The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (83 page)

My Lai wasn’t the only mass killing of civilians. In the fall of 1967, a special American unit called Tiger Force was given the job of pacifying a contested territory with almost no oversight. During their months in the field, they racked up over 1,000 registered kills, although many of their victims were clearly not the enemy soldiers they were reported to be. “One soldier kicked out the teeth of executed civilians for their gold fillings. [One private] slit the throat of a prisoner with a hunting knife before scalping him—placing the scalp on the end of a rifle. . . . Two partially blind men found wandering in the valley were escorted to a bend in the Song Ve River and shot to death, records show. Two villagers, including a teenager, were executed because they were not in relocation camps. . . . Platoon members strung the ears on shoe laces to wear around their necks, reports state. There was a period when just about everyone had a necklace of ears. . . . A 13-year-old girl’s throat was slashed after she was sexually assaulted, and a young mother was shot to death after soldiers torched her hut.”
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A secret army investigation uncovered eighty-four obvious murders by at least eighteen soldiers, but charges were never brought.

Every bit as ineffectual as the military campaign was the parallel “Hearts and Minds” campaign, during which America shoveled money into Vietnam to build roads, clinics, power plants, and schools. The Americans bullied the Saigon government into land redistribution for the peasants. The expenditure was staggering, the results were impressive, and the effect was nil. In a popular war, these social programs would have been the crowning proof of American benevolence, but when contrasted with the bombing, the massacres, and the relocations, it was cast as a hypocritical attempt to whitewash the horrors.

Both sides operated shadowy programs for assassinating the civilian leadership of the opposition, but most of the victims were small fry or unlucky passersby. Terrorist attacks by the Communists in the 1950s had preceded open war and continued year after year. In 1967, for example, the Viet Cong killed some 6,000 local leaders. The CIA retaliated with the Phoenix program, which coordinated various RVN counterinsurgency programs under one command, and killed anywhere from 20,587 (CIA director’s estimate) to 40,000 (Saigon’s estimate) suspected civilian leaders and supporters of the Viet Cong with raids deep inside enemy territory. Tens of thousands more were captured and either imprisoned, turned into double agents, or released after paying their captors a suitable bribe.
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Tet Offensive

Saigon and Hanoi traditionally arranged a cease-fire during the massively popular Buddhist holiday of Tet; however, on January 31, 1968, Viet Cong infiltrators broke the truce and launched simultaneous surprise attacks against political targets up and down the country, even overrunning the major southern city and old imperial capital of Hue. Their greatest propaganda victory occurred when a handful of Viet Cong infiltrated the grounds of the American embassy in Saigon, even though they were eventually contained and killed. The American base at Khe Sanh in the heart of enemy territory was besieged, but it held against everything the Communists could throw at them.

After retaking Hue, the U.S. and Saigon forces began to discover fresh graves packed with bound civilians, first a few hundred, then a few thousand. During their brief occupation of Hue, the Viet Cong had rounded up anyone with a Western taint—government officials, teachers, doctors, clergy, students—and shot at least 2,800 of them. Another 3,000 missing were never found.

The Tet Offensive was clearly a tactical victory for the Americans. The enemy was slaughtered everywhere they popped up. Half of the 20,000 Communists who attacked Khe Sanh were killed or severely wounded, while the 6,000 defending Americans lost only 200 killed and 850 wounded.
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In fact, the Viet Cong ceased to be an effective fighting force after Tet, and the war had to be continued by North Vietnamese regulars instead. However, public perception in the United States considered tactical victory irrelevant. The government had been assuring its people that the Communists were too broken and disorganized to last much longer, but now the enemy was attacking deeper into American territory with larger forces than ever before. It didn’t seem to matter that the offensive had played right into the hands of the American army, allowing it to bring its massive firepower to bear against the outgunned Viet Cong. Even in defeat, the Viet Cong elicited sympathy. The image that stuck with the American public was a widely publicized photo and film of a South Vietnamese officer blowing out the brains of a weeping prisoner on the streets of Saigon.

Antiwar Movement in America

The American government faced a dilemma. There was a limit to the number of casualties the American public was willing to accept without a clear and vital national interest being at stake.
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Because the stated purpose of the war was to bring peace and freedom to the beleaguered people of South Vietnam, turning the whole country into a smoking and cratered desert wouldn’t do anyone any good. America’s best chance to win militarily would be to destroy the war-making capabilities of the Communists at the source in North Vietnam, but doing so risked a war with China—which at this stage in history was a xenophobically insane nation armed with nuclear weapons—and launching Armageddon would probably kill more Americans and Vietnamese than anybody was willing to accept.

The sporadic, almost ritualistic, bombing campaigns against the North were usually designed to send messages rather than destroy the country. Pilots were given a very restricted list of approved targets. Even so, the sheer tonnage of bombs dropped on North Vietnam was over three times the total quantity dropped by the Americans during World War II. Targeting was often careless, and an estimated 65,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in these air raids.

As the war dragged on with no clear purpose and no end in sight, most Americans turned against it. The most visible category of dissidents was college students of draft age who had the motivation, social organization, and political skills to stage large, angry protests. America had been packing its military with conscripts since the Korean War, but what had once been a necessary coming-of-age duty to be endured had now turned into a nightmare to be avoided.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which had originally authorized the president to wage war, had passed the U.S. Senate with only two dissenting votes, but by the beginning of the 1968 presidential campaign, a major faction of the ruling Democratic Party was forming behind peace candidates such as Robert Kennedy. After a poor showing in the first primary, President Johnson realized he’d never be renominated to his party’s ticket and withdrew from the race. Robert Kennedy was gliding toward nomination, but his assassination in June left the peace faction without a viable candidate. The Democratic nomination went to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, an old-fashioned social liberal with no stated opposition to the war. Violent street battles between antiwar protesters and local police at the Democratic convention in Chicago undermined support for the party, and in November the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, was narrowly elected president.

