20

A New War Begins

In a people’s war, you never make war against your own people.

—EDWARD LANSDALE

THE Vietnamese Workers’ Party, as the Communist Party was known, always had a collective leadership. But some leaders were more equal than others. The First Vietnam War—the French war—had been largely directed by Ho Chi Minh in consultation with Vo Nguyen Giap and, after 1949, Chinese advisers. But by the late 1950s, “Uncle Ho” was in his late sixties and was increasingly being pushed by his Politburo colleagues into a largely symbolic role. The Second Vietnam War—the American war—would be instigated and directed primarily by his ruthless and single-minded successor as secretary general: Le Duan. Of diminutive stature, with “perennially sad eyes and protruding ears,”¹ Le Duan did not project the warmth and charisma of Ho Chi Minh or the intellectual sophistication of Vo Nguyen Giap. In political maneuvering, however, he would turn out to be their superior.

Le Duan came from Quang Tri Province, just below the DMZ. No urbane intellectual like so many of his senior party comrades, Le Van Nhuan (his real name) was the son of a carpenter who had gone to work after high school as a railway attendant. One of the founding members of the Indochinese Communist Party, Le Duan was locked up as a political prisoner by French authorities in a series of brutal colonial gulags from 1931 to 1936 and again from 1940 to 1945. Like countless prisoners, from Michael Collins, Joseph Stalin, and Fidel Castro to Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, he left prison more militant than he arrived—and better educated in revolutionary methods. After war broke out against the French, Le Duan rose to a dominant position among Vietminh cadres in southern Vietnam.

Already married but separated from his wife and family, who remained in the North, Le Duan fell in love with another woman while he was in the South—a party comrade named Nguyen Thuy Nga. He met her when she was assigned to bring him his breakfast, a relatively sumptuous meal of rice congee and two boiled eggs. He offered to share one of his eggs with her, and soon took her as his wife, even though he was not divorced. This would cause him considerable personal difficulties, for his first wife and children refused to acknowledge his second family, and the party forbade taking more than one wife. But as a member of the Politburo from 1951 on, he was, as Lien-Hang T. Nguyen makes clear in her groundbreaking narrative, Hanoi’s War, effectively above the law.

Le Duan refused to go north along with other cadres after the Geneva Accords, preferring to stay behind in the South to organize a covert Communist network. He did not return to Hanoi until 1957, and then in 1958 he undertook another secret trip to the South to assess conditions there. He found rising discontent among southern cadres about Ngo Dinh Diem’s repressive policies. Le Duan returned to Hanoi determined to wage war on Saigon—a stance that placed him at odds with more cautious leaders such as Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, who favored building communism in the North first. After a heated debate, Le Duan and the “South first” faction won the argument in January 1959 at the Fifteenth Plenary Session of the Party Central Committee, which approved a resolution “to liberate South Vietnam from the yoke of oppression imposed by the imperialists and the feudalists.”2

To implement the party’s decision, the People’s Army of Vietnam began training a new unit, the 338th Division, composed of “Southern regroupees,” that is, cadres who had gone north after the Geneva Accords and who would now be sent back to infiltrate the South. In contrast to American soldiers, who were, to Lansdale’s consternation, trained only in technical tasks, these future guerrillas were schooled first and foremost in politics. As the French journalist and novelist Jean Larteguy was to note, Hanoi had “created a remarkable type of army, a total army, in which every soldier is at one and the same time a propagandist, a schoolmaster, and a policeman, every officer an administrator, a priest, and an agronomist.”3 In the U.S. and South Vietnamese armies, by contrast, soldiers were simply soldiers.

