In the United States, Democratic presidential candidate senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot down in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 6. Many felt that had Kennedy not been assassinated, he would have been elected president and he would have ended the war in Vietnam in 1969. This supposition would be probable only if Kennedy planned to abandon South Vietnam. A few weeks later vice-president Hubert Humphrey beat senator Eugene McCarthy, one of three leaders of the anti-war movement, for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. But in the general election, Republican candidate Richard M. Nixon won the presidency by a narrow margin over Humphrey, on the platform of “progressive de–Americanization” of the war in Vietnam and “peace with honor.”
President Nixon inherited from the Johnson administration domestic discontent with the war. In foreign policy matters, the Nixon administration continued the previous administration’s concept of containment against international communist aggression. A flexible “détente” was pursued with the largest communist nations, especially with the Soviet Union through the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT, and with the People’s Republic of China for re-establishment of diplomatic relations. Nixon’s political approach exploited the rivalry between the Soviet Union and China. The hope was to decrease international tensions between communist and non-communist nations and weaken the potential support to North Vietnam of the communist bloc in order to solve the war in Vietnam that so entangled every corner of American society. Nixon’s policy in Vietnam was to turn the war back to the South Vietnamese people gradually through “Vietnamization” and through the threat of massive military measures against North Vietnam so that a political solution could culminate in the “honorable withdrawal of American military force from South Vietnam.”
In his inaugural speech on January 20, 1969, President Nixon stated: “The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker. This honor now beckons America—the chance to help lead the world at last out of the valley of turmoil and on to that high ground of peace that man had dreamed of since the dawn of civilization.”1
However, history proves that the peace in Vietnam cost more than 58,000 American sons, hundreds of billions of American taxpayer dollars, several million Vietnamese lives, and the flight of more than 2,000,000 South Vietnamese to every corner of the world. During the last seven years of the Vietnam War, one U.S. presidential adviser, German-Jewish immigrant Henry Kissinger, actively contributed to the disaster. Some have argued that the policies of Nixon and Kissinger might eventually compel a different conclusion.
In the mainstream of international conflicts at the time, President Nixon and Henry Kissinger considered Vietnam to be a “sideshow.” However, it would be a cruel sideshow to be solved with extreme priority in order to calm the rage of the Americans who demanded “peace” and peace immediately. The anti-war movement reached its highest level.
On the first day Nixon arrived in the White House he heard the echoes of anti-war demonstrators from the Lincoln Memorial demanding peace. The president recognized the continued decline of American public support for the war in Vietnam rooted in the Johnson administration’s deceitful war strategy for the intervention in South Vietnam by ground combat forces in the previous years.
The anti-war movement was launched on college campuses by separate protest groups. At first it only expressed strong sentiment against the war and there was no structure or coordination among these groups. However, in March 1965, when President Johnson sent the first combat unit to Danang, some 25,000 people immediately demonstrated in Washington; the majority were students. Thereafter, anti-war sentiment congealed into a “movement” with the emergence of several anti-war organized groups on several campuses around the country. These groups were led by intellectuals, social and political activists, including several congressmen. Some of them were: David Dellinger, a journalist and founder of a pacifist newspaper, who first came to Hanoi and met Ho Chi Minh in 1966; senator Eugene McCarthy, a Democratic Party liberal and presidential candidate, who had given the mass of young Americans the faith of “New Politics”; and Jerry Rubin, a newspaper reporter and socialist activist who led the “teach-in” speeches at Berkeley University and founded the Yippies, or Youth International Party.
The anti-war movement largely opposed U.S. government on several crucial issues:
• The war policy in Vietnam, attrition strategy, random air strikes and civilian massacre, U.S. troop casualties.
• The draft of mostly poor black and white students for military services in Vietnam while favoring the sons of the rich and upper class by the so-called “deferment” system which allowed them to continue their studies in college.
• Defense spending had cut into the domestic budget that pushed Congress to refuse to pass some civil right measures. The cuts gravely affected the “Great Society.”
• The claim that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist rather than a communist and the United States involvement in the war in Vietnam was illegitimate.
Several Democratic congressmen joined the anti-war cause, such as Senators William Fulbright, Robert Kennedy, Mike Mansfield, Morse Wayne, and George McGovern. They were few in number but strong in power, bringing the anti-war movement from the streets to Congress. Also, through 1966–1967, opinion polls revealed that Americans still supported Nixon’s policy in Vietnam. Across the country, there were hundreds of small demonstrations in support of or against the war by different groups. After the communists of Vietnam launched the Summer-campaign of 1967 attacking U.S. forces at Loc-Ninh, Dak-To, and along the DMZ, which resulted in huge casualties on both sides, a great number of U.S. soldiers came home in “canvas bags.” Anti-war leaders David Dellinger and Jerry Rubin sensed that the time had come to let Americans know the truth about the war in Vietnam and to push them to react against it. The anti-war movement grew dramatically with the formation of a leading committee. Committee members represented several anti-war groups: student and teacher associations, women’s groups, war veterans, movie stars, notable authors and intellectuals, doctors and psychologists, radicals and anarchists, civil rights pacifists, and black militants. The leftist activist, Jerry Rubin, in particular thought that the anti-war movement should become bolder and more confrontational in an effort to close down the Pentagon.
On October 21, 1967, more than 50,000 people from different groups rallied at the Lincoln Memorial. After hearing speeches given by anti-war speakers, a diverse crowd marched toward the Pentagon, with white professors alongside black students. Ten thousand U.S. army troops and state marshals were deployed to safeguard the Pentagon with unloaded rifles, tear-gas and truncheons. Young girls from the crowd placed flowers in the rifle barrels of thousands of soldiers. The voice of one of the anti-war movement leaders, David Dellinger, was heard demanding peace, with a chorus from the crowd, “Peace Now, Peace Now.” However, the peace demonstration turned into a running battle that lasted for many hours with more than 1,000 demonstrators arrested. This demonstration was the most violent dissent in the United States since the beginning of the Vietnam War. Rubin saw it as the turning point of an anti-war effort that would capture the imagination of the young.
