It is ten years now since the Vietnamese soldiers who fought our own Army walked into Saigon, uncertain of the city’s streets, meeting no opposition at all, and who, on that last day of April, nearly stopped the American heart.
In our country Vietnam is not the name of a small nation with its own rivers and mountains, its little vegetable gardens with lettuce and peppers, its splendid beaches and rice fields, its children learning arithmetic, and the old men who love the roses they grow. There were orchards once, cattle once, birds once, and flowers whose names I did not know.
Now Vietnam is our word, meaning an American failure, a shorthand for a disaster, a tragedy of good intentions, a well-meaning misuse of American power, a noble cause ruined by a loss of will and no home front, a war of crime, a loathsome jungle where our army of children fought an army of fanatics.
It is a war whose origins and purpose were never understood although many Americans were old enough to remember the events that turned our attention to Vietnam and justified, in the minds of many men, the madness that was to follow. There was, as there is now, the fear that the Communists were seeking to control the world, and proof was at hand: the Greek civil war, 1947–1949, with the U.S. helping defeat the Communist guerrillas; the loss of our China when Mao Tse Tung prevailed in 1949; the Korean war, beginning in 1950, which led President Harry S. Truman to order U.S. forces into battle without a declaration of war by Congress and against the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And, always, the domination of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union in the postwar years, which became our septic wound that never healed and defied recovery. But none of these events are the reason for our war in Vietnam, only a possible explanation for the mentality in Washington that, early on, made the disaster so alluring. In a study by the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, for the Committee on Foreign Relations of the U.S. Senate, the report states: “The U.S. decision to become involved in the war in Indochina was made on April 24, 1950, when on the recommendation of the National Security Council, the President approved NSC 64, ‘The Position of the U.S. with Respect to Indochina.’ There is no indication that Truman or any of his associates consulted with any Member of Congress in making this first and fundamental commitment.” The NSC 64 memorandum said: “It is important to United States security interests that all practicable measures be taken to avoid further communist expansion in Southeast Asia.” NSC 64, the study says, was based on the domino theory, “which has been frequently and erroneously attributed to the Eisenhower administration.” And NSC 64 said: “The neighboring countries of Thailand and Burma could be expected to fall under Communist domination if Indochina were controlled by a Communist-dominated government. The balance of Southeast Asia would then be in grave hazard.”
France began war in Vietnam on November 26, 1944, to keep hold of its colony, while the forces led by Ho Chi Minh wanted total independence. On May 6, 1950, the Library of Congress study reveals, the new U.S. chargé in Saigon cabled Washington that Indochina was comparable to Greece; it, too, was a “neuralgic focus” for the Communists and if it fell “most of colored races of the world would in time fall to Communists’ sickle. . . .” At home the accusations of Senator Joseph McCarthy that Communist agents infested our government and military and that the Truman administration was soft on Communism created panic, a profound distress and shame, too, that such a man could create so much disorder while possessing so little proof of what he was charging.
These were the great magnets pulling us to Vietnam.
Many Americans still say, “Well, we shouldn’t have gone in but once we were there we should have tried to win it.” It is as if these civilians cannot grasp how ferociously we tried to have our own way, how the U.S. military bombed and burned and defoliated the south and had howitzers, year in and year out, fire at mountains where no human moved as if the mountains must be humbled too. Some men, who were combatants, say their hands were tied because they could not open up in certain areas in the south, forgetting or never comprehending that it was our intention to “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people and that it would not do to kill all of them. The phrase was inspired by the French in their own desperate and doomed struggle; we paid no attention to what they could have taught us.
The times are unsettling, that small country still haunts and jolts us, but our President cannot grasp the bare outlines of its history. President Reagan sidestepped a question today that sought reassurance that the United States would not secretly become more deeply involved in El Salvador’s civil war, but in rejecting a reporter’s suggested analogy to Vietnam, Mr. Reagan seemed confused about Vietnamese history. In a story from Washington, D.C., about a Presidential press conference in February 1982, Charles Mohr of The New York Times, one of the best reporters to have covered the war, listed and corrected the mistakes made by the nation’s Commander-in-Chief. Among them was Mr. Reagan’s impression that North and South Vietnam, before colonization, were two separate countries. They were not. The Geneva Accords in 1954, the year that French rule ended after the defeat at Dienbienphu, provided for a temporary partition at the 17th parallel and called for national elections in 1956. President Reagan said at his press conference that Ho Chi Minh refused to participate, but it was not the Communist leader but rather the government of Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and his American sponsors who refused. The United States had not signed the accords but agreed not to undermine what was set forth. It was not President John F. Kennedy who sent in U.S. combat troops to South Vietnam, as Mr. Reagan said, but President Lyndon Johnson in March 1965.
This is how it is going.
