The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (82 page)

VIETNAM WAR

Death toll:
4.2 million (3.5 million in Vietnam, 600,000 in Cambodia, 62,000 in Laos, not including postwar purges)

Rank:
24

Type:
ideological civil war

Broad dividing line:
Communists vs. capitalists

Time frame:
1959–75

Location:
Southeast Asia

Major state participants:
South Vietnam, North Vietnam, United States, Cambodia, Laos

Minor state participants:
Australia, Philippines, South Korea, Thailand

Major non-state participants:
Viet Cong, Khmer Rouge, Pathet Lao

Who usually gets the most blame:
U.S. President Lyndon Johnson

Another damn:
superpower ground war in Asia

The unanswerable question everyone asks:
How did the world’s greatest superpower get beaten by a bunch of second-rate Third Worlders?

Two Vietnams Created

1954: The treaty establishing Vietnam’s independence from its French rulers never intended it to remain two distinct countries forever. It was a stopgap measure. Although Communist rebels under Ho Chi Minh had done most of the work driving out the French, there was absolutely no way that the great powers were going to allow a brand new Communist country to emerge unchallenged. As President Eisenhower later wrote, “I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held at the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.”
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Instead, the West allowed Communist control only in the northern half, at Hanoi, while establishing a traditional constitutional monarchy in the South at Saigon. In the North, the customary Communist killing of class enemies followed, with tens of thousands of landlords and affluent peasants executed. In the South, the emperor was quickly overthrown by a military coup that established the Republic of Viet Nam (RVN), a dictatorship of a Catholic elite under Ngo Dinh Diem. One hundred thousand opponents, including both Communists and “Communists,” were rounded up and imprisoned. Elections were promised for later, but you know how that goes.

Diem was neither charismatic nor clever enough to be an effective strongman. Prone to arrogance and nepotism, his closest advisers were his brothers, General Ngo Dinh Nhu and Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc. The first lady of the clan was the beautiful and sarcastic Madame Nhu, wife of the general.

A Communist rebellion slowly emerged in the South. During 1959, insurgents assassinated some twelve hundred government officials in South Vietnam. During 1961, four thousand officials were assassinated. Because the really important leaders were heavily guarded, the Communists focused on killing minor civil servants and bystanders. As the insurgency escalated into outright civil war, Saigon developed a plan to herd all loyal peasants into strategic hamlets. Anyone who remained outside would be considered rebels and thus fair game. These hamlets were supposed to be self-sustaining and stockaded, but they were built with conscripted peasant labor, and General Nhu ran many of these hamlets like plantations for his own personal enrichment.

The French had originally invaded Vietnam long ago to defend Christian missionaries, and the Catholic Church held a privileged position in the colony. Even after independence, Diem continued these pro-Christian policies, which increasingly brought him into conflict with the Buddhist majority. An unnecessary ban on banners during a Buddhist holiday celebration provoked the usual round of protests, escalating to beatings, shootings, arrests, murders, and riots—which you’ll find in every society under strain—and climaxed with Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire—which is unusual. Madame Nhu was unimpressed and promised to “clap hands at seeing another monk barbecue show.”
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Finally, in 1963, unhappy elements in the Vietnamese military decided to get rid of President Diem. First they cleared it with their American CIA contacts, and were
not
told to
not
do it, so the coup went forward as planned. Diem and General Nhu were taken prisoner, and for a while it looked like all parties might agree to exile, but that seemed like a lot of trouble, so Diem and Nhu were just shot instead.
³

The coup created a leadership vacuum in which the government passed through several hands, but a viable strongman in Saigon was not put in place for many years, until Nguyen Van Thieu was elected president in 1967.

The Smell of Napalm in the Morning

In August 1964, two U.S. Navy destroyers snooping around the Gulf of Tonkin reported that they had been attacked by suspicious radar images that were either North Vietnamese torpedoes or fish. An angry American Senate authorized President Lyndon Johnson to use whatever force was necessary to get even.
⁴

Johnson waited until he was safely reelected in November before he tried anything. After being told that the Saigon government was on the verge of collapse, Johnson authorized regular bombing raids against North Vietnam and then boosted American ground forces in order to defend the newly established air bases. In April 1965, Johnson committed American combat units to fight alongside the South Vietnamese in offensive operations. The numbers built up until over a half-million Americans were fighting in Vietnam by 1968, almost as many as South Vietnam’s 670,000 soldiers.
⁵

Two major technological innovations separated the style of fighting in Vietnam from the previous generation of superpower warfare: helicopters and assault rifles.

