ON AUGUST 2, 1964, the USS Maddox snaked its way through North Vietnamese waters. Its presence drew the enemy’s attention. Three North Vietnamese torpedo boats fired on the vessel, most likely in response to U.S. shelling of two North Vietnamese islands a few nights before. What became known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident profoundly altered both American and Vietnamese history.1 A suspected second torpedo attack on August 4 never actually occurred, but the episode enabled President Johnson to obtain Congressional approval for expanded military action. Although Hanoi had hoped to avoid a full-scale American intervention, communist forces continued to attack the Americans. On February 6, 1965, Viet Cong forces bombarded numerous military targets, including an American air base at Pleiku, killing nine servicemen and wounding 128. President Johnson responded with Operation Flaming Dart, a series of air strikes against enemy targets. It was the incident at Pleiku as much as Tonkin that triggered the deployment of U.S. ground troops. The first waves of Marines arrived on March 8, 1965. By the summer there would be roughly 85,000 of them. U.S. forces would ultimately total more than half a million. They would depart only after 58,000 of them had died and nearly 3 million Vietnamese had been killed, with millions more hideously wounded.
Why did Hanoi sanction attacks against Americans after the Tonkin Gulf incident? Hanoi did not desire an American escalation. Party leaders sought no wider war. Hanoi’s policy had been to avoid an American escalation, to keep the special war from transitioning to a limited war in which American forces would be doing the bulk of the fighting. The last thing Hanoi should have wanted was to provoke a full-scale invasion by the United States, especially at such a precarious time. Nevertheless, communist forces in South Vietnam continued to strike American bases after Tonkin, when the risk of an American escalation was at its peak.
The reason for the attacks at Tonkin and Pleiku has never been fully clear. Lieutenant General Hoang Nghia Khanh was serving as Chief of Combat Operations Office A on the night of August 2, 1964, when the Maddox sailed into North Vietnamese territorial waters. His memoirs allege that the torpedo attacks were authorized by the high command, but he added that his superior, General Van Tien Dung, thought it a mistake to fire on the destroyer at a time when the North sought to limit the war from expanding in North Vietnam.2 Hanoi’s official history of combat operations states that it was an error for the General Staff command duty officer to have issued the order to attack the Maddox.3 It is possible that the torpedo attacks were not directed from the highest Party officials but were rather a knee-jerk response from the high command to retaliate for both an incursion into territorial waters and the recent covert American shelling of the North’s islands. If this were the case, it would indicate the inadequacy of Hanoi’s command over its military, since the aim up to this time had been to avoid an American escalation. The fog of war could account for Hanoi’s attack on the Maddox. But the situation becomes more curious when viewed in the context of subsequent attacks on Americans culminating at Pleiku.
On August 7, just days after the Tonkin episode, Ho Chi Minh presided over a ceremony to commend the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) forces on their fighting spirit in the Tonkin Gulf and subsequent air battle. The military had set about a “scientific analysis” of the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy’s air force. As with any serious modern military, they scrutinized errors made during the battles in order to draw lessons and improve combat performance. At that time they mistakenly believed that they had shot down one American plane. Despite this erroneous belief, the DRV Navy had fought an American destroyer and fighter jets, yet all three of the DRV’s torpedo boats survived. The tiny DRV Navy had acquitted itself well, but Ho cautioned his soldiers not to become complacent. He told the troops:
You have won a glorious victory, but don’t become self-satisfied. Don’t underestimate the enemy because of this victory. We must realize that, with regard to the American imperialists and their puppets, ‘even in the face of death these leopards will not change their spots.’ They still harbor many evil plots.4
That same day the Politburo issued a directive in which it assessed America’s likely next steps. The Politburo concluded that America, despite having alternatives, would continue to escalate the war, particularly by increasing its attacks against the North.
Tonkin marked a break in the pattern of American involvement. Rather than advising and fighting alongside soldiers of South Vietnam, and rather than conducting intelligence or sabotage operations within the DRV, three American actions combined to heightenen Hanoi’s fears of escalation. One was the shelling of islands on the night of July 30–31. The second was two bombing raids on August 1 and 2 over Laos and North Vietnam.5 The third was the Maddox mission. Taken together, these suggested a sudden spike in American aggression. They appeared to Hanoi as serious, provocative acts. Following the attack, the Maddox was ordered back into the area. The ship’s commander, John J. Herrick, suspected that he was being used in a game of cat and mouse, in which his ship was the mouse. Captain Herrick requested permission to withdraw, but Washington refused.6 President Johnson’s intentions aside, the question is whether Hanoi interpreted the Maddox and its attendant incidents as a provocation. Based on the Politburo’s directive of August 7, it clearly did.
