kong-based Australian veteran who wrote for the London Sunday Times, said that he saw clear parallels with US follies in China after World War II. The best the Americans were promising, he said, was a ten-year war to preserve a ‘reactionary, isolated, unpopular’ regime. The only way out, he suggested, was for the Saigon government to admit communists to a coalition.

Within Vietnam, word spread swiftly about the fiasco. A Vietnamese officer wrote that Ap Bac ‘greatly hurt ARVN morale’. Ly Tong Ba, who rose to become a general, later denounced Neil Sheehan, ‘who only wrote articles filled with malicious arguments and inaccuracies’. He also argued that his own adviser on the ground at Bac, Jim Scanlon, was as ‘terrified’ of Vann as of the Vietcong, which prompted him also to paint a false picture of events. The press coverage was seized upon by MACV officers, and by others who deplored ‘negative’ reporting, as highlighting the difficulties of fighting a war covered by a media which recognised no obligation to favour ‘our side’ – meaning the US and its South Vietnamese client – as had been the patriotic duty of every correspondent in World War II, when the press was additionally constrained by censorship.

It remains as difficult now as it was then to see virtue in Gen. Harkins’ attempts to deny the real state of affairs. The maxim obtains for all those who hold positions of authority, in war as in peace: lie to others if you must, but never to yourselves. MACV’s chief could make a case for talking nonsense to Halberstam and Arnett, but he was peddling the same fairy tales in top-secret cables to Washington. Nonetheless, a valid criticism persists of the media’s coverage throughout the war: the critics got bang to rights the shortcomings of the Diem regime and its successors, but gave nothing like the same attention to the blunders and horrors perpetrated by the communists. Halberstam, Sheehan and the rest conscientiously and sometimes brilliantly fulfilled their duty, to tell what they saw and heard; Saigon’s apologists, exemplified by Time magazine, destroyed their own credibility by denying unpalatable realities. The South was only half the rightful story, however. Much of the media showed itself ignorant of or blind to the tyranny prevailing in the North, which was inflicting worse hardships on its own people.

An Australian surgeon who served as a civilian volunteer down at Vung Tau wrote later: ‘It seems fair to say what is usually left unsaid, that if the economic aid to South Vietnam had not been prevented by the activities of the Vietcong, the people of the country which today is war-torn and unhappy would have been well-fed, in better health and better-educated.’ Frances Fitzgerald concluded her powerful 1972 account of America in Indochina with an expression of yearning for North Vietnamese victory, for a moment when ‘“individualism” and its attendant corruption give way to the discipline of the revolutionary community’. American officials, she wrote, might attribute this to the triumph of brainwashing by ‘hard-core Communists’. Not so, she asserted: ‘It will simply mean that the moment has arrived for the narrow flame of revolution to cleanse the lake of Vietnamese society.’ Here was a view of the war that seems as delusional at one end of the political spectrum as was that of Gen. Harkins and his kind at the other.