Ten months later, the anti-war movement Leadership Committee set up another huge demonstration in Chicago. The communist 1968 Tet Offensive and the siege of Khe-Sanh shocked the nation. General Westmoreland’s request for massively more troops, disclosed in March by the New York Times, also shocked the nation, particularly young people. They, poor black and white students, were mostly against the draft. The anti-war movement now entered a new phase. Counseling centers were created to advise students on how to avoid the draft. Draft cards were sent back to the Department of Defense or burned. As many as 250,000 students avoided draft registration while 1,000,000 openly resisted the draft. Twenty-five thousand of them were indicted and more than three thousand went to prison. Almost one hundred thousand others chose exile in Mexico, Canada and Sweden. All of these events led to the demonstration at Chicago’s Grant Park on August 29, 1968.
Anti-war movement activist and leader Jerry Rubin thought that the demonstration held in Chicago would end the war by serving as a trumpet-call for young people to rise up. Although he called for 500,000 people to show up, the actual number of demonstrators was fewer than 10,000. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley anticipated 100,000 protestors would show up and called out 26,000 police and state National Guard troops to face them. The early rally by the demonstrators at Grant Park was bloodied. Senator McCarthy, the Democratic presidential candidate, turned his convention office at the Hilton Hotel into a kind of “field hospital” for his sympathetic voters. The next night, the protestors reassembled and marched toward the Democratic Party’s convention hotel, where Vice-President Humphrey, another candidate for the presidency, was giving his acceptance speech. They were halted. The march turned violent when the police suddenly appeared and charged the crowd, clubbing and beating up protestors without restraint. Senator McCarthy ascertained that in a few minutes more than 800 of the anti-war protestors had been injured. He finally decided to join them and became one of the anti-war movement leaders; his phone was wiretapped after that.
The scenes of this demonstration and terror were televised and widely shown. This worked unconsciously for the interest of the communists of Vietnam and encouraged them to prolong the war and stiffen their voice at the Paris peace talks. Upon taking the Oval Office in January 1969, President Nixon inherited this legacy from the Johnson administration. The American people had turned against the war.
General Frederic C. Weyand, former U.S. Army chief of staff, once remarked: “Vietnam was a reaffirmation of the peculiar relationship between the American Army and the American people. The American Army really is a people’s army in the sense that it belongs to the American people, who take a jealous and proprietary interest in its involvement. When the Army is committed, the American people are committed; when the American people lose their commitment, it is futile to try to keep the Army committed.”2 After the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam, the American people lost their commitment to Vietnam. Through the demonstrations, media criticism, and congressional indecision, President Nixon was obliged to withdraw U.S. combat forces from Vietnam. However, abandoning South Vietnam immediately would mean betraying an ally and surrendering unreasonably to the communists of North Vietnam. The new leader of the free world would not do it. Nevertheless, some suggested the war in Vietnam be solved in such a way.
Secretary of defense Clark Clifford, in a meeting with Kissinger during the transition period, persuaded the new National Security Council to advise the president to abandon the United States effort in Vietnam hastily. Secretary of state Dean Rusk had the same opinion.
Though the American people were impatient of the war in Vietnam and the polls in January 1969 showed that 52 percent opposed it, the role of the United States as the strongest super-power of the free world obliged President Nixon to place the “defense of the national prestige” as the foremost priority in solving the war. His cogent policy toward Vietnam was to keep “maximum pressure” on the communists of North Vietnam while seeking a political solution. The withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Vietnam was certain, but it was to be done the “honorable” way instead of abandoning it unconditionally. Indeed, the president had a response; he said:
Abandoning the South Vietnamese people … would jeopardize more than lives in South Vietnam. It would threaten our long-term hopes for peace in the world. A great nation must be worthy of trust. When it comes to maintaining peace, “prestige” is not an empty word. I am not speaking of false pride or bravado—they should have no place in our policies. I speak rather of the respect that one nation has for another’s integrity in defending its principles and meeting its obligations. If we simply abandoned our effort in Vietnam, the cause of peace might not survive the damage that would be done to other nations’ confidence in our reliability.”3
Melvin Laird, a chief military spokesman in Congress, was made secretary of defense at the same time William Rogers was secretary of state. Other notable politicians to the National Security Council helped carry out the administration’s new policy in Vietnam, but the top Nixon aide was Henry Kissinger. As special assistant to the president for national security affairs, Kissinger, along with the president, would decide the fates of more than 540,000 American soldiers in South Vietnam and 18,000,000 South Vietnamese people. According to several historians, the U.S. Departments of Defense and State were only façades. President Nixon and political assistant Kissinger alone formulated the United States’ new worldwide policy. Both of them possibly believed that the United States had to demonstrate that it had not been vulnerable before the eyes of the international communist leaders. In Vietnam, both Nixon and Kissinger wanted a “peaceful accord” with North Vietnam with “conditions” to quickly draw out U.S. forces from Vietnam in order to solve larger problems with China and the Soviet Union.
A week after his presidential inauguration, on January 27, 1969, a reporter in a news conference asked President Nixon his peace plan for Vietnam. His smooth reply was:
We have been quite specific with regard to some steps that can be taken now on Vietnam. Rather than submitting a laundry list of various proposals, we have laid down these things which we believe the other side should agree to: the restoration of the demilitarized zone as set forth in the Geneva Conference of 1954; mutual withdrawal, guaranteed withdrawal of forces by both sides; the exchange of prisoners. All these are matters that we think can be precisely considered and on which progress can be made. Now, where we go from here depends upon what the other side offers in turn.4
This news conference was related by journalist Tad Szulc in his book (1978). Szulc also noticed Kissenger’s view on Vietnam:
In the beginning, Kissinger was telling everybody that we would be out in six months. You buy time and use that time, first of all, for the Vietnamization program. Second, to convey credible threats to the North Vietnamese—that you will destroy [them] if they engage in offensive operations after you withdraw; and, third, to build up political relations with China and Russia so that they have an incentive to try to deter the North Vietnamese from renewed escalations of war once the United States withdraws. That, I think, was the basic strategy: to buy time at home and carry out these policies overseas.5
By the time the White House’s new political team formed and a U.S. new worldwide policy was drawn, including a policy on Vietnam, the peace talks in Paris had stagnated after several months discussing “the form of the negotiating table” for the delegations of the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the Liberation Front. The South Vietnamese delegation considered the Southern Liberation Front a “political entity” but not a real government, and therefore avoided face-to-face recognition and discussion with its delegation. This would be a problem for the United States and especially for North Vietnam. Once again, the world would learn of Ho Chi Minh’s cunning ability in politics. In June 1969, Ho summoned to Hanoi Nguyen Huu Tho, Huynh Tan Phat, Truong Nhu Tang, and Nguyen van Hieu of the Liberation Front to order them to form the “Provisional Revolutionary Government,” or PRG. After their return to the South, they declared the newly formed PRG as the representative government of the South Vietnamese people. Hanoi promptly recognized the PRG and the PRG’s delegation thereafter officially took part in the Paris peace talks. The formation of the PRG necessitated having two control zones, two administrations, and two armies in South Vietnam.