The post-Tonkin Politburo directive, titled “Increasing Combat Readiness to Counter All Enemy Schemes to Commit Provocations and to Attack North Vietnam,” repeatedly spoke of the need to crush the enemy’s expected provocations. The directive outlined America’s three principal options for future action. First, it could intensify the war in the South and continue to provoke and sabotage the North in order to block the flow of supplies southward. Second, it could expand the war into the North. Third, it could seek a diplomatic solution. The directive concluded that the United States would choose the first option.7
According to the directive, the Politburo anticipated the Americans would engage in a variety of new and intensified provocations. These included the possibility of naval blockades, amphibious landings to destroy coastal areas and then withdraw, larger commando raids inside the DRV than those previously conducted, and inciting ethnic minorities and regime opponents to create disorder. The Politburo assumed that such actions could either be coordinated and launched simultaneously, or be taken in a gradual, step-by-step fashion for the purpose of testing the socialist camp’s reactions.8
In light of the August 7 directive, it appears that Hanoi’s leadership had by this point come to see a full-scale war with America as unavoidable, if it had not already reached this conclusion well before. In fact, by March 1964, Hanoi’s military leadership already suspected that the covert American raids into North Vietnamese territory served as the precursor to a wider U.S. assault upon the North.9 It is possible that Le Duan’s adherence to Marxist-Leninist ideology convinced him that an American expansion was historically inevitable, deeply rooted in the nature of capitalist nations. More likely, his estimation was based on a careful observation of America’s steadily growing involvement. By the time of Tonkin, there was little evidence to suggest that America planned to back down, regardless of prior Party insistence that it would surely be deterred.
Several months earlier, on May 20, 1964, President Johnson had tasked an executive committee to develop plans for graduated bombing against the North. Following the presentation of the committee’s recommendations, Johnson cabled Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in Saigon with a synthesis of the group’s conclusions: Southeast Asia could not be lost, time was on the communists’ side, and Congress should authorize the administration to take all necessary measures before it was too late.10
Hanoi’s assessment of U.S. options after Tonkin closely resembled the options being considered in Washington at the highest levels, suggesting that either its strategic empathy was especially strong at this time or Hanoi had penetrated the American Embassy in Saigon and was literally reading the enemy’s thoughts. Unfortunately, DRV intelligence records from this period are still tightly guarded secrets. We therefore know little about how deeply Hanoi’s espionage penetrated American sources. Nonetheless, the August 7 Politburo directive did accurately gauge the mood within Washington’s innermost circle. President Johnson’s executive committee, which included the various departmental principals, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, had all but excluded negotiation as an option, just as Hanoi recognized. Their idea of negotiation amounted to Hanoi’s capitulation to America’s main demands and therefore would not have been taken seriously by Hanoi. Instead, by the fall and early winter of 1964, the group was increasingly coming to press for attacks against the North, just as Hanoi anticipated, though no action would be taken before the Presidential election in November.11
If Hanoi believed that a U.S. escalation, which was already underway with respect to the number of military advisors, was soon to intensify, then what did it see as the purpose of continued attacks against American targets? If the attacks were intended to deter an American escalation, Hanoi would have had to have believed that the United States was in fact deterrable. Based on the Van Kien Dang records, it appears that opinion on this point was divided by the end of 1963. By August 7, 1964, following Tonkin, Politburo opinion clearly seems to have shifted to the view that the Americans intended to escalate. Deterrence, therefore, could hardly be effective if the decision to escalate had already been made. Nevertheless, Viet Cong attacks continued after Tonkin. On November 1, Viet Cong forces attacked the Bein Hoa airbase, killing four American airmen, wounding 72 others, and destroying five B-57 bombers. On December 24, Viet Cong units attacked the Brinks Hotel in Saigon where U.S. military personnel were housed. The assault resulted in the deaths of two Americans and 100 wounded. The February 6, 1965 attack on the Pleiku airbase at last produced a robust American response. All of these attacks occurred after Le Duan’s carefully-selected General, Nguyen Chi Thanh, arrived in the south to take command of the Central Office of South Vietnam (COSVN).
If Hanoi had hoped to avoid provoking the Americans after Tonkin, it should have tried to restrict attacks on American bases. As head of the Party and having deep, intimate ties to the southern communist movement, and having installed his colleague General Nguyen Chi Thanh to oversee COSVN, Le Duan was exceedingly well-positioned to curb southern communist attacks. To do this, however, he would have needed to halt a common practice. Americans had long been considered legitimate targets by COSVN units. On July 20, 1956, a three-member commando team threw hand grenades into the U.S. Information Agency’s office in Saigon. On July 7, 1959, as U.S. servicemen were enjoying an evening film, a six-member team brazenly fired their way into the U.S. Military Assistance and Advisory Group headquarters in Bien Hoa, killing two American soldiers and wounding one officer.12 Viet Cong units employed terrorist methods as well. In March 1963, a covert Viet Cong operative working as an air controller at the Tan Son Nhat airfield met with his Vietnamese lover, chatting in the boarding area while roughly 100 U.S. military personnel waited for their flight. The woman, however, was not his lover but in fact another operative who had brought with her a bomb in a tourist bag. The “couple” switched their own bag with that of an American, who unsuspectingly carried it aboard. The bomb’s timing mechanism malfunctioned, exploding only after the plane had safely landed in San Francisco, injuring two mail distribution clerks.13 The most provocative act of all was the failed assassination attempt on Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on May 2, 1964, when Nguyen Van Troi planted a mine below a bridge over which the Defense Secretary would travel. The mine was discovered in time, and Nguyen Van Troi was captured and executed by a firing squad at the hands of Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) forces. In commemoration of this assassination attempt, roads in Saigon and most major Vietnamese cities still bear Nguyen Van Troi’s name. For COSVN forces to attack Americans or their bases was not unique. The question is what Hanoi hoped to gain by continuing those attacks after Tonkin, given that provoking the Americans risked expanding the war. The most provocative of those attacks culminated at Pleiku and provided President Johnson with the pretext he needed to begin the American escalation.