Winners and Losers is not a history of the war or an analysis of its origins or U.S. policies. It is only the account of a woman who first went to Vietnam two years after the French lost all of it and the American “advisors” and CIA men were moving in. Fifteen years later she was sent back to Vietnam as a correspondent for The New York Times when the war was at its oldest. This is only a book by an American who witnessed the war for two years and came home with memories to harm the strongest heart, needing to love her country again and to listen to its people as she had never listened before.
In the last decade many veterans of Vietnam have spoken, some have even written their own books, giving a new, most dreadful, meaning to the old military term At Great Cost. After seeing the Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C., which gives every name of the 58,022 Americans who died because of the undeclared war, one man told me space should have been left for the men who have begun to die from their exposure to Agent Orange. This is the herbicide containing the most deadly toxin, called dioxin. Our troops did not know they were being sentenced when they were sent on any of different missions to spray it: Crop Mission (used for fixed wing and helicopter), Defoliation (fixed wing only), Enemy Ground Supply Rt. (helicopter only), Friendly Line of Communication (helicopter only), Perimeter of Military Installation (helicopter only), Enemy Cache Site (helicopter only) and Waterway/Landing Zone (helicopter only). Areas were sprayed to deny crops or cover to the enemy or to kill growths and weeds around our own installations. So U.S. troops absorbed Agent Orange through the skin or in water they drank or when it reached their food. Now the Vietnamese and the Americans have this grief to share: children born in both countries with major birth defects.
In Binh Dinh, a province never pacified, 38,700 gallons were sprayed in 1966, 157,104 gallons in 1967 and 141,153 in 1969, according to the figures compiled by a man whose own health has been impaired by Agent Orange. He is George Ewalt, Jr., one of the plaintiffs in the veterans’ lawsuit against the seven chemical companies that manufactured dioxin and settled, out of court, for the sum of $180 million to be divided among the veterans and their families.
An obsessive archivist of the records of Agent Orange sprayings and an infantryman who was on the M-60, Ewalt thinks the men sent to fight in Vietnam were the poor boys unable to seek draft deferments, who could not imagine what was waiting for them.
“Beautify America,” Mr. Ewalt often says, “Clean up the street corners by drafting the kids who hang out there.” In his Philadelphia neighborhood almost all were sucked into it.
It was this war that showed we are not a people made of a better clay, more decent and humane than those in countries many Americans think of as inferior to our own, not a people set apart. There were atrocities, photographs and films gave proof. And some veterans, possessed of a startling courage, gathered in Detroit in 1971 to testify how the United States was waging war in Indochina, and of what they had done. Their testimony was published in a book called The Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes, by the Beacon Press in Boston. It is something of a convenience now, when the war is being considered in a more forgiving light, that this small book is almost impossible to find.
Some men have a need to speak to stay sane but more keep their silence. What they might tell you are not war stories with the usual triumphant clang, only communiqués. A former lance corporal in the 9th Marines, George Swiers, remembers Marines pursuing a North Vietnamese Army unit in the Dong Ha Valley in Quang Tri province and then, in what he calls a “reverse ambush,” being cornered. Pinned down, the water went, the ammunition went, the radio was out. When, at last, the men and their own dead were pulled out, Swiers was sent to the Cua Viet Marine Base where a Corporal Mendes cut his hair. He was handed a mirror and held it up to his face. “I had never seen that person,” Swiers says. “I had no idea who that was.”
Many Americans, sickened or puzzled or bored by the war, wishing to repudiate or forget it, did not notice or stayed apart from the returning veterans. They were seen as contaminated men or simply not seen at all. Cheated on their educational benefits or too suspicious to take advantage, needing jobs when no jobs were there or, despite qualifications, only getting the lowest-paying and meanest work, their problems ignored by the Veterans Administration, their lives were not pretty. Some of them are lost to us now and do not believe otherwise. Help has come, in certain ways, but not enough or too late. This is not to deny that a number of veterans did come home and learn how to release themselves from the war, or silently choke on it bit by bit.
Almost nothing is heard of the ordeal of the men who defied the draft and risked disgrace because they denounced the war that needed them. Last December in the Halfmoon Cafe on Madison Avenue in Albany, New York, the Vietnam Reconciliation Committee had its first informal meeting. Men who often tended to be adversaries spoke to each other: veterans of Vietnam and war resisters. YOU WERE NEVER MY ENEMY, said a sign in big blue letters above a map of Southeast Asia. Steve Trimm, who fled to Canada to escape a prison term for resisting the draft, now working in a hospital with psychiatric patients, stood to have his photograph taken with a high-school friend who won the Bronze Star for valor, a Silver Star, and a Purple Heart, beneath the sign. The man was Swiers. “He was the first person I knew to speak out against the war,” Swiers said, adding he wished that he had listened to him. “I’m hoping that if people can see that the veteran, of all people, can finally accept me, maybe others would be more willing to,” said Trimm, who spent five and a half years in Canada. It is seventeen years now since both men went inside the war, almost half their lives.