However, the peace talks were deferred because the North Vietnamese delegation posed two irrational premises to Henry Cabot Lodge, who again re-appeared as the United States chief delegate. The United States must first withdraw militarily from South Vietnam, then the two Vietnams would negotiate a political settlement between themselves. It would mean the Paris peace talks might proceed after these premises satisfied and only between the Vietnamese communists and nationalists. These prerequisites were unacceptable by the United States and became the main reason Nixon took hard military measures against Hanoi in all fronts in Indochina.
The communist 1968 General Offensive, which would eventually defeat President Johnson politically, could not bring about a “General Uprising” in the South and was a disaster militarily. The weighty losses suffered during this campaign, especially during the Tet Offensive, forced them to draw back from the war in South Vietnam. The morale of the communist forces was at an all-time low, especially after VC units were almost annihilated during the campaign and after tens of thousands of their cadres, soldiers, and guerrillas gradually rallied to the South Vietnamese side under the “Phoenix Program,” or the Open-Arms Amnesty program which had been created by Ambassador Robert Komer, the deputy commander of MACV for pacification, who was replaced by William E. Colby in November 1968.
William Colby, the former CIA chief in Saigon, successfully conducted the U.S. Civil Operation and Rural Development Support (CORDS) Program coordinating U.S. military and civilian intelligence efforts to support, assist, and advise the South Vietnamese Phuong-Hoang Program, which sought to reduce the influence and effectiveness of the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI) in South Vietnam. These joint operations were set up in 44 provinces and 242 districts both to recruit VC units and organizations’ military and political personnel to the side of the government (Chiêu-hồi, or Open-Arms Amnesty) but also to neutralize the VC infrastructure using local forces and special groups called Provisional Reconnaissance Units (PRUs) which were formed, trained, paid for, and operated by the CIA. Colby named this joint program “Phoenix.” The program was very effective: in two and one-half years, from January 1969 to June 1971, the efforts of Phoenix resulted in the defection of 17,000 VC cadres and guerrillas, the capture of 28,000 VC infrastructure personnel, and the death of 20,000 others, according to the Colby’s testimony to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in late 1971. Nguyen Co Thach, North Vietnam’s foreign minister, later admitted that the Phoenix efforts had wiped out many of their bases in South Vietnam and forced the rest of the VC units and the NVA to retreat to sanctuaries in Cambodia.
South Vietnam President Nguyen van Thieu fostered the return of village elections and land reform with the slogan “the farmers own the cultivated land” (Chủ-trương “Người cày có ruộng”), encouraging the villagers to secure their lands for themselves. At the suggestion of Colby, President Thieu agreed to arm with U.S. M-16 rifles local forces at the district and village levels, such as the People’s Self-Defense Forces (PSDFs, or Nhân-dân Tự vệ) and the Popular Forces (PFs, or Dân-vêệ). Many Phoenix operations were executed at these levels and with these forces. The total strength of PSDFs and PFs around the country rose from several thousand to four hundred-thousand men armed with rifles. The security of the countryside improved drastically with these infrastructure reforms. By June of 1970, the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES) rated 91 percent of the total 10,954 hamlets as “secured or relatively secured,” 7.2 percent as “contested,” and only 1.4 percent as “VC controlled.” By early 1971, MACV’s Deputy commander for pacification William Colby said that he could drive through the countryside at night without any concern for his safety. South Vietnamese Senator Tran Ngoc Nhuan and U.S. Army Colonel Harry G. Summer, Jr., the notable editor of Vietnam Magazine, echoed this truth.
At the central level, President Thieu ameliorated his regime’s political stability after the 1968 Tet Offensive thanks to the continuous support of the Armed Forces Council, the Congress, the Nationalist parties and sects, and the populace. South Vietnamese people throughout the country had shown their faith toward the regime and the ARVN during and after the defeat of this communist offensive campaign. This advantageous situation favored the anti-communist efforts of the South Vietnamese government. Unfortunately, the war in Vietnam was decided in Washington, which fought a different war, the social and psychological war, that lasted several years and politically divided the nation. The obvious final result of this war was the defeat of the Nixon administration. However, before that was to occur several phenomena appeared: “Vietnamization,” whereby the withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Vietnam would be viewed as the “finality,” Paris “peace talks” as the “means,” and military measures in Indochina as the “procedures,” but time was really the “determinant.”
Hanoi leaders precisely assessed the American domestic pressures which obliged President Nixon to withdraw U.S. forces from South Vietnam and end the war. What could not be done militarily by the 1968 Offensive campaign was almost realized politically: “To push the Americans from South Vietnam.” However, their optimistic estimate underestimated the mentality and philosophy of the new president of the United States, Richard Milhouse Nixon. President Nixon was tough, and despite the intense demands for peace by a majority of Americans and by the media, he decided not to give up on the war so easily. The war intensified and the leaders in Hanoi gravely suffered as they tried to negotiate an advantageous political solution in Vietnam.
These communist leaders believed that even the peace talks failed, they could win the war and re-unify Vietnam by military means. Therefore, keeping regular forces in South Vietnam and continuing to fight was imperative. President Johnson’s decisions to halt all air strikes on North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail on October 31, 1968, had given them the precious time and opportunity to send more troops, equipment, and supplies to replace and replenish their units in sanctuaries in Laotian and Cambodian territories along the borders between South Vietnam.