When, decades later, Robert McNamara convened a conference of former adversaries in June 1997 to reflect on the war, General Dang Vu Hiep claimed that the attacks at Pleiku had occurred solely at the local commanders’ initiative. They were not, the elderly General asserted, directed by Hanoi, nor were they connected to Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin’s visit.14 Subsequent to the McNamara meetings, General Hiep published his reaction to those discussions. He viewed Pleiku as an utterly ordinary attack, of lesser significance than others his side had struck against American targets. He could only understand the robust American reaction to Pleiku as intentionally blown out of proportion to serve as an excuse for expanding the war. He noted that the American air strikes, supposedly in response to Pleiku and which occurred on the following day, had to have been planned months in advance.15
But then the General added a curious note. The historian George Herring asked him who had planned the attacks. As mentioned above, the General affirmed that they had not been directed from Hanoi. Professor Herring asked if anyone had been criticized for launching the attacks. General Hiep replied that not only was no one criticized, his superiors commended them for the attack.16 Commendations can help foster a fighting spirit, but if the goal had been to avoid American escalation, then such measures were ill-timed at best. Of course, the comments of Vietnamese officials must still be taken with great skepticism. We cannot conclude beyond doubt that Hanoi did not in fact direct the attacks at Pleiku or elsewhere. Nonetheless, the more important question is not whether Hanoi directed the attacks but rather why it did not seek to prevent them at such a crucial juncture.
The historian Frederick Logevall has advanced the standard interpretation that whether the attacks were directed by Hanoi or not, they were intended to destabilize the South Vietnamese government and not to engender an American retaliation.17 In Logevall’s view, Pleiku offered Washington the pretext for escalation it had been seeking. The Johnson administration immediately responded with air attacks against the North. Operation Flaming Dart deployed 132 U.S. and 22 South Vietnamese aircraft to strike four targets in the southern part of North Vietnam. America’s direct combat against North Vietnam had begun.
Le Duan’s writings to COSVN in February 1965 partly support Logevall’s conclusion, but they do not tell the whole story. They show that the First Secretary hoped to weaken the Saigon regime before a full-scale American escalation could develop. In February 1965, Le Duan wrote to the southern communists to elaborate on points from the most recent Party resolution that year. It is unclear whether he wrote this letter before or after the Pleiku attacks. As he saw it, the aim was to fight in such a way that would “virtually eliminate” the possibility of an American escalation.18 It had become a race against time to totally destroy the ARVN forces so that the United States could not rely on them any longer. “[The Americans] will only accept defeat when that source of support no longer exists.”19 And yet, based on the August 7 Politburo directive following Tonkin, it seems that Le Duan had already concluded that an American escalation could not be deterred. Why then would he have instructed southern communists that weakening ARVN forces could deter America?
Le Duan’s next points bear close scrutiny. He argued that the United States would not be willing to expand because it understood that it could not afford to become bogged down in a protracted war, especially in light of its other global commitments. Destruction of the puppet army would lead the Americans into a quagmire in Vietnam, forced to deploy ever more troops. Since the United States was the world’s leading imperialist power, it had interests and commitments around the globe, and becoming overcommitted and bogged down in Vietnam would limit its ability to act elsewhere.20 This had been Le Duan’s consistent line of reasoning for years. He possessed a firm grasp of geostrategic realities, always cognizant of his enemies’ global advantages as well as their constraints. Yet we cannot rely solely on Le Duan’s letters south as a Rosetta Stone for decrypting his beliefs. He was very likely convinced that America would be defeated in a protracted war, but, in contrast to what he told the southern communists, he probably did not think that the United States would soon back down.
Crippling ARVN forces was one thing; attacking Americans at so sensitive a time was quite another. If the standard interpretation for Pleiku and related attacks were correct—that the communists miscalculated—it would mean that Hanoi’s strategic empathy for America (specifically for President Johnson and his top advisors) proved inadequate at one of the war’s most critical turning points. This explanation, which we could call the “failed deterrence hypothesis,” would mean that Le Duan, and presumably other Party leaders, believed that attacks on Americans after Tonkin would not be used by President Johnson as justification for escalation. It would mean that Hanoi believed that the relatively minor gains it could win by attacking American bases would not be offset by the tremendous costs of a large-scale U.S. military invasion. In other words, Hanoi badly misread its enemy’s drivers.
This explanation assumes that Hanoi, and/or the southern communists, made a rational cost–benefit analysis of attacking Americans after Tonkin and calculated that Washington would back down. The political scientist James Fearon has argued that rationalist explanations for war must not only show how war could appear attractive to rational leaders; they must also show why states cannot find an alternative to the costly act of war.21 On the eve of the Second Indochina War, Hanoi appears to have held what Fearon would call “private information” but that is in this case more precisely stated as a Marxist ideological conviction: that its victory was historically inevitable. Yet even this powerful belief did not go unquestioned. Le Duan himself had pointed to the Americans’ success against revolutionary movements in Greece and the Philippines. The notion of ultimate victory, therefore, may have been a deep aspiration, an expectation, and a hope, but Party leaders understood that its realization depended on their ability to bring it to fruition.