Villains are needed to explain the defeat. In the libel suit of General William C. Westmoreland against CBS, which aired a documentary Westmoreland believed made the claim that the general deceived President Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the size and composition of enemy forces, Westmoreland told the jury that his troops never thought, and told him so, that they were “getting a fair shake from the media.” That enlisted men in the field unburdened themselves to their commander of all U.S. troops is a revelation indeed; few generals ever know what their troops are thinking although they often pretend otherwise. Westmoreland did not make clear how infantrymen or the crews on tanks, how cooks or clerk-typists or artillerymen on fire support bases, knew what was being reported on American television networks or in American newspapers since all they saw was the Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes, and an Armed Forces television station. During the same trial a lieutenant general, who in 1974 and 1975 directed the intelligence arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the jury that South Vietnam would have prevailed if the United States had not cut military aid to the Saigon government in 1974 and if the press had not contributed to “defeat.”
But the army of the Republic of South Vietnam, which the Americans paid and equipped and monitored and advised, was once thought of as an army without a country and its ranks did not often love their large allies. The huge American press corps was not suspicious enough of the fraudulent body counts, the cover-ups, the deceitful official reports and the inflated pronouncements of the military. It was the generals and the colonels who dishonored themselves, not the journalists. The best of the journalists knew immense sorrow. “It seems the saddest story possible, with one more sad chapter following another,” David Halberstam wrote in The Best and the Brightest. “Like almost everyone else I know who has been involved in Vietnam, I am haunted by the fact that somehow I was not better, that somehow it was all able to happen.”
Here is the question to ask; the question posed by the father of a soldier killed at Fire Support Base Tomahawk: If we had done it, if we had won, what is it we would have won?
Among us are people trying to finish off the war at last in a decent and intelligent way. Delegations of veterans, including those who did the fighting, have returned to Vietnam, members of Vietnam Veterans of America, the largest and most coherent of a score of veterans’ organizations. There are crucial issues to be discussed, its president, Robert Muller, has often said, and the two governments do not talk to each other. But the former commander-in-chief of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Clifford Olson, Jr., thought this horrifying and so tried to block the granting of a federal charter by Congress to V.V.A. “It’s despicable,” wrote George Ewalt, Jr., to Olson in a letter of protest. That the reasons for returning were to exchange information on the effects of Agent Orange on Americans and Vietnamese and their afflicted children, to raise the question of the missing U.S. servicemen and to expedite the immigration of children of American fathers in Vietnam, appears not to have impressed the V.F.W. commander. That it would never be an easy trip, requiring each man to confront himself and the friends who died there, was of little consideration. Sometimes there is valor long after a war that is more startling in its way than what is done in battle. But the veterans themselves do not agree and have divided and regrouped.
There was one person in Vietnam, a Vietnamese called Luong, who helped me cover the war, both of us so new at it and going in so much deeper than we knew. For eight years I have been waiting for a letter from him, heard rumors that he was in bad shape, even under surveillance because he had worked for an American newspaper. I know how stubborn and proud you are, my last note said, but now have pity for your old friend and send word. The answer came in February 1984. It is only the voice of one Vietnamese, an exceptional man, not at all a typical letter but surely one that reveals something about the grace and courage and resiliency of his people. In the letter he calls the correspondents he knew his “relatives” and tells us not to worry. His four daughters were doing well in school, above average. The family made things to be sold in bookshops, and he is teaching.
“During the past few years I have always found one job or the other,” Luong wrote. “Even too many at that. Of course they were the kind of jobs that one has to think up oneself in order to live and enjoy life. Every odd job my family and I work on together means food and must also mean fun, certainly.”
Material difficulties are enormous, he said, but the family always had a simple way of living, so only the basic needs concerned them. A brother, a former officer, had been released after four years in a reeducation camp and had been unemployed for a very long time.
“The most terrible thing that can happen to a person, I think, is not to have any self-confidence. I still have plenty. I am still in good health, full of enthusiasm for work whether mental or manual, 18 hours a day. I still have books to read and friends to spend time with. . . . Thus I am not afraid of life’s difficulties. You mentioned my pride and stubbornness. That was true in the old days and still is now, whether for good or bad, for advantage or disadvantage.”
He avoided seeing foreigners in Ho Chi Minh City. “What’s more I don’t want to bother with letter writing and exchanges. There are a million troublesome things that go with it. I must resign myself to being rude and heartless to my friends,” he wrote.
“You and my relatives want to file papers for me to go but I must decline your good intentions with thanks. My family has happiness, according to my way, right here in Vietnam.”
His Vietnam is not now the Vietnam we once thought we knew so well. The old days of working with Americans was so far in the past he could not be held by them and was asking that I let him go. Always a kind man, he did not end the letter without sending a few words that might help me be more peaceful.
“Goodness, I wonder how I can tell you in words all that I want to say. . . . There have been so many changes lately, but love will always be strong.”
January 1985
New York, New York