CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHE GUEVARA WAS HAULING ass out of Africa the last we heard of him. The Simbas proved to be a poor investment for Castro and the commies, so Khrushchev concentrated his support elsewhere. Communist presence in the Congo collapsed.

I went home.

While I was away, DCI John McCone resigned in a dispute with President Johnson over the Defense Department’s takeover of CIA covert responsibilities in Vietnam. Kicking out the CIA left the agency in turmoil, confused by exactly what government expected of it not only in Vietnam but in other hot spots around the world. A man I trusted and valued for his cool common sense was replaced by Vice Admiral William Raborn, a squarely built man with thinning hair, gray sideburns, and a jaw, as wags asserted, that was as hard as his head. Why would LBJ appoint a man with absolutely no intelligence experience as DCI? Perhaps to reduce the CIA’s influence in making national policy?

Vietnam was quickly ramping up into a real war. The U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, General Maxwell Taylor, who opposed introducing combat troops, provided the president with disturbing assessments of conditions in the tiny besieged nation:

“We are faced here with a seriously deteriorating situation characterized by continued political turmoil, irresponsibility, and division within the [South Vietnamese] armed forces, lethargy in the pacification program, some anti-U.S. feeling which could grow, signs of mounting terrorism by VC directed at U.S. personnel and deepening discouragement and loss of morale throughout South Vietnam. Unless these conditions are somehow changed and trends reversed, we are likely soon to face a number of unpleasant developments ranging from anti-American demonstrations, further civil disorders, and even political assassinations to the ultimate installation of a hostile government which will ask us to leave while it seeks accommodation with the National Liberation Front and Hanoi.”

Pitched battles occurred after August and the Gulf of Tonkin “sea battle.” On October 31, 1964, Viet Cong disguised as farmers floated sampans past the U.S. airbase at Bien Hoa and let loose with mortars that killed four Americans, destroyed five bombers, and damaged eight more.

On Christmas Eve, a driver parked an explosive-crammed truck by the Brink Hotel in Saigon, where a crowd of U.S. soldiers waited for entertainer Bob Hope. The explosion ripped through the building, killing two Americans and wounding more than seventy.

The event that prompted LBJ to take more extreme action occurred on February 7, 1965, at Camp Holloway near the provincial capital of Pleiku. About three hundred VC crept up while Americans of the 52nd Combat Aviation Battalion were sleeping and turned the base into a conflagration of exploding ammunition and burning aircraft, killing seven Americans and wounding one hundred.

“They are killing our men while they sleep in the night,” President Johnson raged. “I can’t ask our American soldiers to continue to fight with one hand behind their back.”

He activated Operation Flaming Dart in retaliation. American and South Vietnamese pilots targeted NVA bases near Dong Hoi in North Vietnam with forty-nine sorties; a second wave targeted VC logistics and communications centers near the DMZ.

Soviet Union Foreign Minister Alexei Kosygin happened to be visiting Hanoi when the raids commenced. Khrushchev was furious and promised to provide additional assistance to Ho Chi Minh.

A few days later, VC sappers blew up a hotel used as an enlisted men’s barracks in the coastal city of Qui Nhom, killing twenty-three American soldiers.

Apoplectic, LBJ responded with Flaming Dart 2—155 sorties and air strikes against North Vietnam.

The USSR increased its aid to North Vietnam by supplying SAMs, jet fighter planes, technical support, and more “advisors.” China said it was ready to send its personnel “to fight together with the Vietnamese people to annihilate the American aggressors.”

Escalation of the war from a clandestine affair carried out in the dark seemed to be spiraling out of control. The 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade began sending Marines. The first Marines ashore at Da Nang found the sleepy little place I remembered from my OP-34 days—bunkers left by the Japanese in 1945, blockhouses deserted by the French, a single unimproved three-thousand-yard runway. Their initial orders were to guard the base. They were not to “engage in day-to-day actions against the Viet Cong.”

The airbase was soon to become one of the three busiest airports in the world. U.S. force levels increased from 23,000 to 185,000 within the year.

PFC Craig Roberts was among Marines in a follow-up landing on the beaches near Da Nang. Word on the USS Pickaway, a Navy World War II assault ship bobbing offshore, had it that VC were everywhere, that attacks could come from any quarter. The countryside belonged to the Viet Cong, Charlie, the gooks, VC—the enemy. For the first time, U.S. combat troops were going in with permission to shoot back if fired upon.

Christ, it was hot. The sun itself became a burden. Marines would get to know it like they would get to know the shit-smeared punji stakes, the Malaysian whips, the black-pajamaed Viet Cong who sniped at them during the night and turned farmer again with the rising sun, but they would never get used to it. It sucked the moisture through the pores in their skin until they felt like fish left on a gray and weathered pier.

“Ladies, get your fuckin’ asses in gear,” gunny sergeants shouted. “We goin’ to war, Marines. Not to some old lady’s tea party. You want to live, make damned sure you are locked and loaded when them boats hit the beach and the gates drop. Make damned sure.”

Second Battalion, 9th Marines, went ashore in one of several World War II–style beach landings the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade had made since LBJ committed the first land troops to Vietnam. Marines heard the VC had fourteen combat units within fifty miles of Da Nang. Most of them would probably be waiting on China Beach when the Marines landed.