Alongside the 338th Division, another new military unit was activated: Military Transportation Group 559. Its duty was to create a covert supply route to move weapons and fighters south, expanding trails that had been used by the Vietminh during the French Indochina War. Initially its men traveled on foot and by bicycle; eventually roads would be hacked through the jungle big enough to accommodate trucks. By the end of 1959, 543 cadres and soldiers had been smuggled into South Vietnam along with “1,667 infantry weapons, 788 knives, 188 kilograms of explosives, and a number of military maps, compasses, and binoculars.”⁴ It was a modest start to a supply route, snaking through the jungles of Cambodia and Laos to penetrate deep into South Vietnam, that would later become legendary as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

At the end of 1960, Hanoi created the Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam to wage war in the South, along with the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) to serve as an umbrella organization for opposition political parties. The NLF was designed to foster the illusion that the war breaking out was a spontaneous, non-Communist uprising against the hated My-Diem (American-Diem) regime and its “lackey ruling clique of U.S. imperialists.”⁵ In reality, the NLF was as wholly controlled by the Communist Party as its predecessor, the Vietminh, had been. All of the insurgents soon became known generically as the Vietcong (Vietnamese Communists)—a pejorative label coined in Saigon that represented one of the few propaganda victories won by South Vietnam and its American allies in this new war.

Later, the people of Vietnam would look back on the years from 1954 to 1960 as a golden age. “The six years of peace,” they would call it.6 Now the interlude between wars was over and a new struggle was beginning, one that would eclipse the French Indochina War in its inhumanity.

NGO DINH DIEM responded to the Communist threat in the summer of 1959 with a new program to move residents of the Mekong Delta out of their isolated villages into “agricultural towns,” eventually known as agrovilles, where they would be provided with amenities such as electricity, markets, clinics, schools—and, above all, security. This was not, at least in theory, a bad idea: similar population resettlement plans had been implemented in campaigns against guerrillas from turn-of-the-century South Africa and the Philippines to, more recently, Malaya and Algeria. But the implementation of the agroville plan was badly flubbed. Local government officials coerced peasants into building the new settlements for no pay, and then coerced them again to move their families there. As the agrovilles’ unpopularity became clear, Diem throttled back ambitious expansion plans. While his initial goal had been to resettle half a million farmers, the actual number never exceeded fifty thousand.⁷

Meanwhile, dissatisfaction with Diem was rising in the South. On April 19, 1960, a group of eighteen political figures from opposition parties gathered in the Caravelle Hotel, the newest and most luxurious hostelry in Saigon, to produce a manifesto denouncing the lack of freedom: “You should, Mr. President, liberalize the regime, promote democracy, guarantee minimum civil rights, recognize the opposition so as to permit the citizens to express themselves without fear, thus removing grievances and resentments.” The apparent arrogance with which Diem dismissed their concerns further contributed to the image of an increasingly autocratic and out-of-touch leader, especially among U.S. diplomats who were in close contact with the Caravelle group.⁸

Harder to ignore, even for Diem, were the events of November 11, 1960. The CIA station chief in Saigon, William E. Colby, was awakened at his house around three o’clock in the morning by a “series of sharp noises.” It was not “the usual thunderstorms.” Rather, it was the sound of tracer bullets arcing across the night sky and thudding into his house.9 The bullets were meant not for him but for President Diem, who lived nearby. This was the beginning of what became known as the paratroopers’ coup. A tense standoff ensued between the mutinous airborne units and the presidential guard. To gain time, Diem entered into negotiations with the coup plotters while secretly radioing for help from army units based in the Mekong Delta. By the following day, November 12, armor and infantry units loyal to the president had streamed into the capital to surround the paratroopers. The rebellious troops surrendered and their leaders fled the country.

The failed coup exacerbated tensions between Diem and the U.S. government. The U.S. ambassador, a “combative and peppery”¹⁰ career diplomat with the ambassadorial-sounding name of Elbridge Durbrow, had alienated Diem in various ways since his arrival in 1957. In September 1960, Durbrow had demanded that Diem make drastic changes in the government, including shipping his younger brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, abroad as an ambassador, removing his trusted intelligence chief, adding opposition politicians to the cabinet, forcing all officeholders to publicly declare their finances, and lifting restrictions on the press. Even Durbrow had to concede that “some measures I am recommending are drastic and would be most impolitic for an ambassador to make under normal circumstances. But,” he insisted, “conditions here are by no means normal. Diem government is in quite serious danger.”¹¹