During the 1950s and 1960s armies began to equip their infantry with assault rifles, which could be fired as either a rifle or a light machine gun. Studies of combat in World War II had shown that most infantry firefights took place at a closer range than previously believed, which meant that soldiers did not need to fire heavy rifle bullets across long distances. Instead infantry could shift to lighter, intermediate-range ammunition. As the soldiers could now carry more cartridges, it was possible to waste ammunition in bursts of automatic fire rather than limiting fire to carefully aimed individual rounds. These same studies had also shown the effectiveness of small squads over larger formations. Small groups bonded more tightly and fought with stronger individual motivation than the large faceless mobs of the past. Assault rifles made up for the lost firepower.

More controversially, studies of World War II had also shown that the combat skills of a frontline soldier reached a peak after a few months of experience, and then went into a steady decline as burnout set in. The U.S. Army decided to rotate all soldiers home after a year in combat, a policy that was widely criticized as creating an incentive for a soldier to avoid risks and survive his year, rather than fighting to victory as the only way out.

Over the previous decade, technology had moved mechanized warfare up into the air. Helicopters proved to be more versatile than earthbound armored vehicles. They circumvented obstacles, fortifications, and obstructive terrain by operating in three dimensions. Helicopter gunships like the Cobra packed rocket launchers, Gatling guns, and cannons, which had earlier been the weapons of tanks. Transport helicopters kept combat troops supplied and reinforced, while medevac helicopters carried away the wounded.

Although the Viet Cong (the southern insurgents) and North Vietnamese (allied troops sent by Hanoi) were supplied by the Soviets and Chinese, they had less advanced weaponry and relied more on surprise to kill or demoralize the Americans. Booby traps and land mines killed and maimed Americans. Infiltration and ambush tactics could bring a brief tactical advantage before the Americans had a chance to bring their heavier firepower to bear. Viet Cong would blend quietly into the civilian population, attack suddenly, and then disappear.

The Communist supply route was as elusive as the Communist soldiers. The Ho Chi Minh Trail slipped around the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ, the border between the Vietnams), through neutral Laos and Cambodia, and into South Vietnam the back way. The Americans tried bombing it but there wasn’t anything to hit, just a dirt path somewhere under the jungle canopy.

The American goal was to create a situation where the Communist forces could be exposed to overwhelming firepower and destroyed. To that end, it was necessary to clear civilians, brush, and jungle out of the war zone. Two chemical weapons helped clear vegetation, leaving the guerrillas out in the open to be slaughtered. Napalm, a jellied gasoline, spread sticky flame across a vast field of fire, and Agent Orange, a herbicide defoliant, stripped the trees of their leaves. Obviously, both were dangerous to any human who got in the way.

Americans also tried to establish free-fire zones from which all noncombatants were forcibly evacuated. By 1968, a total of 5 million of the 17 million South Vietnamese had been driven from their villages.
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In theory, by removing all civilians in the war zone, soldiers on patrol could safely shoot anything that moved without endangering the general population they were supposed to be defending. Aircraft and artillery could pound these areas with the full military might of the world’s greatest industrial power, and the only people who would get killed would be the bad guys. Of course, many peasants resisted the idea of abandoning everything they owned so that the Americans could destroy it, so they stayed behind, in harm’s way.
⁷

Because the Viet Cong couldn’t be brought to stand and fight against the superior armaments of the Americans, the war was mostly a matter of relentless patrols. A hint, rumor, or suspicion of a vulnerable Viet Cong base would draw an American search-and-destroy mission. These patrols could just as easily turn out to be false alarms or ambushes as successful missions, and the persistent uncertainty frayed the nerves of the soldiers and made them dangerously jumpy. As military discipline broke down, angry, frustrated American soldiers took to massacring the civilian population in which the guerrillas hid.

In March 1968, the day after losing men to a Viet Cong booby trap near the village of My Lai, a company of American soldiers occupied the town and began pulling civilians from their homes. Almost a hundred villagers were herded into the plaza, where they were gunned down by soldiers. A dozen or so old women were shot in the backs of their heads as they knelt praying at a temple. Still more were lined up and shot along an irrigation ditch. Some villagers survived hidden under fallen bodies.
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Finally, horrified by what they were seeing as they flew over the town, an American helicopter crew intervened on its own initiative, threatening to fire on the soldiers if the massacre didn’t stop. As many as 500 civilians were killed that day.
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