The real problem with a rationalist interpretation is that the Politburo directive of August 7, 1964, shows that Le Duan expected America to intensify its commitment to the South—the opposite of backing down. It seems unlikely that the Party chief believed that America could be deterred by some relatively modest strikes. It is therefore worth considering some other possible explanations for the post-Tonkin attacks.
The second alternative is that the attacks on Americans from Tonkin through to Pleiku were simply ill-conceived, undirected, and divorced from any larger strategy. Poor communication between Hanoi and COSVN could have been at play. Hanoi might have been unable to restrain the southern attacks and subsequently felt it had to commend COSVN units on their heroic actions. But, as we have seen, in 1962 Le Duan was working to restrain COSVN by advocating caution. Since Le Duan had appointed his own man, General Nguyen Chi Thanh, to oversee COSVN, Le Duan should have had even greater influence over military actions in the South. To accept what we could call the “poor planning hypothesis,” one must believe that on a subject of tremendous importance to Hanoi—the introduction of U.S. ground troops—Hanoi’s oversight of COSVN actions was lacking.
There is another explanation for the attacks on Americans at this time, which we could call the “inevitable benefits hypothesis.” There can be little doubt that most of Hanoi’s leaders did not desire the massive deployment of American ground troops to South Vietnam. This was surely true of the Viet Cong fighters as well. One prominent Viet Cong leader recounted in his postwar memoir that he and his comrades viewed an American escalation as a “living nightmare,” one that filled them with “sick anticipation of a prolonged and vastly more brutal war.”22 Yet if Le Duan had already concluded that the Americans intended to escalate, then there was little that Hanoi could do to prevent it. In that case, there would be certain benefits from attacking American bases. If successful, they could provide a substantial boost to morale and the southern communists’ fighting spirit. Since the war to come was likely to be protracted, the southern communists would need to know that they had the ability to inflict real damage on the Americans, even against the invaders’ own military bases.
One way of thinking about this preescalation period is as a time of undeclared war. Many overt wars are often preceded by a period of undeclared war. This was true of the United States and Germany prior to Hitler’s declaration of war against America. Hitler’s declaration merely acknowledged the reality that had existed between the two powers, as the United States had been providing financial support to the British, French, Soviets, and other allies via the Lend-Lease program. Even though no formal state of war existed between the two nations, German U-boats fired on American vessels in the Atlantic in an effort to disrupt the transfer of supplies. Similarly, the United States and Japan were in a state of undeclared war prior to Pearl Harbor, as the United States cut off oil supplies to Japan under President Roosevelt’s quarantine policy.23 During such times of undeclared war, there is often an incentive for each side to make the other launch the first strike. This enables the side being attacked to rally its people around the government as it portrays itself as the nation’s defenders. This was true even of Hitler, who went to the trouble of casting Germany as a victim of Polish aggression on the eve of World War II. In the Gleiwitz incident, Hitler fabricated an attack on a German radio station by dressing up German soldiers in Polish uniforms. That drama enabled him to justify an invasion of Poland in September of 1939.
Given Hanoi’s frequent wish to present itself as the victim of American aggression, and given that it expected an imminent American escalation, could Le Duan have encouraged the attacks on Americans (or at least failed to restrain them) in order to boost morale? Could he and others in Hanoi have reasoned that the time of undeclared war would soon be over and the time of a large-scale American invasion had come? This would not mean that Le Duan desired an invasion. It would instead mean that despite what he wrote to COSVN, he actually believed that deterrence had already failed, American escalation was inevitable, and it was best to strike the Americans hard in order to frame the Party as Vietnam’s defenders. Viewed in this light, his written assurance to COSVN in February 1965 that they could still prevent an American escalation likely stemmed from a desire to embolden their forces. If instead he had informed them that the strongest, most technologically advanced military in the world was about to commit hundreds of thousands of combat forces to attack a relatively small South Vietnamese revolutionary army, the effect could have been highly dispiriting. Wiser, from Le Duan’s perspective, would have been to urge the National Liberation Front (NLF) onward and persuade them that history was ultimately on their side. In the face of a large-scale war with America, morale would surely be at a premium.
The southern communist fighters were not all of one mind regarding strategy. Many favored guerilla warfare over Le Duan’s preferred methods of large, conventional attacks.24 Although General Thanh imposed Le Duan’s policies on COSVN soldiers, Le Duan’s letters also show the First Secretary’s keen sense of his position. Unable to inflict the Ministry of Public Security apparatus upon southerners who rejected his plans, and recognizing that General Thanh’s efforts would need help to overcome southern resistance, Le Duan tried to rally COSVN units behind large-scale attacks against ARVN forces. He tried to persuade them that his methods were the best way of defeating the Americans. Furthermore, permitting COSVN units to attack Americans directly, culminating in the brazen Pleiku assault, was a clever move by a leader sensitive to southern needs. These strikes helped to unify a diverse collection of divided forces.