Development along the Ho Chi Minh Trail continued and secret sanctuaries in these borderline areas were created. Truck traffic moving on the trail increased considerably. The Soviet Union continued to support Hanoi with three billion dollars a year in industrial and military aid of materiel and equipment including surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and MIG-21 fighters. Supplies of war goods came from Hanoi via the important Hai-Phong Seaport. China’s economic and military aid also rose to one billion dollars a year from 1970. War goods came to Hanoi via the Kunming-Hanoi and Nanning-Hanoi railway lines. Supplies from North Vietnam to the NVA and VC units in Cambodian sanctuaries were sent not only through the Ho Chi Minh Trail but also via the Sihanoukville (or Ream) Seaport, which Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia chief of state, was secretly afforded for Hanoi’s use.
Washington feared that NVA regular divisions in these sanctuaries would severely harm South Vietnamese armed forces and the American “Vietnamization” plan. In other words, if the withdrawal of U.S. forces proceeded to quickly, the ARVN could not defend South Vietnam from attack by these NVA units coming from their sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia.
In February 1969, General Creighton Abrams, MACV commander sent a briefing team to Washington to report on the presence of COSVN and several NVA regiments at secret Base Area 353 in Fish Hook, a corner of Cambodia jutting into South Vietnam 80 miles northwest of Saigon. General Abrams proposed a single B-52 operation to eradicate this communist highest command in South Vietnam. His proposal was approved on March 17. The next day, forty-eight B-52 sorties of this air operation, code-named “Breakfast,” were launched. Base Area 353 was one of the fifteen NVA sanctuaries along the border regions between the Long-Mountain Range and the Mekong River from the Laotian Tchépone area to the Parrot’s Beak area on the border South Vietnamese Tay-Ninh Province. General Earle G. Weeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, proposed to President Nixon a list of six to nine of these sanctuaries to be demolished by airstrikes. An air-operation plan was approved by the president under the code name “Operation Menu.” It was a secret air war in Cambodia which followed a replica of the clandestine air operation “Commando Hunt” in Laos years before that had been designed to interrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Once “Operation Menu” was approved, night after night, from spring 1969 through summer 1973, continuous air-strikes of more than 15,500 strategic and tactic sorties were sent and more than 535,000 tons of bombs were dropped on these NVA & VC sanctuaries. These were code-named “Lunch,” “Dinner,” “Dessert,” “Snack” and “Supper,” in addition to the first target “Breakfast.” (See Map #4.)
Meanwhile, the U.S. Seventh Air Force received orders to reopen the “Commando Hunt” air-campaign that had been halted in October 1968, under the Johnson administration. This time airstrikes composed 60 percent of strategic air sorties. Once again, the Ho Chi Minh Trail caused the war to widen, this time to Cambodia in addition to Laos. In mid–May of 1969, three months after the first bombing on “Breakfast” and the renewal of the air campaign in the Laotian panhandle, Kissinger took a positive step toward a political settlement with the North Vietnamese delegation in the Paris peace talks. He proposed a mutual troop withdrawal from South Vietnam within a twelve-month period, a release of prisoners, an international supervised cease-fire, and new elections in Vietnam on the basis of the 1954 Geneva Accords. Hanoi was unresponsive to Kissinger’s proposal. However, Ho Chi Minh responded to a private letter from President Nixon in June, accepting the “secret peace-talks” between Kissinger and Hanoi senior negotiator Le Duc Tho, an important VWP Politburo member. The first meeting was scheduled for August 4, 1969, in Paris. In June, President Nixon announced that 25,000 American troops would begin to leave Vietnam in July. The Vietnamization began even before the secret peace talks occurred.
U.S. secretary of defense Melvin Laird had a “timetable worked out” for additional training of ARVN and the withdrawal of U.S. air, sea, and ground combat forces. The timetable for Vietnamization was four years. But Laird was not the man who decided even military affairs in Vietnam; Kissinger himself, the most powerful authority after President Nixon, determined all U.S. political, diplomatic, and military issues. President Nguyen van Thieu, his government, the RVNAF, and South Vietnamese people had to endure every decision made by Kissinger. Vietnamization created many critical problems for South Vietnam, such as:
• First, Vietnamization occurred over three years, from July 1969 to August 1972, which left South Vietnam too little time to prepare for prolonged fighting against the communists, especially the North Vietnamese Army, which was potentially stronger than the ARVN in manpower and firepower. The North Vietnamese Army consisted of twenty infantry divisions and twenty attached regiment-sized artillery units, one for each division. In 1973, there were just ten NVA and five VC divisions permanently fighting in South Vietnam.
• Second, to replace seven U.S. Army infantry divisions, two U.S. Marine divisions and nearly four allied divisions, all of which had fought in South Vietnam years before, the ARVN was authorized to organize only a new division, the 3rd Infantry Division. Comprised of new recruits, this Division was weak in formation and poor in training, but it was put along the DMZ to replace two experienced U.S. Marine divisions.
• Third, the inflation, lower production and unemployment that resulted from the American troops leaving were burdensome for the government to combat. The nation had to use up precious economic and human resources to fight a complicated war while the United States cut down its economic and military aid for South Vietnam.
• Finally, and most importantly, Kissinger engaged in secret peace talks with Le Duc Tho without any consultation with or regard for South Vietnamese leaders, including President Thieu. Kissinger later placed President Thieu and his government under the de facto “political settlement” which was unfair for South Vietnam to safeguard itself.
As the “Vietnamization” materialized, the Republic of Vietnam faced the most dangerous situation of any time during the Vietnam War. The “high-profile defensive war,” previously fought by more than 550,000 U.S. troops and nearly 60,000 Asian allied troops, now solely relied on the RVNAF. At the time, nobody believed the RVNAF could stand firmly against the overwhelming enemy. Indeed, after the Communist 1968 Offensive campaign, from mid–March 1969 until the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, the war in Vietnam was fought by North Vietnamese Army regular units with the disintegrated VC units playing no significant role.
In any case, Vietnamization proceeded at the same time the war escalated in this critical period 1969–1972. Vietnamization may have been a good intention of Nixon and Kissinger in their worldwide and long-range policy to prosper the United States, but it immediately proved to be the Nixon administration’s worst solution for the war in Vietnam. This consequence surfaced both in the United States and in Southeast Asia.