Two months later, when Diem’s presidency and even his life were in danger during the paratroopers’ coup, Durbrow adopted a neutral tone. The only U.S. interest, the upper-class diplomat lectured the president and the paratroopers, was in fostering unity against the Communists and preventing further bloodshed. Beyond that, they were welcome to settle their differences among themselves.¹² This was a long way removed from the kind of wholehearted assistance that Lansdale had given to Diem. Durbrow’s “no bloodshed” mantra, was, in fact, the same one that Diem had heard from Lightning Joe Collins during the sect uprising in 1955, and it convinced him that the U.S. embassy was once again conniving in his overthrow.

From the Pentagon, Edward Lansdale protested, “The actions of the U.S. ambassador undoubtedly have deepened President Diem’s suspicions of his motivations.”13 Lansdale was no fan of the devious Ngo Dinh Nhu, but he was skeptical of Durbrow’s proposal “to transfer Mr. and Mrs. Nhu” out of the country. This “involves the traumatic surgery of removing President Diem’s ‘right arm’ . . . ,” he wrote. “What is proposed as a substitute?. . . Would an American be used to fill this vacancy, partially? . . . Would another brother be used to fill the vacancy? . . . Would someone outside the family move in?”¹⁴ There was, of course, no substitute proposed—only a series of nonnegotiable demands.

That Durbrow and Lansdale would advocate such different policies was hardly surprising. Although both were Californians, “Durbie,” as his friends called him, came from a privileged milieu in San Francisco far removed from Lansdale’s middle-class background in Los Angeles. His family’s largesse had made it possible for him to attend an almost comically long list of elite educational institutions, beginning with undergraduate studies at Yale, followed by graduate work at Stanford, the University of Dijon, The Hague Academy of International Law, Sciences Po in Paris, and the University of Chicago,¹⁵ before joining the Foreign Service, another elite institution dominated in those days by WASPs from “good” families. While working at the State Department during World War II, he had been instrumental in burying evidence that Hitler was carrying out a genocide against the Jews—a subject that he believed had nothing to do with “American interests,” properly understood.¹⁶ Having previously served only in Europe, Durbrow had scant patience with the difficulties of running a government in a newly independent Third World country while under incessant insurgent assault.

Ngo Dinh Diem had had his differences with Lansdale in 1956 when the “Ugly American” had urged him to create a more democratic political system, but he also knew that Lansdale was one of the few friends he possessed in Washington. Whether to counter Ambassador Durbrow’s hostility or simply to provide guidance in difficult times, Diem officially requested in April 1960 that the Eisenhower administration send Lansdale back to Saigon to help deal “with intensified Communist guerrilla activity.”¹⁷ Lansdale professed himself to be “damn tired and worn out,” but his reaction was that “if Diem really wants me, I’ll come.”¹⁸

By now Lansdale was a brigadier general.19 His first star, even more than his National Security Medal and Distinguished Service Medal, was a welcome validation of his efforts to fight the Cold War in Asia. That he was being promoted within the Air Force was all the more remarkable given how little he had to do with its operations. As neither a pilot nor a navigator nor even a conventional public affairs officer or intelligence officer, he was one of the more unlikely generals in the history of the aerial service—or any other military service, for that matter. Lansdale would later write, “It takes a Service mighty big of spirit to care for a bastard child—and this bastard child returns the affection.”²⁰

Yet Lansdale found that his new rank did not lessen internal opposition to sending him back to Vietnam. His proposed trip would become the subject of months of behind-the-scenes acrimony between the State and Defense Departments, with the diplomats complaining that “it was extremely difficult for Lansdale to work on a team.”²¹ The State Department finally relented when it realized that it could not move Diem with blunt-force methods. On November 27, 1960, Durbrow conceded, through gritted teeth, that a “Lansdale visit may be useful . . . if he follows Department’s instructions and cooperates fully and openly with me, including reporting accurately to me on talks with and advice given Diem and other top Vietnamese.”²² Admiral Harry Felt, commander in chief Pacific Command, also backed a Lansdale visit but lectured him that he was only to further “the objectives” that had already been agreed to by the Departments of State and Defense.²³ He was forbidden to exercise his independent judgment and initiative.

