Beating Plowshares Into Swords: An Alternate History of the Vietnam War (2 page)

We did catch a break that summer of ‘65 because the North Vietnamese offensive ran out of steam in late May. With the onset of the rainy season, they dug in and prepared to hold on to their gains, which at that point consisted of well over 50% of all South Vietnamese territory. I believe that if they had kept up the pressure, we would have been looking at something like a Dunkirk in the South China Sea. Starting in mid-July, American troops began pouring into the South, and with their arrival came the first large scale engagements with the enemy, which in turn led to the first casualty lists. That meant coffins coming home to a lot of small towns and big city neighborhoods and every one of those coffins only raised the stakes higher. Nothing less than “victory” will redeem the supreme sacrifice and as MacArthur stated, there is no substitute for it. Simultaneous with the troop arrivals in Vietnam were the increase in monthly draft calls, which were more than doubled to 40,000 a month in July and then increased by an additional 7,000 in September.

This necessitated the canceling the deferments for all first year college students, the first of many politically unpopular decisions that had to be made. This of course created an atmosphere of resentment on many campuses that was used by opponents of our efforts to save South Vietnam among college faculties and the so-called intellectual elite. That individuals are still required to make sacrifices for their country was a notion alien to this ilk and I’m sorry to say they mislead many young people. That they would compare the American President to Hitler was particularly repellent to me. It is amazing how many rotten apples nearly ruined an entire generation.

In early November American forces in Vietnam went from a defensive posture to an offensive one and we had great success initially. The pressure was taken off Hue and Da Nang and shells were no longing falling on Saigon, but as they pushed into the Central Highlands and toward the Cambodian border the resistance stiffened considerably. The North Vietnamese proved to be skilled jungle fighters and I have to admit that our boys were pretty green and they paid a severe price for their inexperience. Entire Companies were ambushed and the losses were severe. Of course in warfare some things cannot be taught, they must be experienced, I saw the same thing in Korea. These unpleasant facts of war can be hard to explain to the public and this brought even more criticism of our policies, especially in the Congress. It was only a matter of time before our superior numbers and technology would wear the enemy down, but nobody seemed to have any patience.

I accompanied Secretary Nixon to Saigon in mid December for a progress report. There has been some controversy about the meetings there between the Secretary and Gen. Westmoreland. It has been purported that the Secretary of Defense compelled the General into committing himself to end the war by a fixed date and promising him a blank check on whatever additional men and material that would be needed to achieve it. I personally sat in on every meeting that occurred and can attest that no such discussion happened. If such a conversation occurred privately, then the Secretary never mentioned it to me or acknowledged it officially. The 75,000 men that arrived in January 1966 was part of the original troop commitment. As I had originally believed, our superior numbers, coupled with the lessons of real combat, began to pay off in the early months of the new year when the enemy began to yield ground in the Central Highlands, where most of the major towns and strategic real estate were recaptured.

By early March the North Vietnamese seemed to be in full retreat back to their sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia; in many provinces they had just melted away. At the Pentagon, the assessment was that the war was virtually won; Secretary Nixon believed it was no longer possible for the Communists to win militarily and it was time to declare victory. President Johnson was prepared to present his terms to the North Vietnamese for ending the conflict.

It turned out that old Ho and Gen. Giap were far from beaten, they’d only strategically retreated and regrouped. They had also done a lot of infiltration behind our lines, making the most out of their greatest advantage: the ability to blend in with the South Vietnamese population. No matter what, our boys would always be white men in a yellow man’s country. On the opening day of the North’s counter-offensive, a Viet Cong demolition team breached the security of the US Embassy in Saigon and destroyed half of the building, a terrible humiliation for us. But that was hardly the least of it, they were also able to seize part of Saigon and it took the Marines three weeks of house to house fighting to route them out. The enemy struck in nearly 30 provincial capitals from the Delta to the DMZ and hitting most American bases, barracks and supply depots. Especially hard hit were Quang Tri, Hue, Kontum and Pleiku. I’ll give the Communists credit, their Great Spring Offensive was very well organized and coordinated; they stopped us in our tracks and for the second time caught us with our pants down. Much more, they had given plenty of new ammunition to the opponents of our policy from one end of the political spectrum to the other. The worst aspect was the casualty rates; we lost over 350 men a week at the height of the offensive.