In the high speed materialization of the U.S. troop withdrawal from Vietnam while facing North Vietnam’s steadfast determination in the Paris peace talks, Nixon and Kissinger firmly decided to use any necessary force to drive Hanoi leaders to come back to the secret peace talks. Some strategic and tactical measures of the Nixon administration during the Vietnamization period included bombing North Vietnamese sanctuaries in 1969 and attacking their regular units in 1970 in Cambodian territories; re-opening airstrikes on Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1969 and launching ground operations in Laotian panhandle in 1971 to cut their supply activities on the Trail; re-opening the air campaign against North Vietnam in 1969; blockading Hai-Phong Harbor; and massively bombing Hanoi in 1972.
However, these military measures sharply divided American society. The anti-war movement grew in intensity across America to the point that 450 colleges closed in protest for a few weeks in May and several massive demonstrations were held. On November 15, 1969, more than 250,000 people demonstrated in Washington. The escalation of the war in Indochina generated repercussions against the Nixon administration and the president himself. A case in point: the secret Arc-Light, or “Operation Menu” was disclosed by the New York Times on May 9, 1969. The next day, President Nixon perceived that the source could have been a National Security Council (NSC) staff member and ordered the wiretapping of the 17 telephone lines of the NSC staff officials and members of the news media at the White House. This first wiretapping of staffers and newsmen spread the first ripples, to be followed by the “Watergate” scandal that forced Nixon to resign. The secret air campaign targeting NVA sanctuaries in a neutral country was investigated by the House Judiciary Committee. After several debates, the Committee voted on an article to bring an action against Nixon. It read:
In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath, authorized, ordered, and ratified the concealment from the Congress of the facts, and the submission to the Congress of false and misleading statements concerning the existence, scope, and nature of American bombing operations in Cambodia, in derogation of the power of the Congress to declare war; and by such conduct warrants impeachment, and trial, and removal from office.6
It was the first call for “impeachment” against President Nixon. But the full House concluded that the Congress could not prosecute the president for actions in the war. However, the direct result of the congressional hearing on the Operation Menu was a repeal of the “Gulf of Tonkin” Resolution, removing important warmaking powers from the president and returning them to Congress. Still, President Nixon and Kissinger continued on their path to resolve the war in Indochina.
In Southeast Asia, by withdrawing the U.S. and Asian Allies’ forces from South Vietnam under Vietnamization, President Nixon unofficially broke with the continuous “containment” policy against international communist aggression formulated and maintained by his four consecutive predecessors since the end of the World War II in 1945. This was the real turning point of the United States’ policy in Southeast Asia. Probably, after Nixon had made his historical visit to China in February and to the Soviet Union in May 1972, it was foreseen that a worldwide geopolitical settlement would shape important tacit arrangements to allow Nixon to neglect the previous U.S. policy and abandon Indochina for a farther political purpose. The South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) thus automatically died without a sound. Many South Vietnamese historians felt this explained Kissinger’s excessive concession made during his secret peace talks in Paris with Le Duc Tho. The dissonantly military actions of the Nixon administration during the Vietnamization period in Indochina were also assumed merely to be Nixon and Kissinger’s tricks to gain necessary time to negotiate with China (but primarily not with North Vietnam) for a final political settlement for Southeast Asia. Once such a solution was accomplished, the rest was less important. Such an explanation would also interpret the Nixon-Kissinger concept of Vietnam as a “sideshow.”
Sideshow, in its proper meaning, is “any subordinate event or matter.” The Nixon Administration’s foreign policy toward Vietnam, by its logical elucidation, was a subordinate or partial policy of the United States in Southeast Asia. Certainly, with the Vietnamization policy, Nixon and Kissinger meant to disengage the American military commitment in Vietnam and let South Vietnam to stand or fall on its own merits. But, to this day, no one knows the absurd meaning of the “sideshow” of Vietnam in the grand design of Nixon’s global context. Kissinger could have explained it but he did not, probably for reasons of secrecy. In addition, no one could know the conversations between President Nixon and his national security adviser, Kissinger, who was the prime mover in Vietnam. Indeed, in the opinion of U.S. ex–assistant secretary of defense Adam Yarmolinsky, the key player of the Vietnamese games, including the Vietnamization, was Henry Kissinger. Yarmolinsky said that Kissinger’s conceptual view evolved from “a paranoid fear of the consequences of withdrawal [from Vietnam] in terms of right-wing reaction … and he was not prepared to take what he saw as a serious risk to Americans. And he was prepared to sacrifice large numbers of Americans, even larger numbers of Vietnamese lives, to avoid what he saw was at risk.”7
With Vietnamization, Kissinger merely feared the “theoretical” but serious risk of a “political division” in America and chose to ignore the result of it in Vietnam. South Vietnam President Nguyen van Thieu saw the “honorable withdrawal” of U.S. troops as a “factual risk” to the South Vietnamese people and paid it his highest attention. Later, Thieu recalled: “Vietnamization depended on the US heart and mind. I repeated many times to the Americans it must be honest Vietnamization—You must honestly like to help us fight. If it’s fully done, continuous, it could be a way to prevent the collapse of South Vietnam.”8 At the time, Kissinger regarded President Thieu as a real obstacle to his “peace with honor” process in Paris. Thieu considered Kissinger a real enemy of the South Vietnamese regime because he clearly perceived Kissinger’s dark intentions to abandon Vietnam, in a “legitimate” way, through Vietnamization and the Paris peace talks; even as the United States adroitly pretended to escalate and widen the war against North Vietnam and in the whole of Indochina. His revenge against Kissinger was later seen in April 1975; and, it was the “real risk” that Kissinger would not anticipate.
The American armed forces in Vietnam and the RVNAF were the most piteous victims of Kissinger’s political dark side and military designs in Vietnam, and the triangular poker games between Kissinger, Thieu, and Hanoi leaders during the Vietnamization period. Fighters in the South Vietnamese armed forces were blamed for incompetence in their own war while the U.S. army, its officers, and soldiers, were equally embittered by the slander of critics. Several texts, themes, and magazine articles by U.S. media reporters including some by American Vietnam War veterans have addressed this. In their view, Nixon’s policy of seeking a negotiated peace through pressure was heavily felt by the American troops in Vietnam and the divided nation at home. They claimed the U.S. forces fighting during the Vietnamization phase-out period, 1969–1972, experienced “overall demoralization” or “lost heart.” Many went too far when accusing U.S. Army officers and soldiers of “fragging” or murdering of civilians. The accidental killing at My Lai, a village complex at Quang-Ngai Province, on March 16, 1968 was widely circulated while the communist massacre of civilians at Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive, which was more horrible by tenfold, was silently neglected.