Lansdale had no choice but to accept these straitened conditions. “While I resent being treated as a second-class citizen, I think it wise to get on out there,” he wrote to Hanging Sam Williams, who had retired from the Army. “Diem and the Vietnamese need a friend present right now.”²⁴

LANSDALE LEFT Washington on December 29, 1960, at the end of a fraught year during which an ill-fated American U-2 spy plane had been shot down over the Soviet Union and the truculent Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had banged his shoe to make a point at the United Nations. His itinerary took him on “smooth as cream” Pan Am flights to Saigon via stops in San Francisco, Honolulu, Tokyo, and Manila. Along the way he picked up his trusty translator Joe Redick, who was again lent to him by the CIA, this time from his post in Laos. The layover in Manila was only about an hour, but many of his old friends, including Johnny Orendain, Manual Manahan, Oscar Arellano, and, of course, Pat Kelly, heard that he was on Philippine soil for the first time since 1959 and flocked to the airport to meet him. (Although he denied it, Lansdale probably tipped them off himself.) Some friends in the Philippine customs service even allowed Lansdale to leave the transit area and have coffee with his visitors in an airport office.

“That hour in the airport was a darn frustrating thing to everyone,” Pat wrote to Ed a few weeks later. She had thought of following him to Saigon, “but I sobered up in time with the thought that it had been a couple of years since I had seen you, with only a note or two in between.” In truth, as subsequent events were to show, she remained very much in love with this married man. “If you ever come this way again, don’t time it with our election year, so there won’t be too much fuss about your staying overnight,” she implored him, “though I suppose there will always be much-ado about you.”25

Any hopes that Lansdale might have had of keeping his brief stopover in Manila private were lost because a fellow passenger aboard the flight was the publisher of the Manila Bulletin. The next day, the newspaper ran a fanciful story beginning, “United States intelligence man Edward Lansdale, a former ranking official at the American embassy here, slipped quietly into town yesterday on a secret mission which apparently has something to do with the uneasy situation in the strife-torn Laos.”²⁶ This article was picked up in other newspapers around the region, getting “the boy diplomats highly exercised,”²⁷ in Lansdale’s phrase. Already the other U.S. ambassadors in the region, fearing his insubordinate tendencies and his reputation for “dirty tricks,” had demanded that he stay out of their countries, and this incident seemed to confirm their concerns. Ambassador William C. Trimble in Phnom Penh wrote to Washington, “Department will recall this treatment of Lansdale’s trip was predicted (reference telegram). Under present circumstances feel impelled urge once again in strongest terms that Lansdale not visit Cambodia.”28

This was the price that Lansdale paid for his growing fame. His very appearance in any country, even for an hour, was treated with panic, as if he were a modern-day Pied Piper capable of magically making governments rise and fall with a few catchy notes from his harmonica. Writing of the powers imputed to him by critics, including so many serving ambassadors, Lansdale cracked, “If I could only figure out what it is they think I’m doing, I’d go do it.”²⁹

SAIGON WAS the city, after Manila, closest to Lansdale’s heart—the scene of earlier triumphs mixed with inevitable frustrations, of song-filled soirees and close brushes with death, of friendships forged and dear friends lost. Now he was returning to this bustling metropolis, which still retained its colonial charm, on January 2, 1961, for the first time in nearly two years,³⁰ at a pivotal moment in the history not only of Vietnam but of the United States as well. Less than two months before, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, young, handsome, and charismatic, had defeated the dour vice president, Richard M. Nixon of California, in a bruising presidential contest decided by the slimmest of margins. The primary national security issue was a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union that Kennedy sincerely, if erroneously, claimed had been created by the Eisenhower administration’s restrained defense spending. Vietnam was almost entirely absent from the election in spite of Kennedy’s long-standing interest in that country. He had visited Vietnam in 1951 and had come back presciently skeptical that the French war effort could succeed without addressing Vietnamese desires for independence. After the Geneva Accords were signed, as noted by the historian Fredrik Logevall, he had become a staunch supporter of Ngo Dinh Diem and echoed Eisenhower’s warnings that the fall of South Vietnam could send “dominoes” toppling across the region.³¹