Beyond the benefits to morale, Le Duan also recognized that escalation provided tangible advantages to the Party. Le Duan and other Party leaders expected a general uprising to occur in the South, which would overthrow the puppet government and pave the way for a socialist revolution. This uprising had been long awaited though thus far unrealized. An American escalation, invasion, and bombing of the North could prove fortuitous. It enabled the Vietnamese Workers’ Party to frame itself even more clearly as the Vietnamese peoples’ savior, heroically fighting against outside invaders. It furthered the conditions for attracting average Vietnamese, from the North and South, to the Party’s cause. Le Duan bluntly articulated this rather cold-hearted line of reasoning in December 1965:
In fact, the more troops the Americans send into our country, the more bases they build in our country, and the more they employ the most vicious and barbaric methods to bomb, shoot, and kill our people, the most intense the contradictions between them and all classes of the population will become; the deeper the contradictions between them and the leaders of the puppet army and the puppet government will become; the more powerful will be the awakening of the spirit of nationalism among the majority of puppet army soldiers and puppet government officials will become; and the more difficult the lives of the residents of the cities and the areas under enemy control will become. This situation creates possibilities for us to further expand our political struggle movement and attract new forces to join the front. For that reason, our policy must be to strive to assemble a broad-based mass force from every class of the population and persuade members of the puppet army and the puppet government to join a truly broad-based resistance front to fight the Americans and save our nation.25
As Le Duan saw it, the American escalation offered two useful benefits to Hanoi’s cause. First, as described above, it allowed the Party to frame itself as the nation’s true defender against outside invaders—foreign forces who could be portrayed as cruel. This would attract more Vietnamese (from both North and South) to join the Party and support its aims. The propagandistic term “the resistance struggle against the Americans to save the nation” underscored this aim. The second benefit from escalation was that it provided greater opportunity to inflict casualties. The body count was seen as an essential component to Hanoi’s overall strategy of protracted war. The higher the casualties, Le Duan reasoned, the more soldiers the United States would be forced to deploy, the more overstretched it would become, and American domestic support for the war would sink even lower.
In November 1965, with the American escalation well underway, Le Duan again wrote to the southern communists regarding the latest Party resolution. Following the massive influx of U.S. ground troops and Hanoi’s failure to prevent the Americans from expanding the war, the Party Secretary needed to reiterate the North’s commitment to a protracted war strategy. He maintained that, despite America’s escalation, the enemy’s objectives remained consistent. He cited Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s own words to a Congressional Armed Services Committee: “Even though our tactics have changed, our goals remain the same.” Though he did not admit directly that the efforts to prevent escalation had failed, he did offer a new objective for Hanoi: to prevent the Americans from expanding the war to the North.
Hanoi had determined that in contrast to the preescalation phase, when ARVN forces constituted the primary targets, the postescalation phase meant that American soldiers as well as ARVN forces comprised the prime targets. “The dialectical relationship in this matter is that we attack U.S. troops in order to create conditions that will enable us to annihilate puppet troops, and, conversely, we annihilate puppet troops in order to create conditions that will enable us to attack and annihilate American troops.”26 Le Duan cautioned the southern communists to continue to avoid attacking the Americans where they were strong and to focus on attacking their weaknesses, but he added a new caveat: This instruction was not absolute; it was not cast in stone. The calculus had changed. Even striking Americans where they were strong could now be permitted.
Le Duan recognized that inflicting the greatest number of American casualties represented a crucial lynchpin in the protracted war strategy. Although the escalation posed new challenges and augured more exacting costs on Hanoi, it also provided more targets for communist forces. The Secretary envisioned a clear causal chain of events that would flow from killing Americans:
. . . the more American troops that come to Vietnam, the more of them we will be able to kill. If large numbers of American troops are killed, the puppet army will disintegrate even faster, the U.S.’s hope of securing a victory through military means will collapse, and the American people’s movement opposed to the U.S.’s dirty war in Vietnam will grow.
Later in that same missive, Le Duan set a specific kill quota. He advised the southern communists to kill at least 10,000 Americans in the coming spring–summer campaign. Within the next few years he suggested that they aim to kill between 40,000 and 50,000 American soldiers.27 The bulk of this letter outlined the tactics that the southern communists should employ to accomplish their mission. One small part included training all classes of the population to profoundly hate the enemy.28 In his 2013 study of American atrocities in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves, Nick Turse observed that U.S. military policy centered on maximizing the body count of enemy combatants.29 It is striking that Le Duan adopted the same tactic toward the Americans.
The Party leader had read his own people well. By the spring of 1965, as American attacks against the North increased, the People’s Army doubled its ranks.30 For the time being, at least, Le Duan, the strategic empath, had bolstered support for his policies among northern and southern communists alike. Now the task ahead required even finer appreciation of America’s constraints.