Criticizing Nixon’s new policy in Vietnam may have been reasonable, but dishonoring U.S. armed forces, or the RVNAF, and American and South Vietnamese officers and enlisted personnel, who were fighting for the noble cause of safeguarding freedom and democracy during the Vietnam War, was simply cruel. General Creighton W. Abrams, MACV commander in the most critical period (1968–1972) of the Second Vietnam War, acknowledged the combative ability and heightened the role of the ARVN in the battlefield; he noted that during the last phase of the communist 1968 offensive “the ARVN killed more enemy than all other allied forces combined.” He also emphasized that “the South Vietnamese get relatively less support, both quantitatively and qualitatively, than U.S. forces i.e. artillery, tactical air support, gunships, and helilift.”9 In addition to Abram’s notes, many U.S. generals voiced the problem of the ARVN being “outgunned” by the NVA. Indeed, NVA soldiers had introduced the AK-47, a modern and highly effective automatic rifle into the war since 1964 while ARVN soldiers were still using single-shot Garants M-1s and carbines from World War II. Only in March (or April) 1968, were a limited number of M-16 rifles distributed to ARVN elite units. That was ironic.
Having formulated a policy to “disengage” the U.S. military commitment in South Vietnam through “withdrawal with honor,” the Nixon administration simply needed a military pact to effectuate its aim. But such a pact was not forthcoming. Both Washington and Hanoi continued to seek military and psychological advantages at the Paris peace talks. Nixon, when he first began his presidency, believed that under military pressure the aging Hanoi leadership would become weary and seek a political settlement for Vietnam. The Hanoi leadership, on the contrary, with its rigid authoritarian structure, was very staunch in its communist ideology and was willing to endure the war. The goals for the members of the Communist Party’s Politburo—the liberation of the nation and the people—never changed; their long-term objectives—“fighting while negotiating” in order to push the Americans out of South Vietnam, “liberating” South Vietnam, and re-unifying the country—remained unchanged. They continued to fight and so the war escalated and became bitter and more tragic. The simple reason was that Hanoi misinterpreted the de-escalation of American combat troops from South Vietnam, while Washington continued to underestimate the competence and endurance of North Vietnam, which continued even though it experienced unprecedented American bombing from April 1969 and lost one of its greatest leaders, Ho Chi Minh.
Before Ho Chi Minh died of a heart attack, on September 3, 1969, he had seen the U.S. air war not only intensify in North Vietnam and Laos but also widen to Cambodia. He had seen the impact of the Paris peace talks. His will to continue the war until the final victory, to expel the Americans out of Vietnam, and to re-unite the country was later materialized by his comrades and disciples.
Ton Duc Thang, Ho’s oldest comrade, replaced him as president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Far different than Ho, Ton was only the symbol of the regime, while the real powers of the party rested with Le Duan and ten other Politburo members. As first secretary of the VWP, Duan was the leading voice of the Politburo members and the first leader of the party. The number two man, Truong Chinh, held the National Assembly as chairman. Pham van Dong, number three, retained the premiership; Pham Hung, number four, was first vice-premier; Vo Nguyen Giap, number five, was vice-premier, minister of defense, and commander in chief of the People’s Army; Le Duc Tho held the post of permanent secretary of the Politburo in charge of liaison, organization, and security. The five other members of the Politburo were less important, including General Van Tien Dung, the 58-year-old general chief of staff of the People’s Army, who was the youngest of the “eleven equal powers.”
Pham Van Dong stated that the new equal powers of North Vietnam were of one mind and united, and the North Vietnamese people continued to live, work, and fight. Le Duan, born in Quang-Tri Province, Central Vietnam, had spent seven years in French jails. He was the first organizer of guerrilla forces against the French in 1945 and the architect of the southern communist structure and strategy against the Saigon government in 1955. Returning to North Vietnam, he was assigned first secretary of the VWP by Ho Chi Minh in 1961. Washington knew nothing about Le Duan and other members of the VWP Politburo, except General Vo Nguyen Giap, and probably, premier Pham van Dong.
Ho Chi Minh’s heir, Le Duan, was a pragmatist rather than a theorist. His personal visitations and stumping tours around the countryside excited the people to continue the war against the Americans. In a greater perspective of war and peace, Le Duan was ordered to concede nothing further at the Paris peace talks. He declared that a definite cease-fire would be honored only if the United States would consider a total withdrawal, leaving the Saigon government and the Southern Provisional Revolutionary Government to negotiate and settle a political solution for South Vietnam between themselves. With such a declaration, Duan sought to neutralize South Vietnam with a neutral government similar to that of Laos, which had been set up due to the 1962 Geneva Accords. This “solution” would be Hanoi’s first success in its march to isolate the Saigon regime, annihilate it, and reunite Vietnam.
By January 1970, in the first year of Nixon’s presidency, 60,000 U.S. troops had withdrawn from South Vietnam. Hanoi regarded this number as insufficient and the secret peace talks stalled after six months of bargaining and four secret meetings between Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. While Kissinger was frustrated with his tough counterpart and the unproductive negotiations, President Nixon still believed that a military victory would probably come soon. In February 1970, secretary of defense Melvin Laird was sent to Saigon to plan a new campaign to strike NVA and VC units and demolish their sanctuaries inside Cambodia. Ground operations were drawn, but the key player of both political and military games in Cambodia was probably Kissinger, as Laird implied; “Kissinger was a thoughtful foreign policy leader.”10
On March 18, 1970, while traveling abroad, Cambodia’s head of state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was subverted by his army chief of staff, General Lon Nol. The United States denied any connection with the coup. Lon Nol established a militarist regime in Phnom Penh while Sihanouk set up a government in exile. Within two weeks, after considering the new situation in Cambodia, Washington decided to support Lon Nol. Military aid in the amount of $500,000 was forthwith offered to the new Phnom Penh government. Later, an “American Military Equipment Delivery Team, Cambodia” (MEDTC) was formed and sent to Phnom Penh to assist, equip and train the Cambodian national armed forces, or the “Forces Armées Nationales Khmères” (FANK). The new reformed FANK of 100,000 troops faced not only five NVA and VC regular divisions commanded by the moving COSVN, but also the army of the Khmer Rouge’s “Parti Communiste du Kampuchia.” The Khmer Rouge’s army, composed of 100,000 to 120,000 regular troops and guerrillas, was formed, equipped, and trained by North Vietnam and backed by China. By the end of 1970, the Khmer Rouge’s army was strengthened and reorganized into regiment- and division-sized units. Many of these units were framed with NVA officers and political cadres. These NVA and Khmer Rouge units occupied virtually all the large eastern corridor of Cambodia between the Mekong River and the Vietnamese border stretching from the northern area of Kratie to the southern part of the Kompong Trach Province.