No one knew how the untested president-elect would react to the new Vietcong offensive. Would he send more American advisers or even combat troops? Would he support Diem or jettison him? Would he press for liberal reforms or conclude that authoritarianism was the best option? Or would he abandon South Vietnam altogether if it was deemed incapable of defending itself? Neither Kennedy’s campaign nor his transition team had focused on the problem of Vietnam; Laos, which appeared to be in imminent danger of falling to the Communist Pathet Lao, had gotten more attention. Thus the Kennedy administration’s Vietnam policy remained to be defined as Lansdale stepped onto the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut Airport to be greeted by the familiar tropical heat and smell of rotting vegetation.

Lansdale was surprised to find that, after opposing his trip, the U.S. embassy “killed me with kindness.”32 The reason was that, as CIA station chief Bill Colby, a daring wartime commando with a deceptively nondescript appearance, later wrote, “There were rumors that Kennedy was considering naming Lansdale as his Ambassador to Vietnam.”³³ Colby thought that Lansdale was “very suspicious of the CIA station” initially, which was to be expected in light of Lansdale’s clashes with Colby’s predecessors, but eventually the CIA man won him over, and the two became friends. Colby, a future CIA director, was later to say that he had “great respect” for Lansdale and felt “very warm and friendly and very supportive of him,” feelings that Lansdale fully reciprocated.³⁴ Predictably, Lansdale was less impressed with Ambassador Durbrow, whom he found to be worn-out, ill, and ineffectual.³⁵

Among the many other people Lansdale saw were the arch-schemer Ngo Dinh Nhu and his wife, the caustic and comely Madame Nhu, a power couple that was becoming even more important in the councils of government than when he had left in 1956. She asked about “that beautiful girl who was at Long Hai [beach],” recalling his waning days in Vietnam, when he had prevailed on Diem and his family to take a seaside vacation. Lansdale wistfully had to admit that he hadn’t seen much of Pat Kelly for the past two years “and was even more curious than she about that beautiful girl.”³⁶

Seeking to reestablish his old relationship of trust with Ngo Dinh Diem, Lansdale found that at first the president “was a bit cautious with me. I suspected that he was waiting for me to drop Washington’s other shoe as a follow-up to the Ambassador’s demands that he reform his ways.” Lansdale sought to dispel Diem’s wariness: “I reminisced on what we had gone through together in the past and he joined in, adding the story of the 11 November [1960] coup as he saw it.” His reserve starting to melt, Diem gave Lansdale a tour of his bedroom, not something he would have done with an outsider, to show the damage inflicted by the paratroopers’ .50-caliber machine-gun fire. “Our meetings from then on became more like the old days, with plenty of give and take . . . ,” Lansdale wrote, “but only after I convinced him that I still had affection for the Vietnamese people and was trying to understand their problems before sounding off.”37

Diem’s primary complaint was not with the United States but rather with his aides, who were lacking in “strong executive capability.” The president was feeling overworked because he felt there were so few others he could trust.³⁸ Of course, part of the problem was self-inflicted: Diem was by nature a micromanager and an introvert who found it hard to reach out to others. Aware of Diem’s shortcomings, Lansdale closely questioned him about how often he met with his vice president, Nguyen Ngoc Tho, who was also the economics minister. Diem assured him that he saw Tho “all the time.”

Lansdale asked, “When’s the last time you had him over for dinner?”

Diem replied, “Oh, a short time ago. I don’t know exactly when.”

Lansdale then went over to the Economic Ministry and talked to Tho, who told him that he hadn’t had dinner with Diem in a year or two. Asked whether he would like to have dinner with the president, Tho replied that he would love to.

