Читать книгу Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975 - Max Hastings, Sir Max Hastings, Max Hastings - Страница 33

A general soothed the impatience of Lt. Don Snider on his passage to Vietnam, saying, ‘Son, there’s going to be enough war for everybody.’ Snider, born in 1940, hailed from an Ohio cattle-farming family. He had loved West Point, ‘because it represented the kind of values I had been raised with’, and in 1964 found himself training and advising Vietnamese special forces. All the Americans who served in those early days went by choice, found thrills and also frustrations. Snider made operational parachute descents near the junction of the Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian borders: ‘When I jumped out of the plane at night, I couldn’t have told you what country we were over.’ They landed atop triple-canopy jungle, then roped themselves to the ground. He loved some of his American comrades, especially a formidable NCO named Sgt. Zahky. ‘What an opportunity it was, to go to war with somebody like that!’ he said wonderingly. After days and nights of probing the enemy’s territory, the hard part was to make the rendezvous with extraction helicopters.

Snider never bonded effectively with his men, most of them Nungs – ethnic Chinese: ‘In three tours I never really got to know them, to work out whom to trust. They were mercenaries. They said, “If you pay me, I’ll fight.” Eventually, however, the pay wasn’t enough.’ Snider completed seven deep recon missions before transferring to the delta to train and lead local defence forces on the Cambodian border. They ran into some bad ambushes while searching for Lt. Nick Rowe, a Texan SF man held by the Vietcong for five years. Snider came out of one clash humping a wounded interpreter on his back, and with bulletholes in their radio: ‘There was no will among the Vietnamese people I was with. I thought: if this is the way we are going to fight this war, it is not going to be a successful proposition.’ By his tour’s end, ‘I didn’t want to do any more with special forces or with the Vietnamese. I wasn’t disillusioned with war – experience had just taught me that what I was doing wasn’t worth it.’

Snider came to believe that the only advisers who accomplished worthwhile things were those who, unlike himself, forged relationships with local people. Frank Scotton, soon after arriving in country, rode in a jeep with a sergeant who waved and smiled extravagantly at every civilian they passed. Scotton asked, why the big show? The driver replied, ‘If I get captured, I want the Vietnamese to remember me as a big, dumb, friendly American.’ Helicopter door-gunner Erik Dietrich loved his ARVN comrades, among whom he ferried many wounded back from battlefields – or maybe not: ‘They died quietly, sometimes even with what I took to be an apology for the inconvenience and mess they were causing.’ Dietrich nonetheless admitted embarrassment when a little paratrooper whom he befriended tried to hold hands. ‘His last letter wandered about the country for a time before finding me: “A month missing you. I couldn’t help remembering of our working days. I never forget … I wish you a good luck on your way of duty. And when we see each other again, I shall give you a good narration.”’ Dietrich reflected sadly later: ‘The “narration” never got told. Nguyen Chanh Su, Vo Van Co, Bong Ng-Huu. What became of you all? Pham Gia Cau, you dear brave man who fought at Dienbienphu and walked south at the partition, to whose capabilities I unhesitatingly entrusted my life, you are ever in my prayers …’

Yet some Americans were driven almost to despair. On 1 March 1964 foreign service officer Doug Ramsey wrote home to his parents: ‘The fabric of this government is rotten to the core, and from top to bottom. You pull a lever and find that there is no cable attached to it; and if you manage to get hold of a cable, there’s nothing on the far end of that, either … Unless we are willing to promote real revolutionary change, I’m afraid I must agree with those who say we have no business being here. If we cannot offer the people of Vietnam anything better than a protracted struggle … If we merely continue to … bolster a feudal regime that is doomed anyway … we cannot expect real support.’

Ramsey later became assistant to John Vann, out of the army and serving as regional pacification chief in the delta. He described the colonel starting with ‘the small, determined, reverse-slanting eyes, somewhat reminiscent of the movie star Lloyd Bridges, which transfixed you like blue-gray laser beams. His voice was slightly harsh, with a southern Virginia accent. He was fairly short, with blond hair thinning in front; and at forty-one, he was beginning to develop a slight paunch.’ Ramsey respected Vann’s ‘animal physical vitality’, which persisted through sixteen hours of every twenty-four, and the man’s competitiveness: ‘He wanted to know everything about everything and everybody. With his prodigious memory and eye for detail, he could have been an immensely successful administrator … save that he cherished a passion for action. He described himself as a Virginia redneck at heart, and maybe he was. His loyalty to friends and loathing for foes were absolutes. He was also a fabulous networker, cultivating ruthlessly and usually successfully the acquaintanceship of anyone who might fit his purposes.’ Superbly athletic, he could perform a somersault from a standing start and was a showy volleyball player.