Growing up beneath the dark cloud of the Cold War, living under the threat of nuclear war and communist expansion, they were finally getting their chance to stop the commies by going to a foreign and exotic land and battling evil on its doorstep.

Roberts found himself on a landing boat asshole-to-belly button with the rest of his platoon, so packed in he was gasping for a breath of air. Long lines of gray flat-bowed boats kicked up a giant washing machine of froth and charged toward the beach, leaving wakes that spread out behind and made even the Pickaway bob like a fishing cork.

The only things missing were bugles.

“One hundred meters to sand!”

Still no fire from the beach. The gooks must be waiting for the landing gates to drop in the surf.

The gates dropped. Roberts glimpsed a sandy strip backed by palm trees. Almost like a postcard from Hawaii or Miami Beach—“Having a great time, wish you were here.”

“Go, damn you, go! Go, go, go, go, go …!”

Caught up in the excitement, Marines charged toward dry sand, screaming and yelling rebel war cries. Ready for action. Expecting it. Wanting it.

They dove face first in the sand and executed combat rolls to keep the enemy from marking their positions. Weapons swiveled back and forth across the front of brown-and-white sand and rattling palm trees and shimmering heat devils, eyes darting and busy.

Where were the human hordes?

Roberts saw a kid. About eight years old with an eight-year-old’s grin, yellow skin, no shirt, and a baggy pair of too-short black trousers. His first gook. Holding out two bottles, the kid positioned himself directly in front of the weapons.

“Hey, Joe… You buy Co’Cola?”

All around, kids and toothless old women who grinned like kids. All up and down the beach—the enemy. Selling Cokes and beer and cigarettes.

Marines slowly clambered to their feet and looked stunned.

“Buy Co’Cola, Joe? Buy Co’Cola?”

* * *

I knew from the beginning that the escalation was wrong, that UW operations were the best method of countering insurgencies, that a war fought by conventional means seldom overcame guerrilla action. Unconventional warfare and terrorism were calculated to slowly bleed a conventional force of its will to continue. It had worked before in history—a numerically inferior force triumphing over a much stronger force, bleeding it dry by a series of small and repeated cuts. The French suffered from the strategy and withdrew from Vietnam in 1954.

I helped the new DCI present our assessment of Vietnam. The communist nations, we noted, would no doubt ally themselves with Ho Chi Minh, but we did not think they would do it actively as the Red Chinese had in Korea. Instead, they would contrive to win victory through supporting a continued guerrilla insurgency.

The U.S., we said, was “proceeding with far more courage than wisdom. … [The NVA and VC] appear confident that their course in South Vietnam promises ultimate and possible early success without important concessions on their part. They seem to believe that they can achieve a series of local military successes which sooner or later will bring victory through a combination of a deteriorating South Vietnam Army morale and effectiveness, a collapse of anti-communist government in Saigon, and exhaustion of the U.S. will to persist.”

In the Cold War, Army and Navy special forces were designed to fight limited wars, clandestinely, in a way that averted the nuclear powers from squaring off against each other. Under CIA patrimony, Army Special Forces established permanent headquarters in Nha Trang, from which they eventually established more than 250 CIDG (Civilian Irregular Defense Group) outposts throughout the country, each generally defended by a single A-team of a dozen SF soldiers and a few hundred local civilian irregulars. “Winning hearts and minds” by building schools, hospitals, government buildings, canals, and fish ponds, while defending against insurgents. Classic unconventional warfare.

SEALs also operated in classic UW but in a different capacity. In addition to training South Vietnamese in combat diving, river warfare, and counterinsurgency tactics, they made their bones and their reputation in sustained direct-action efforts along the seacoast and the Mekong River in the Rung Sat Special Zone. Harassment of the enemy, hit-and-run raids, recon patrols, intel collection, ambush and counter-ambush, interdiction of enemy troops and supplies coming from North Vietnam.

Far from using conventional warfare methods of firing artillery or dropping bombs from 30,000 feet, SEALs, who seldom numbered more than 120 in-country at any one time, experienced combat close and personal, killing at close range and responding without hesitation lest they be killed themselves. They made great headway with this style of warfare, bringing to Vietnam the most effective direct counterinsurgency of the war. Widely feared by the enemy, with their faces painted to blend into darkness and jungle, they became known as “the men with green faces.”

Now, the “Invisible Front” war of Green Berets and SEALs began to fade into the background in the new U.S. policy toward full militarization. President Johnson placed the military in near total control of the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Administration, and other intelligence organizations operating in Vietnam.

With LBJ’s approval, the commander of all U.S. forces in South Vietnam, General Westmoreland, initiated a strategy of attrition by employing U.S. superiority in firepower, technology, and mobility. His methods, contrary to the shadow war that existed before, turned to a series of search and destroy operations in which large U.S. and South Vietnamese units supported by air and artillery swept through an area to attempt to engage the commies in battle. In contrast, North Vietnam and the VC continued to rely on hit-and-run operations and ambushes, avoiding set-piece battle except at their own initiative. Classic guerrilla operations out of Mao and Clausewitz.