With the new Cambodian regime established, the war proceeded furiously, reaching its most extreme and tragic results in April 1975, when the Khmer Rouge “liberated” Phnom Penh and massacred more than 1,500,000 people around the country. Assuredly, Kissinger could not have imagined that his policy decisions toward Cambodia would led to such a disaster for the Cambodian people, the worst in their long history. His decisions about Cambodia had contemplated widening the war in South-East Asia to achieve his single desire of “peace with honor.” When Kissinger began to formulate a “plan” for Cambodia, he and his own political aides engaged in stormy discussions at staff meetings. Four of the five aides who assisted with these mini-meetings resigned after the Cambodian decisions were made. These included Washington notables such as Anthony Lake and William Watts.
In particular, a plan of ground operation in Cambodian territory was approved by President Nixon on April 27, 1970. The primary objective was to strike the North Vietnamese high command headquarters in South Vietnam, COSVN, which was moving mostly in Cambodian territory, to attack NVA and VC large units, and to destroy their logistical base areas, or sanctuaries, along the Vietnamese-Cambodian border.
The operation was mainly carried on by 45,000 troops of the ARVN and supported by MACV forces. MACV was cooperating with the ARVN operational forces in deploying several large units in vulnerable areas along South Vietnamese border, providing helicopters for ARVN operational troop movements and medical evacuations, and affording air and long-range artillery support for the ARVN units during their course of action in Cambodia. The American units then deployed no further than 30 kilometers, or 21.7 miles, into Cambodian territory.
On April 29, 1970, a separate two-prong access proceeded across the Vietnamese Cambodian border. The first prong, composed of an infantry division, an armored brigade, and two ranger task forces (regimental size), commanded by Lieutenant General Do Cao Tri, III Corps commander, crossed the border at Parrot’s Beak, or NVA and VC sanctuaries 367 and 706. The second prong, composed of an infantry division and three ranger task forces, commanded by Lieutenant General Nguyen Viet Thanh, IV Corps commander, advanced to the Bulge area, or sanctuary 704, fifty miles southeast of Cambodia Takeo Province. These “external operations” (Hành-quân ngoại-biên) were named “Toàn Thắng” (41, 42, 43, and 44). ARVN II Corps also launched Operation “Binh Tay” (1, 2, 3, and 4) from May 6 to June 26, in northeastern Cambodia.
These operations were completely successful. In the first three weeks of May, more than 4,500 NVA and VC troops were killed, more than two thousand tons of ammunition destroyed and thousands of weapons captured, and their secret base areas at the Bulge, Parrot’s Beak, and Fisk Hook totally overwhelmed and flattened. By the end of June 1970, NVA and VC casualties were enormous: 11,890 killed, 2,230 captured. Weapons and ammunition (individual and crew-served) and stacks of rice captured or destroyed were fivefold greater than the first three weeks of the operation.
Within the ARVN III Corps operational zone in Cambodian territory, the NVA 7th Division, the VC 9th Division, and several COSVN’s specialized units, such as sapper, reconnaissance, logistical and combat support battalions, were hit and crushed in pieces by ARVN operational units in these base areas and in Mimot, Dambee, and Chup rubber plantations along international Road 7, from the Vietnamese-Cambodian border to the Mekong River. The remaining of these communist units were forced to withdraw and disperse over the northern bank of the Chhlong River, a branch of the Mekong River, running eastward more than 120 miles from Chhlong area in Kompong-Cham Province to the southern part of Kratie Province.
General Tri’s forces advanced deeply into Cambodian soil and linked up with the Cambodian units of Colonel Dap Duon, governor of Sway-Rieng Province, on international Road 1, two miles from Sway-Rieng City, and the Cambodian 1st Military Region’s units of Brigadier General Fan Muong at Tonle-Bet, across Kompong-Cham, the terminus of the international Road 7 on the east bank of the Mekong River. General Tri had fair relations with both Colonel Dap Duon and General Fan-Muong, Commander of Cambodian 1st Military Region. This writer was the III Corps’ first liaison officer to General Fan-Muong’s headquarters at Kompong-Cham to coordinate RVNAF’s air, artillery, and ground supports for the Cambodian 1st Military Region’s forces in their fighting against the Khmer Rouge Army and the NVA. My missions included arranging with Cambodian authorities for the repatriation of two hundred thousand Vietnamese people from Cambodia.
General Do Cao Tri had planned to keep his forces along Road 7 and at Tonle-Bet as long as possible for the protection of this humanitarian mission and to block the NVA re-infiltration into Vietnamese III Corps & Region. He liked fighting the NVA on Cambodian instead of Vietnamese soil. Within the IV Corps operational zone, General Nguyen Viet Thanh, IV Corps commander, did the same.
Unfortunately, by the end of April 1970 General Nguyen Viet Thanh was killed during the operational process when his command helicopter collided mid-air with an American Cobra some ten miles from the Vietnamese border. On February 23, 1971, General Do Cao Tri, III Corps commander, suffered the same fate. His command helicopter exploded above the capital city Tay-Ninh a minute after taking off, killing him, his three main staff officers and the notable French press reporter François Sully. Four decades later, no one knows the true reasons for their deaths. Who killed them, and why? These generals were the most clever and brilliant commanders in the South Vietnamese Army.