Lt. Gen. Fred Weyand said, ‘He was one guy I would have trusted with my life.’ Ramsey described Vann as fanatically self-disciplined about everything save sex: ‘John’s idea of relaxation was to have two sisters on the same night, but I had no right to complain, because he offered to cut me in.’ He believed that for all Vann’s manic womanising, this muddled man retained a deep love for Mary-Jane, the former wife whom he had betrayed so often. Army captain and adviser Gordon Sullivan admired Vann’s grasp of Vietnamese realities, rather than games played to please Americans. ‘He’d say: “I’m not interested in the dog and pony show.” A lot of the opposition to him came from jealousy.’

Such thoughtful men as Doug Ramsey were alternately exasperated by failures of US policy and revolted by communist savagery – the latter’s atrocities took place daily: ‘shooting into school yards in the hope of getting three ARVN soldiers amidst fifty children, or killing dozens of civilians in restaurants or on the streets to chalk up two Americans; mortaring towns willy-nilly to terrorise; assassinating unarmed teachers and murdering disarmed PoWs; killing female friends of GVN officers, as well as the officers themselves’. Ramsey urged that a successful pacification programme must work through small local advisory groups, unashamedly modelled on communist cells.

He and Frank Scotton once arrived in a hamlet unannounced, and entered its chief’s courtyard to find a cluster of black-pyjamaed men, obviously NLF, conferring within. They scowled at the newcomers, but made no hostile move since both Americans were armed. The hamlet chief assured both groups that if everybody stuck to his own business, nothing unpleasant need happen. The communists eventually recognised the comedy of the situation and posed for photos. Nonetheless, when the Americans drove away, they were relieved there had been no High Noon. And sobered to witness the freedom with which the enemy transacted business in broad daylight, within an hour’s drive south-west of Saigon.

For all its difficulties and frustrations Ramsey, like Scotton and Vann, loved the life. While rejecting Lawrence of Indochina comparisons, he liked to see himself as Spartacus, ‘though look what happened to him’. He wrote: ‘At worst, being in Nam provided one with opportunities to pander to and magnify childhood macho self-images: the heroic swashbuckler, rifle in one hand and candy for the kids in the other, by day doing his thing for God, country, democracy and free enterprise, in an environment providing enough danger to keep the blood running fast, the stories flowing and building, the promotions coming through – and by night being able to sample all that Saigon had to offer. In the words of Tom Lehrer’s 1953 “Old Dope Peddler”: in Vietnam, while doing good you could also do very well indeed.’ More than Lehrer’s satirical ballad, however, Ramsey became increasingly obsessed with the music of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem.

The CIA’s Frank Snepp came to Vietnam later, but was cast in the same mould. He was the son of a fiercely establishment ex-Marine colonel and subsequent judge, with whom he had a troubled relationship. The most loving bond of his childhood in North Carolina was with his black nanny. His best claims to employment by the CIA on leaving Columbia’s School of International Affairs, he wrote, were ‘Aryan blood, a country-club mentality, and an immense capacity for dissembling’. He might have added, good looks that enabled him to sleep with an astonishing range of girls, some of them employed by the Agency. His critics called him priapic, though he would have preferred the word romantic. Two weeks into Snepp’s first tour as an intelligence officer, the Pilatus Porter in which he was crossing the Mekong delta took rounds in the wings from communist small arms, and the twenty-six-year-old exulted, murmuring to himself, ‘I love it! My God, I love it.’ He said later: ‘It was simply great. I fell in love with Vietnam and the Vietnamese … I believed that if the CIA generated the right intelligence and got it to the right people, we could really make a difference for the better.’

Harry Williams started working as a wireless eavesdropper in April 1964, and embraced the assignment eagerly: ‘This was a good war, a wonderful war. We were cowboys. I loved the work, and felt I was making a real contribution. I felt assured of the rightness of our cause, and that we would win.’ He left his pregnant wife Peggy at home in the US, and rented a Saigon apartment. Because he could speak their language, Vietnamese neighbours branded him ‘the Frenchman’. He travelled extensively around the country chatting to local people in those days before wandering became prohibitively perilous. One day up near Danang, a village elder asked him in puzzlement, ‘Why did they kill Kennedy?’ Williams found that many Vietnamese grasped the notion that the president had been seeking to help them, and vaguely suspected that his death might have been linked to this. The American decided that the default political stance of most local people was indifference to both sides: ‘The average Joe on the street really couldn’t care less, except to stay alive.’