Le Duan argued repeatedly that America faced a dilemma. The more troops it deployed, the weaker it became. He articulated this and other assessments of American constraints at the close of 1965, as the escalation was fully underway. In December 1965, when Le Duan addressed the Twelfth Plenum of the Party’s Central Committee, he explained more fully the policy of protracted war. His address began by observing that the war had developed precisely along the lines that the Party had laid out in the Ninth and Eleventh Plenums. (Those comments, however, were highly hedged, offering possibilities, not definitive futures.) He then noted that the situation had developed more rapidly than expected. In mid-1965, he alleged that the puppet army of the South had been on the verge of disintegration but that the Party did not have the necessary means at that time to force its collapse. Had the DRV been able to push the ARVN to the breaking point, he maintained, then the Americans might not have deployed massive ground troops. The lessons from this episode, he said, bore directly on the policy of protracted war.
The policy of protracted war, Le Duan explained, was to use weakness against strength. Even if the enemy deployed 400,000 troops to Vietnam (the United States ultimately sent more than a half million), the Vietnamese would defeat them by bogging them down in a stalemate. That policy, however, did not entail an orderly, step-by-step advance. Instead, it required massing forces against the enemy under specific conditions. The Americans are warmongers by their nature, Le Duan frequently declared. That was why they continued to escalate and expand the war. These appear to be Le Duan’s true beliefs: that the Americans would continue to expand the war if the resistance was insufficient to deter them: and a protracted war would grind them down because it would increase American casualties, which in turn would bolster opposition to the war both within the United States and abroad.
The Politburo was not in complete agreement on these matters. In a rare admission of internal Party disagreement, Le Duan commented that differences of opinion on these matters still remained despite their lengthy, ongoing discussion. The First Secretary stressed that the Politburo was unanimous in its view that no matter how many troops the United States should send, the Vietnamese would defeat them. Further, they all agreed that the Politburo “must firmly maintain and study and digest even further our formula of fighting the enemy using both military and political means.”31 Le Duan insisted that unanimous agreement was essential, crucial to the success of the movement. And then the hint of dissent emerged:
However, in a limited period of time we have not been able to carefully and thoroughly discuss every aspect of each individual issue, and therefore we may have some slight difference on one aspect or another, such as on our assessment of the American imperialists, on the nature and the form of the war, on the formula of a protracted war and striving to defeat the enemy within a relatively short period of time, about the effort to win the sympathy and help of our camp and of the international community, etc.32
Though couched in understated tones, the “slight disagreements” he described involved rather major issues. We can surmise that at this critical juncture in the war, the Politburo did not share a consensus view on either America’s position or Hanoi’s strategy. Le Duan, however, seems to have had strong opinions of his own, and he sought to push them through the Party bureaucracy to translate them into policy.
Following his admission of internal disputes, Le Duan launched into a new section titled, “Assessment of the American Imperialists.” He asserted that, in devising Hanoi’s war strategies, the most important question was to determine the balance of forces between the United States and Vietnam. It was a question, he stated, “of knowing the enemy and knowing ourselves.” The lessons of Sun Tzu would not be lost on Le Duan.
A customary segment of many Party speeches included a historical analysis, which, heavily shaped by Marxism-Leninism, invariably illustrated both the enemy’s waning fortunes and the Party’s inevitable ascent. Le Duan thus laid out America’s global position at the close of World War II, when its strength was unmatched by any rival. Under these conditions, the Americans, he claimed, “hatched their plot to take over and dominate the world.”33 Since its zenith of global power at the war’s close, he continued, America’s position had steadily eroded. Its loss of a monopoly on nuclear weapons; the recovery of the Soviet Union; China’s rise; America’s defeats in Korea, Cuba, Laos, and beyond; and its declining economy all combined to shift the balance of forces to the revolutionary camps around the world. He then cautioned that the American successes in “snuffing out” revolutionary movements in Greece and the Philippines could not be ignored. After recounting America’s failures, from backing the French and paying 80 percent of their war costs only to be defeated at Dien Bien Phu, to now being bogged down in South Vietnam, Le Duan concluded that the Americans could not escape a crucial strategic contradiction. Although they possessed economic and military resources far greater than the DRV could muster, “the deeper they involve themselves in this war of aggression in the southern half of our country, the deeper they sink into a quagmire.”34 He observed that America’s greatest problem was that it was waging an offensive modern war against guerillas. Using large units to fight guerrillas in South Vietnam, he said, was “just like punching water—when you pull your fist out, the water just flows right back in.”35
The Secretary described America’s military constraints as hinging on the asymmetric nature of the conflict, noting that this required the Americans to disperse their forces. He devoted roughly equal attention to America’s political weaknesses, as it faced growing internal and global opposition. He also added mention of American economic decline. So was this all pure propaganda aimed at rallying the Party to the cause? Not quite. Though his speeches and directives certainly contained heavy doses of propaganda, his assessments reflect some sober analysis of America’s strategic situation. That knowledge no doubt contributed to Hanoi’s willingness to prosecute its protracted war strategy despite the enormous toll it was taking on the Vietnamese people.