A Bigger, Smaller War

A total of 30,000 Americans had been killed in Vietnam by the time Johnson left office.
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During the course of the 1968 election, it became clear that America was going to get out of Vietnam, regardless of who won the election or who won the war. The only question was how to do it without losing face. Nixon began withdrawing troops as soon as he was inaugurated, trying to shift the burden back onto the South Vietnamese Army. Meanwhile the Communists launched another offensive. Even though Nixon was actively trying to disengage the United States from ground combat, some 10,000 Americans were killed during his first year in office.
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For many years, Vietnamese Communists had been operating out of sanctuaries in neutral Cambodia to the west, which the Americans began secretly bombing and raiding as soon as Nixon came to power. Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk reluctantly and quietly permitted the American incursions because he had little choice. In retaliation, the Viet Cong armed, trained, and infiltrated a force of Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians) back into Cambodia to harass Sihanouk’s government. Sihanouk tried to maintain a balanced neutrality in the face of the spreading war, but his chief minister Lon Nol pressed for a harder line against the Khmer Rouge. In March 1970, while the prince was vacationing in France, Lon Nol deposed him and declared Cambodia a republic. Rather than accept a quiet French retirement like his fellow ex-monarch from Viet Nam, Sihanouk hurried to China and connected with representatives of the Khmer Rouge, with whom he joined into a common front.
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With Cambodia rapidly deteriorating, American and RVN troops openly invaded in May to destroy the Viet Cong sanctuaries. The idea was to corner and destroy the Communists, but they were no more capable of destroying them in Cambodia than they had been in Vietnam. In fact, the foreign invasion stirred up Cambodian nationalism and boosted local support for the Khmer Rouge. This sudden expansion of the war also caused a new outbreak of protests in America, during which National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of protesters at Kent State University, killing four.

In 1971, South Vietnamese forces openly invaded Laos to shut down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but they were driven back by North Vietnamese.

Back to Civil War

By the next presidential election, in 1972, America’s commitment had been reduced by over 90 percent, with only 40,000 American soldiers on the ground, but the Communists still refused to let the Americans withdraw. Peace talks had been sputtering along in Paris for years and had become a farce, with petty bickering over the most trivial procedures. Nixon improved diplomatic relations with the Communist giants, China and Russia, in the hopes of returning to the calm, practical nineteenth-century way of doing things, when big powers decided the fates of little countries. Even though both of the Communist big powers were losing money on the Indochina war and had cut their support back to almost nothing, the North Vietnamese persisted. In the spring of 1972, they launched another massive offensive.
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Out of desperation, the Americans resumed heavy bombing of North Vietnam in December 1972 in order to force the Communists to let the Americans withdraw with some dignity intact.
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Finally, the North Vietnamese agreed, and a cease-fire took effect in January 1973.

The terms of the cease-fire were complicated—involving promises of elections, power-sharing, territorial arrangements, return of prisoners, and so on—but none of that matters. The key point was that the Communists were allowed to keep their armies in place, but they were supposed to stay quiet long enough for the Americans to withdraw without calling it a retreat.

The civil war continued unofficially, with the RVN slowly gaining ground, but it was becoming clear that both sides were on their last legs. Even though South Vietnam’s wartime economy was based on bribery, theft, prostitution, and black markets, at least it was a thriving economy of
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sort, but with the withdrawal of American soldiers, their money went with them. The masses of peasants driven into the cities now had no income at all. On the other side, the stubborn and profligate attacks by the Communists year after year had gutted and broken the North Vietnamese army. In October 1973, both Russia and China refused to resupply the North Vietnamese. The Chinese prime minister told the leader of North Vietnam, “It would be best for Vietnam and the rest of Indochina to relax for, say, five or ten years.”
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In the United States, the animosity over the war had been steadily driving politics to the edge of anarchy and dictatorship. The Nixon administration was caught trying to stifle domestic opposition with a web of illegal activities, and in August 1974, the president was forced to resign—an unprecedented event in U.S. history.

As it turned out, however, the North Vietnamese had one last offensive left in them. Their first attack broke through the Central Highlands, isolating the cities of the North. The RVN commander flew out to safety, leaving 200,000 soldiers and dependent family members to find their own way of escape.

Then the Communists turned against Hue. Remembering the massacre of 1968, the population panicked and tried to escape. Civilians overran the airport; they waded out to sea to scramble aboard boats or drown trying. Hue fell on March 25, 1975; Da Nang, shortly after. Massive columns of refugees fleeing from the Communists were caught in the crossfire and slaughtered by the tens of thousands. In scattered actions, the South Vietnamese soldiers either were beaten badly or fled without a fight, stripping off their uniforms and blending into the civilian columns in order to avoid Communist prison camps.
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As soon as the endgame started, the U.S. Congress voted overwhelmingly to stay out. In the United States, there’s still a furious debate over the failure of the Americans to go rushing back into a country they had been driven out of, in order to rescue a failing ally, but realistically, America wasn’t going back. Period.