It goes without saying that there were plenty of recriminations, both in Saigon and Washington in the wake of the Communist offensive. I spent two weeks over there in April trying to piece together what had happened. My report to the Secretary put the blame squarely on our intelligence services. They had completely overlooked the enemies’ supply system, chiefly the Ho Chi Minh Trail that ran from North Vietnam down through supposedly neutral Laos and Cambodia and back into the South, capable of delivering 200 tons of material a day and 10,000 men a month. Backing up the North were the Soviets and China with supply lines across their common border and Soviet cargo ships offloading to Vietnamese barges just inside of international waters in the South China Sea. I was with Secretary Nixon when he reported these facts to the President. At that same meeting he also presented a serious plan to cut those supply lines and a request to send another 100,000 men to South Vietnam. “Goddamn it, Dick” I heard the President say to the Secretary when they put their heads together at one point, “it’ll be a hundred years before we get out there at this rate.” “Don’t believe that, Mr. President” the Secretary replied “we are stronger than they are and we will win, no matter what. You can count on it.”

Travis Folsom Smith
Biloxi, Miss.

Rifleman

23rd Infantry Division

I had never given the army much thought while I was growing up, which was strange considering the fact that my father and my five brothers were all veterans. The old man had been in the Infantry and served in France during World War I. He married my mother six months after he got home and my oldest brothers were born just in time to be eligible for the Second World War-two of them followed the old man’s boot steps in Europe and another one fought the Japs in the Philippines. My closest brother was eleven years older than me and he got to spend a year in Korea. I was born the spring my older brothers got home from the Big One, they used to laugh and say that they had been through the worst kind of combat, but the most shocking sight they saw was when they got back to Biloxi and found their gray haired mother six months pregnant. Our mother died of a heart attack when I was in the 10th grade.

When I graduated from high school in 1964, I couldn’t have spelt Vietnam, much less found it on a map. I was working as a stock boy in the Winn Dixie in Biloxi and couldn’t have cared less about the future; I was having too much fun that summer dating a couple of local girls, drinking beer on the beach and cruising around in my ‘61 T-Bird. Out of school, working just enough to have some pocket money, living at home with no responsibilities-I had it made. One thing for sure: I didn’t want to work in my Daddy’s saw mill. My brothers always said that the baby had it too easy and I used to bitch that I had four extra fathers.

One Sunday afternoon, sometime after Labor Day, the Old Man and my brothers all got together after church, sat me down in the kitchen and spelled out the hard facts of life. They told me that it was only a matter of time until my ass got drafted and that I might as well make it easy on myself and just go down to the Board and have them push my number-that means I’d volunteer to be drafted. According to them, I’d get a better pick of jobs, like crew chief or maybe make NCO. Made it sound like a great deal. Now I don’t like being pushed into anything, even if was for my own good, but it was six against one and all I could offer was a very few lame excuses, like maybe I’d flunk the physical, to which it was pointed out that I’d played Tight End three years for Biloxi High and the worst that had happened was that I’d sat out a couple of games with a sore tendon. “Boy, you can’t stock shelves for the rest of your life,” my father said, “and it’s just for two years and you got nothing tying you down. Either you make the call or it’s gonna be made for you. It’s not anything your brothers ain’t been through; it’s just your turn.” That settled the matter. It occurred to me that there just might be a war and this could turn out to be not such a good idea, I thought about saying so, but that wouldn’t have cut any ice.