It was then time for the Party’s First Secretary to speak about predictions. The underlying aim of developing strategic empathy, of knowing one’s enemy, is of course to anticipate an opponent’s actions. Le Duan proclaimed that the war would intensify, becoming more vicious in both the North and South. The scale of fighting would increase as the Americans stepped up their artillery and air strikes. The Americans would use chemical warfare and poison gas on liberated zones, even those adjacent to urban centers. The enemy would increase its bombing of North Vietnam, but it would focus on disrupting the transportation and supply lines from north to south. The Americans would attack key economic zones, the dike system, and residential areas. Finally, they would use psychological warfare and espionage to shake the will of the Vietnamese people.36 Though none of this may have been difficult to predict (especially as much of it was already occurring), it was at least essentially accurate.
In order to counter the anticipated American intensification of the war, Le Duan spelled out the nature of Hanoi’s protracted war strategy while also seeking a quick victory: two ostensibly contradictory positions. This policy, as suggested above, may have emerged as a compromise between divergent Party factions. Le Duan tried to square the circle this way:
We have also clearly explained that these two things are not in contradiction to one another, because the basic condition for fighting a protracted war as well as for seeking victory within a relatively short period of time is to quickly develop our power and forces in all areas, and especially military forces, in order to change the balance of forces in our favor.37
The protracted war strategy was not, he explained, a policy of annihilating all American forces down to the last man. Instead, as is well known, it was a plan to sap the enemy’s will to fight. It was also, he added, to force the enemy to accept defeat with certain conditions. This caveat indicates that Hanoi’s “talking while fighting” tactic allowed for the possibility that at least a faction within Hanoi’s leadership was willing to make certain concessions. Such a statement suggests that the more compromising members of the Politburo who were open to negotiation with the Americans still held some sway over Party pronouncements. Le Duan would later silence this faction through intimidation and arrest.
The tension between waging a protracted struggle and seeking a rapid victory is perhaps best played out in this section of the speech. Le Duan explained that Party leaders had a responsibility to understand the psychological state of Southern Vietnamese. Although they had been fighting the Americans officially since 1960, the revolution had actually been fought for the past twenty years under savage conditions. The Party leaders therefore had to make the greatest effort to shorten the fighting as much as possible. And then he struck this compromising note: “Naturally, our goal must be to win total, 100 percent victory, but if in a certain situation we are able to achieve a 90 percent victory, we can then bring the war to an end under conditions that are favorable to us.”38
Le Duan distinguished Vietnam’s past struggles against the French from the current war with the Americans. Though he had frequently drawn comparisons between the two conflicts, he now identified the significant differences. First, the strength of communist forces in both the North and the South was far greater in 1965 than it had been in the 1940s and 1950s. Second, the communists in the North now possessed a solid rear area backed by the socialist bloc. Third, the war against the Americans and puppet government began with offensive, rather than defensive, operations. He asserted that this time the Party held the offensive initiative in its hands. Through the use of protracted war, Le Duan believed that Hanoi would eventually win. The Party leader’s ability to recognize what was new in the current conflict enabled him to adjust Hanoi’s strategy to the enemy at hand, rather than applying a one-sized approach to waging war. He was not fighting the last war with yesterday’s methods. Instead, he had the mental agility to see what was unique about his enemy and adapt accordingly.
Shortly after Le Duan’s address, the Party convened a meeting of high-level cadres on January 16, 1966, for the purpose of studying the Twelfth Plenum’s resolution. Although his folksy style stood in sharp contrast to Le Duan’s more formal speeches, Ho Chi Minh showed himself in agreement with Le Duan’s assessment of America. Addressing the assembled cadres, Ho confronted the challenges of fighting American soldiers. He observed that the Americans were well-fed and well-financed, receiving meat, cake, cigarettes, and chewing gum as typical rations. He claimed that supporting an American soldier cost fifteen times that of a South Vietnamese soldier. In addition, the Americans had just introduced a mobile division transported by helicopter. But then Ho outlined the enemy’s weak points. First among these was their lack of mobility on the ground. Calling the Americans “big, heavy-set people,” weighted down with all imaginable equipment, he observed that once they were on the ground, they could not move as quickly as the Vietnamese. Ho argued that although Vietnamese soldiers were smaller, they were faster, more agile, and therefore not at a disadvantage in hand-to-hand combat. Beyond these tactical appraisals, Ho underscored the view that body counts mattered for political reasons.
America’s fundamental weaknesses, Ho asserted, centered on the growing domestic and global opposition to its intervention. He cited American youths setting themselves on fire in protest. He pointed to the violent uprisings by black Americans. Underscoring the same theme that Le Duan had stressed many times before, Ho assured the cadres that increased American casualties would only augment domestic opposition. He even cited U.S. Senator Morse as saying: “The more American troops we sent to South Vietnam, the more caskets that will be sent back home to the United States.” Because victory hinged on what happened in South Vietnam, Ho concluded that “we must do whatever it takes in South Vietnam to destroy and shatter the puppet army and to kill large numbers of American troops. . . .”39
These same notions of America’s vulnerability continued for years, even after the general offensive. Following the multiple attacks that together comprised the 1968 Tet Offensive, the Party’s resolution of August revisited the current strategic balance, paying closest attention to the contradictions inherent in America’s position. First, the resolution asserted that America’s greatest contradiction was that it needed to confront the enemy directly, yet its current posture was defensive. It could not win without substantially increasing its troop strength, but deploying more troops would guarantee an even greater defeat. The next contradiction, as Hanoi saw it, involved de-Americanization, or what the Nixon administration would later dub “Vietnamization” of the war: transferring primary fighting responsibility to the ARVN. Hanoi maintained that ARVN’s forces were becoming less effective as their morale deteriorated, but the Americans needed to place them in the principal fighting role. In addition, the Americans needed to mass their forces, though they were compelled to disperse them because they needed to defend the cities while simultaneously controlling the countryside.40 In short, all of the weaknesses Hanoi had recognized years before were now exacerbated.