In the first week of May 1970, while Operation “Toan Thang” was in process, President Nixon announced in the United States that 150,000 American troops would withdraw from South Vietnam over the next twelve months. His decision did not satisfy the internal dissidents. A Gallup poll showed that while 38 percent of the public wanted an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam, 31 percent supported the withdrawal over as long period as necessary, and another 31 percent favored an increase in troop levels to finish off the war in a shorter time. Politically, America was evenly divided. Meanwhile, anti-war demonstrations emerged across the country; some were bloody. President Nixon also faced the congressional repeal of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the issuance of an amendment prohibiting further U.S. troops or air support for the ARVN in Cambodia, and forbidding any further escalation of war in Southeast Asia without congressional approval.
In May of 1970, Le Duc Tho cut off the secret Paris peace talks with Kissinger after demanding the complete withdrawal of South Vietnamese troops from Cambodia and the removal of South Vietnamese president Nguyen van Thieu from office as conditions of any further discussions. Hanoi, meanwhile, regained its ability to fight both in Cambodia and in South Vietnam by moving thousands of tons of ammunition, supplies, and troops to the battlefronts. Trucks traveling southward along the Ho Chi Minh Trail continuously increased during the last six months of 1970, despite massive day and night U.S. bombing along the trail.
President Nixon was resolved to act firmly with Hanoi, but Hanoi’s tenacious stance on the war had intensified the fighting in Indochina on all fronts. Casualties soared day after day for U.S. forces, the RVNAF, and the NVA and VC forces. The war escalated and became more tense and tragic. The Ho Chi Minh Trail created problems for yet another president of the United States. President Kennedy had allowed the trail to build up by the 1962 Geneva Accords; President Johnson had refused Westmoreland’s plan to cut the trail by ground forces in deploying a corps-sized U.S. unit along international Road 9. Now, President Nixon planned to cut the trail by a single operation effected by a couple of ARVN divisions traveling across the Long-Mountain Range into the Laotian panhandle.
Such a rough plan would raise the eyebrows of any ordinary tactician. Was it a calculated mistake? Or, was it a White House plan to test the ability of the ARVN prior to total “Vietnamization”? It seemed unlikely that a force of 17,000 South Vietnamese troops could perform this deadly mission when General Westmoreland and the Pentagon previously planned to accomplish it using 60,000 U.S. troops.
Ignoring the obvious risk, President Nixon approved the “invasion” plan of Laos on January 18, 1971. The Operation “Lam-Son” was set for February 8. The main objective of the operation was to destroy NVA sanctuaries 604, 641, and their logistical base area at Tchépone town, twenty-five miles inside Laos on international Road 9, or thirty miles from the abandoned U.S. outpost at Khe-Sanh. At least three NVA divisions were permanently stationed in these vast mountainous highlands. It was a tiger den. The “Lam-Son” Operation was an illogically massive sacrifice of ARVN forces, but the best of them: the Airborne, Marine, and 1st Infantry Divisions.
Starting from February 8, the main ARVN operational forces advanced slowly on the axis of movement along Route 9, while other infantry and artillery units were airlifted by American helicopters to build up several hilltop support firebases. It took them a month of hard fighting to reach Tchépone and destroy these NVA’s sanctuaries. The NVA forcibly responded. All ARVN operational units at Tchépone and along Route 9, including any hilltop firebases, were continuously under NVA heavy artillery attacks and infantry assaults, day and night, for a week. It took the ARVN operational forces another three weeks fighting in retreat with huge losses. In sum, on April 9, the end of the Lam-Son 719 Operation, ARVN losses were 1,146 dead and more than 4,200 wounded; U.S. helicopter aircrew losses were 176 dead and more than a thousand wounded. It was not a surprise.
Anyone who recalled the Khe-Sanh battle in 1968 could have foreseen the bad outcome of this crucial operation. The ARVN operational forces were, indeed, proud. On their march to Tchépone they had destroyed at least a thousand tons of enemy supplies and ammunition and eliminated more than three NVA regiments. However, a “fierce tiger could not fight a herd of foxes,” as a Vietnamese proverb says. In Washington, the effect of the Lam-Son Operation was more somber for President Nixon and Kissinger. The president faced a series of critics by Senators such as Edward Kennedy, George McGovern and William Fulbright. All had opposed President Johnson’s war policy in Vietnam; now they began to obstruct Nixon’s war policy in Indochina. The House Democrats voted to cease U.S. involvement in Vietnam by the end of 1972.
A most serious event then occurred that created a chain of reactions against the president: an important Pentagon official, Daniel Ellsberg, stole secret documents from the Pentagon concerning U.S. decision-making by five previous presidents of the United States on military strategies in Vietnam from 1945 to 1968. He copied these 7,100-pages of documents and turned them over, first, to Senator Fulbright, and after the invasion of Laos, passed the “Pentagon Papers” to a columnist of the New York Times. Several weeks later, on June 13, 1971, the New York Times began publishing excerpts of the “Pentagon Papers.” President Nixon immediately obtained an injunction to stop the publication. The New York Times pleaded to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of it. The Washington Post also began to publish excerpts of these secret Pentagon documents. Newspapers across the country began to defy the president. The White House, after using secret methods to gather Ellsberg’s personal information, indicted him on charges of stealing and disclosing secret documents related to national security. Because of the administration’s violation of his personal rights, all charges against Ellsberg that might have resulted in a sentence of 115 years were dismissed. Further, the secret methods used by the White House to investigate and gather information would later became evidence during the Watergate scandal.
The result of these events was to turn the Congress, the media and the public against Nixon’s war in Indochina. Kissinger was sensitive to this critical situation. External demarches on even bigger problems would be the only remediable solution to alleviate internal displeasure. While the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were underway, Kissinger went to Moscow and Beijing to arrange for President Nixon’s future visits to the Soviet Union and China. He also met Chinese Prime Minister Chou En-lai to discuss other political and diplomatic relations between the United States and China. American foreign policy proceeded effectively on all fronts except Vietnam. In Paris, in a secret meeting with Le Duc Tho, Kissinger proposed to drop demands for the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam. This was unknown to Saigon. Le Duc Tho did not respond to Kissinger’s concession.
In short, during the last six months of 1971, Hanoi gained advantages on both the political and military fronts. In Cambodia, ARVN operational forces of the new III Corps commander, Lieutenant General Nguyen van Minh, were forced to withdraw back to the Vietnamese border under fierce NVA counter-attacks from June to September of 1971. In Laos, after Operation Lam-Son ended in April, only U.S. air bombing along the Ho Chi Minh Trail remained, although with fewer bomber and fighter sorties.