Lansdale went back to see Diem and told him, “Tho hasn’t seen you for a year for dinner. Why don’t you call him right now and invite him tonight for dinner?” Diem did just that, and relations between the two men briefly improved.³⁹

The rapprochement between Diem and Tho was but one example of the kind of political action that Lansdale favored and that was largely neglected in his absence. Unsurprisingly, the relationship between Diem and Tho would go sour once again after Lansdale left Saigon, and Tho would join the cabal plotting a coup against Diem a few years later.

LANSDALE FOUND that in Saigon, amid the cyclos and the cafés, the cocktails and the sumptuous banquets, the “guerrilla fighting in the countryside . . . seems far, far away.”40 There were “crowds of people” on the streets and shops full of goods but, just as in Manila in 1950, the atmosphere of frenetic gaiety was permeated by “suspicion and fear.” He was disgusted by infighting and plotting among “the intellectuals and Americans in Saigon.” “They don’t know how hard the Communists have hit them yet,” he wrote. Many of his acquaintances were “in jail or in exile. Others are sitting around griping.” He felt besieged by “so damn many kibitzers.” “It was almost as bad as Washington,” he wrote to Pat Kelly. “The Americans and Vietnamese sit around writing papers all the time, in triplicate.” “What a place,” he lamented. “It got me down.”⁴¹

To get away from “the protocol” and get a taste of the real war, he asked Diem to borrow a helicopter and a member of his staff to tour the provinces. Diem wanted to know where he was going. Lansdale refused to say. “I’ll tell your pilot that; I don’t want to tell you,” he replied, because he didn’t want to give the president time to construct a Potemkin village for his inspection. Diem played along, assigning his secretary of defense, Nguyen Dinh Thuan, to accompany Lansdale, and even providing some sandwiches for them to munch en route.⁴²

Early on the morning of January 10, 1961, only ten days before John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, Lansdale, along with Joe Redick and Thuan, took off in a South Vietnamese C-47 transport aircraft from Saigon bound for Soc Trang, a provincial capital with a South Vietnamese army base set amid one of the world’s lushest rice-growing regions, the Mekong Delta. Amid the watery rice paddies, worked in the age-old manner by water buffalo and farmers in black pajamas and conical bamboo hats, Lansdale discovered a disturbing development: “Vietnamese artillery firing on villages down in the Delta.” “That shocked me more than almost anything else,” he said. “That’s something you don’t do in a guerrilla war, you know. In a people’s war, you never make war against your own people.” Lansdale demanded that the battery commander cease firing, which made the officer so angry that for a minute Lansdale thought he was going to get shot. Fortunately the defense minister “talked him out of it.”43

Amid the Vietcong resurgence in the Mekong Delta, Lansdale managed to find one good-news story—the village of Binh Hung on the Ca Mau Peninsula. Its unusual and inspirational leader was known as “the fighting priest.” Father Nguyen Loc Hoa was a Catholic cleric who had once been a colonel in the Chinese Nationalist Army (he had adopted a Vietnamese name after moving to Vietnam). After Chiang Kai-shek’s defeat, Father Hoa (pronounced wah) had fled with his parishioners. Eventually Diem allowed them to settle in one of the least promising parts of South Vietnam—an area of swamps and forests that resembles the Florida Everglades. They had to build their own village out of mud dragged out of the water.

Lansdale had met Father Hoa in Saigon and been impressed by this almost six-foot-tall figure with, in a journalist’s words, wire-rim spectacles, a placid countenance, and a “wide smooth face with gently slanted gray eyes.”⁴⁴ Father Hoa, who spoke fluent Chinese, Vietnamese, French, and English and typically wore a .45-caliber pistol on his hip, regaled him with tales of how he had organized his own 300-man militia, named the Sea Swallows after a local bird. When the Vietcong first struck, the Sea Swallows had nothing to fight with save staves and knives. But by counterattacking swiftly, Hoa’s men seized M-1 rifles and Browning Automatic Rifles from the enemy. After appealing for support from Saigon, Father Hoa was given some outdated weapons captured from the Binh Xuyen along with a pittance to pay his fighters. Gradually, his community, which had started with 375 Chinese Catholic refugees, grew with the addition of Vietnamese farmers. By early 1961, there were 1,200 people living in Binh Hung.