I left for basic just after New Year’s, I cried on Christmas Day when I realized that it would be my last one at home for awhile, but I made sure nobody saw my tears. I think the Old Man was about to tear up a couple of times that last week, but he’d have lay down and died before he let on anything was bothering him. Did my basic at Fort Polk, Louisiana and except for a week at Church camp when I was 12, it was the first time I had been away from home for any length of time. Talk about homesick, every time I was alone in the head was a battle to keep from sobbing and I didn’t sleep a wink that first week, but I wasn’t the only recruit that felt that way and the important thing was not washing out. Did more sit ups and pushups than I ever thought was in me and the drills were so monotonous they almost drove me crazy.

About halfway through my Basic everything in Vietnam hit the fan. If we were ignorant about that part of the world before, we learned very fast. I read every newspaper article that could be found and kept track of how fast the Communists were walking over the South Vietnamese. None of us had any doubt from the beginning that we’d be in it soon; every day brought a new rumor, a lot of us felt that this was the beginning of World War III--South Vietnam was just like Poland when Hitler rolled over them. A lot of the NonComs were not sorry to see McNamara take the fall for this disaster, and they were positively delighted when Richard Nixon was brought in to take his place. It meant war for sure, they told us. The election of 1960 had occurred while I was in the 8th grade and I did a report on the Vice President in Civics class, so I was familiar with his reputation and thought it was a shrewd move on LBJ’s part to bring in the man who’d stood up to that old bastard Khrushchev. Few people from my part of the country had much use for the Kennedys. I remember standing in a rec room with about 200 guys, watching President Johnson go before Congress and promise to send the best we have to offer to save South Vietnam. Everybody knew that “best we have to offer” included us, but our spirits were high, we were ready to go and kick some Commie ass, just what we’d marched and drilled and crawled through crap for. It’s easy to feel that way when you’ve never heard a gun fired in anger. The way things were going over there had us worried that South Vietnam would surrender before we got there. We needn’t have worried ourselves.

With the outbreak of war the Army suddenly needed lots of infantrymen, “Eleven Bravos,” which meant the end of my chances to make NCO any time soon; along with everyone else who went to Basic with me, I landed in the newly created 23rd Division. To show just what naive fools we were, every last one of us agreed to have our enlistment’s extended for an extra year; there was a big bonus that came with it, money we could use when we got back to civilian life. It was my duty to be part of a fire team in the 11th Brigade. If we thought we’d see combat soon, we were sorely disappointed, they sent us to temporary quarters at Fort Hood, Texas for the summer, where we trained and marched and drilled some more, while a Marine Company, an Armored Brigade and the 101st Airborne got over there ahead of us. Of course I realize now the buildup of ground forces had to take place at a deliberate pace because the airfields and port facilities in South Vietnam had to be expanded and you can’t get a hundred thousand new recruits trained and ready overnight. It’s hell when you’ve got a tough job staring you in the face and all you can do is sit and wait for it to happen.…just waiting, that was awful. Most of us were just green kids who’d never been anywhere before this. The worst thing the Army did was not allowing any of us to go home on leave after Basic, they claimed we had to be ready to move out on a moment’s notice, but it was obvious we weren’t going anywhere anytime soon and if we did go into Vietnam then some of us weren’t going to come back; so the decent thing would’ve been to let us see our families one last time before we went over there. Instead, we spent one endless day after another, practicing target shooting under that boiling Texas sun and playing stud poker until September, when the Army started to get down to business; we got our inoculations, made out our wills and received a bunch of lectures on what to expect when we got to South Vietnam-which contained a lot of information that proved to be utterly useless once we got in country.

We flew over to Vietnam on a big TWA 707 that had been pressed into service when the buildup began. On the way over they gave us the choice of hot dogs or grilled cheese sandwiches; we were quite disappointed that they didn’t find better food for a group of soon to be heroes like us. Other than bitching about the food, nobody had much to say while we in the air. There was a stopover in Guam, but it was 3:00 A.M. and we didn’t see much. The 707 touched down on the airfield at Da Nang on the morning of Sept. 28, 1965, it had been just over a year since that family conference in the kitchen way back home in Biloxi.