The same was true for the way Hanoi assessed America’s international position. On August 29, 1968, a report to the Central Committee observed that Vietnam had hamstrung U.S. actions in other hot spots. Referring to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, the report argued that America could not mount a serious response because it was tied down in Vietnam. It could not go deeper into the Middle East despite the recent Arab-Israeli War. It could not go deeper into Laos following its defeat at Nam Bak.41 Despite Hanoi’s military losses from the Tet Offensive, Party leaders still maintained that America’s underlying constraints left its future prospects grim.
By the start of 1969, Le Duan recognized that American support for the war had reached a turning point after Tet. On January 1, the Politburo cabled Le Duc Tho and Xuan Thuy (two of the leading delegates to the Paris peace talks) to report on its discussions of American intentions. Party leaders believed that the key American policymakers wanted to end the war by withdrawing troops but maintaining a strong regime in the South. President Nixon, they presumed, was also compelled to follow this course, though he sought an honorable end to the war. In subsequent Politburo cables throughout January and February, Hanoi reiterated its belief that U.S. politicians wanted to deescalate and de-Americanize the war, though Nixon hoped to negotiate from a position of strength. Consequently, the Politburo concluded that the struggle must continue on all three fronts—military, political, and diplomatic. In order to maintain the protracted war strategy, the cable instructed that diplomacy must not give the impression that Hanoi desired a quick conclusion to the conflict.42 On each of these three fronts, Le Duan continued to pursue an effective grand strategy of wearing the Americans down.
Le Duan’s strategic empathy for America—his ability to identify America’s underlying constraints—proved strong on the most crucial dimension. He grasped the enemy’s sensitivity to casualties. He understood America’s vulnerability to being bogged down, fighting for years without demonstrable progress. He comprehended that America’s global commitments could be hamstrung if overextended in Vietnam. Ultimately, this was the most important assessment to get right, and on this point he succeeded in knowing his enemy well.
Le Duan also saw the shelling of North Vietnamese islands and the Tonkin Gulf episode as both a provocative act by America and a distinct break in the pattern of U.S. behavior. According to the Politburo directive of August 7, 1964, he expected America to intensify the war in the South and step up its measures against the North. Here, too, he correctly estimated his enemy’s intentions.
Le Duan likely understood that President Johnson would retaliate against the post-Tonkin attacks culminating at Pleiku. Rather than halting COSVN assaults in order to avoid provoking an American escalation, Le Duan seems to have reasoned that since escalation at that point was both likely and imminent, attacking the Americans would boost morale, giving southern communists a resource that would be greatly in need throughout the protracted war to come. The fact that Le Duan permitted those attacks to continue after Tonkin strongly suggests that he recognized Tonkin as signaling an inevitable escalation. It is not clear that Le Duan ever comprehended why President Johnson and his advisors decided to expand the war, but his uncertainty is understandable, especially since even historians are divided on the matter. They have been debating the Johnson administration’s motivations for decades and will no doubt continue to do so. Given Le Duan’s in-depth, reasoned efforts to understand his American foes, we cannot attribute his predictions of American actions to his Marxist-Leninist convictions alone. The often conflicted nature of Hanoi’s assessments of America show that ideology influenced, but did not determine, Hanoi’s thinking. Instead, Le Duan’s and Hanoi’s strategic empathy derived from a complex interplay of pattern recognition, attention to pattern breaks, and an overlay of Marxist dogma.
Contingency and chance are always at play in every conflict. Rarely are any outcomes predetermined or ineluctable. Obviously there were many causes of Hanoi’s ultimate victory, primary among them being the support it received from China and the Soviet Union, its ability to continue sending arms and materiel south via the Ho Chi Minh trail, and its willingness to allow its people to endure extraordinary suffering. We must add to that list Hanoi’s strategic empathy for America. Despite its failings, that empathy proved an equally important factor in its final triumph.
Although Le Duan ultimately triumphed, he and other Party leaders still failed on numerous occasions to read their enemies correctly, most notably with their prediction that the South Vietnamese would rise up in revolution. Thus far we have examined cases in which the pattern-break heuristic played a helpful role (or could have, in the case of Stalin). I want now to turn to a different heuristic, one that sometimes undermines even the sharpest observers. I will call this the continuity heuristic: an assumption that the enemy’s future behavior will mirror past behavior. To illustrate this mistaken mindset, we must look back at one of its earliest recorded cases, on the battlefields of ancient China. As the Han dynasty collapsed into warring factions, three kingdoms vied for supremacy over China’s vast dominions. Amid countless generals, one strategic thinker stood apart. Though his fame was already secure, it turned legendary when he faced a massive onslaught with merely a hypnotic tune.