Lansdale and his party alighted from their helicopter on “a small landing pad in the midst of deep mud just outside the village.” As soon as they got off, three of Father Hoa’s men, who had been wounded in combat, were put aboard the helicopter for transport to a hospital in Soc Trang. “Some of these tough guerrilla troops gave me the only salute they knew, the three-fingered Boy Scout hand salute,” Lansdale wrote. Father Hoa’s followers reported that they had lost seventeen men in one recent battle while killing thirty to sixty Vietcong.

Much of the combat in this “dirty war” was not waged with guns. “The majority of casualties,” Lansdale found, “are foot wounds, caused by the most common weapon: a long iron nail.” The Vietcong would drive six-inch nails into thin boards and hide them in the mud where, in an omen of things to come for American soldiers, the booby trap would perforate the foot of any unsuspecting Sea Swallow who stepped on it. Sea Swallows were thus forced to advance “with a sliding motion that looked as though they were ice-skating.” Because they had nothing to wear but basketball shoes bought in Saigon, they took to adding inner soles made of iron sheeting.

While Lansdale was visiting Binh Hung, the imperturbable Father Hoa received a report of Vietcong movements to the north. He wanted to check it out and invited Lansdale, Redick, and the minister of defense to accompany him. They all climbed aboard a motor launch “and went chugging northerly up a canal,” while a company of Sea Swallows shadowed them on foot. The “tall grass and mangrove swamp along the canal showed how easily ambushes could be laid,” Lansdale wrote. Eventually they reached the tiny village of Cai Doi, where, Lansdale wrote, “Secretary Thuan and Father Hoa shook hands with many of the villagers, talking about rice, fish, and the Viet Cong.”

And then it was time to return to the isolated, mud-brick redoubt of Binh Hung. This was a moment of maximal danger, for, as Father Hoa explained, “A favorite VC tactic is to let a group through on an outward march and then to ambush them on the return. The group becomes unalert when a patrol seems to have been uneventful.” Father Hoa and his party were accompanied on the return trip by a second company of troops and another boat. The journey was uneventful, but Lansdale told Pat Kelly that he “broke all the rules” in order to go out “with a small patrol of local villagers” in terrain where “not even the French ever dared to go, nor the Vietnamese Army.”

Even though he had seen for himself that the Vietcong were gaining ground, Lansdale returned to Saigon buoyed by this foray into the increasingly embattled Mekong Delta. “The morale of Vietnamese officials and people in the 5th Military Region was quite refreshing to encounter after visiting people in Saigon–Cholon, which is full of defeatist rumors,” he wrote, echoing an observation often made by visitors to war zones, who find, paradoxically, morale soaring on the dangerous front lines and sagging in the safer rear areas.45

LANSDALE’S GOOD feelings had dissipated somewhat by the time he left Vietnam on January 14, 1961, after additional exposure to the hothouse atmosphere of Saigon, where political intrigue was an art form not infrequently practiced for its own sake. The self-serving politicos in the capital were far removed, geographically and ethically, from Father Hoa’s stout Sea Swallows, and their entreaties and imprecations depressed him. “Everyone wanted me to do some sort of miracle,” he wrote to Pat Kelly the day of his departure, “and did their level best to make sure I wouldn’t have a chance. . . . It’s heart-breaking to see what a bunch of self-centered people have done to ruin the dreams in the Philippines, Vietnam + Laos. . . . Whatever happened to people with guts like Spruance and O’Daniel?” ⁴⁶

In that melancholy mood, Lansdale flew to Hawaii to write a lengthy report on the trip amid crashing waves and gently swaying palm trees. He returned to Washington via Los Angeles, Tucson, and Chicago, arriving home during an unwelcome cold snap on the afternoon of January 18, 1961.⁴⁷ Two days later, a new president a decade younger than the fifty-three-year-old “Ugly American” would take office, uncertain of what to do about the growing Communist challenge in Indochina. One of the very first documents he would find on his Oval Office desk would be a report on Lansdale’s trip.