The longer sensitive Americans stuck around, the more they lamented the change coming over Saigon. The tall plane trees on Tu Do were felled, and traffic doubled. Old hand Howard Simpson said: ‘The sleepy colonial capital had become a crowded, dirty wartime metropolis.’ Adviser Col. Sid Berry wrote: ‘Saigon has greatly changed … It has grown crowded, vulgar, glossy, commercial, grasping, greedy, dirty, tinny. Too many Americans. Far too many Americans. Who drive up prices, attract the cheap and gaudy and tasteless.’

The tempo of the war rose steadily. Williams often dined at the Brasserie, a little restaurant behind the Rex cinema run by a French-Vietnamese woman named Helene. One night in August when he entered, she greeted him by saying seriously, ‘You should eat somewhere else.’ Sure enough, an hour later the place was bombed. That summer, Williams was assigned to a team monitoring North Vietnamese infiltration on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. They established a base at Khe Sanh, close to the western end of the DMZ, less than three miles from the border with Laos, where a special forces A Team was already ensconced. The key personnel were civilians from Syracuse University Research Corporation, a body created by the Office of Naval Intelligence. Their technology was dubbed POSSUM: Portable Signal Unscramble Monitoring System.

The plan was to plant sensors on nearby Hill 1701. On 28 May an H-34 airlifted Marine Capt. Al Gray and three Vietnamese to clear the summit with defoliants. Gray was an austere, dedicated warrior who relished the drollery that his ARVN sergeant had once commanded a Vietminh machine-gun company: ‘He was a great warrior.’ On the mountain, matters went sour: within hours of their arrival rain and mist descended – and stayed down for thirty days, preventing the team’s extraction. They subsisted for a while on starvation rations, then decided they must walk out. The descent went without incident save the usual leeches and big animals, until they emerged from the jungle to confront a man bathing: VC. They shot him, then bolted towards Khe Sanh. For the last six miles Gray carried a wounded man, earning himself a Bronze Star. The electronic monitoring eventually got started.

Many of that first crop of Americans were earnest men who feared God as well as honouring the flag. Sid Berry wrote to his wife Anne: ‘A good rest this weekend. Needed it. Now back to the fray. 101 sit-ups, 40 push-ups, 30 waistbands, two chapters of Romans, a shave, shower and now a letter to thee.’ Even some of those who spent fewer hours with their bibles than did the good colonel were less preoccupied with bargirls than legend suggests. A newly-arrived special forces NCO looked in awe at the filth coating Frank Scotton and his team after days in the hills and said, ‘Gee, after your experiences I bet you guys go wild with the ladies when you get into town.’ Scotton disabused him – their first priorities were always the same: a bath and decent sleep in a clean bed.

A few Vietnamese managed to enjoy the war, including Nguyen Van Uc, who clocked six thousand hours as a helicopter pilot. ‘I loved flying,’ he said, ‘and got huge satisfaction from doing the job when it went right.’ Most of his countrymen, however, took a bleaker view. One morning in August 1964, Lt. Phan Nhat Nam of Saigon’s 7th Airborne approached a bunker entrance in an apparently deserted village. ‘Anyone down there?’ shouted one of his men, then turned to Nam. ‘Lieutenant, let me toss a grenade in.’ Nam, twenty-one years old and experiencing his first operation, told the soldier instead to fire a burst from his Thompson.

This prompted an old man slowly to emerge, sobbing, carrying an old woman with a hideous head wound. He laid her on the ground before bowing solemnly in all four directions. Nam felt shocked by the spectacle, together with that of two dead teenage Vietcong in a nearby ditch, the first enemy corpses he had seen. This was a Catholic community, and in its church he found five more bodies – those of a husband and wife clutching three children to their breasts, all killed by blast, as had been a young girl he found nearby, her purple blouse flapping in the breeze. Nam wrote: ‘I felt stunned and found it hard to breathe, in a daze from my anger and sense of boundless grief.’

Next day, as his battalion swept through an almost abandoned village amid occasional bursts of enemy fire, he found a young woman sitting silent on the brick floor of a wrecked house, holding a wicker basket: ‘her eyes looked straight ahead in a blank, stupefied stare’. She stood up as the soldiers entered and Hieu, the radio-operator, slipped past her into the ruined kitchen, to search for food. Nam asked why the girl lingered in the midst of a battlefield. When he gestured towards her with his pistol, ‘she remained silent, her stunned eyes emitting a flash of terror. Suddenly, as if performing a gymnastic exercise, she thrust out the basket towards me. It contained two sets of clothing, blouses and pants, a head-scarf and a small paper package tightly secured with a rubber band. When I opened it, I saw two gold-strand necklaces and a pair of earrings. Hieu muttered behind my back: “This bitch is crazy. She’s got so scared she’s insane.” Then he caught the glint of the necklaces. “Gold! It must be more than one tael