could not fail to exercise a polluting influence on a predominantly rural and impoverished Asian society. Like other senior Americans posted to Saigon, the CIA’s Bill Colby adopted a domestic style befitting an imperial proconsul, occupying a villa with a domestic staff of six. Army enlisted men took it for granted that a Vietnamese cleaned their boots and policed their huts.
By contrast, one of the perceived virtues of the enemy was that they had so little save their guns. Again and again, peasants were heard to say that, whatever else was wrong with the communists, they were not getting rich. Western wealth and technology did not generate envy among poor Vietnamese; it merely emphasised a remoteness, an alienation from their enormous foreign visitors, that no amount of MEDCAP visits, inoculations, food aid, tractors, outboard motors, ‘miracle’ rice could assuage. Material aid never secured the gratitude its donors hoped for. Children visiting Saigon zoo often likened the apes to Americans, because both had such long, hairy arms. Some older Vietnamese were uncomfortable with black soldiers, who awakened memories of France’s exceptionally brutal colonial units. Local cynics, as well as communist propagandists, asserted that Washington shipped to Indochina only commodities discarded by Americans, such as hated bulgur wheat.
A West Point adviser could scarcely fail to regard with disdain a forty-seven-year-old battalion commander with blackened teeth, alongside whom he was assigned to service without any common language. An ARVN officer wrote: ‘No superior anticipated or taught the young [American] captain to adapt to our situation and cultural environment. He would make ridiculous intrigues to control his Vietnamese counterparts and take control of the battalion, as if it was his toy.’ After a year, before he went home, the American told his counterpart that he was now starting to understand the war, and regretted his earlier crassness. But then he boarded his plane, another adviser came, and the cycle restarted. ‘That is the history of advisors. American people have goodwill, but they are impatient.’ A Vietnamese officer trainee cited the sort of cultural clash an American might precipitate: at Dalat military academy, a US Army captain tapped on a cadet’s helmet with his briefing stick, to awaken him from a doze. This gesture almost provoked a riot prompted by the shared fury it aroused among the Vietnamese, for whom even a token blow signalled colonial contempt. That confrontation was eventually defused by the school commandant, Col. Nguyen Van Thieu, later Vietnam’s president.
Chuck Allen’s special forces A Team, out at Khe Sanh in the winter of 1962, referred to their Vietnamese counterparts as ‘LLDB’ – Lousy Little Dirty Bastards: ‘It could be hard to get [them] out on an operation. They didn’t want to leave the camp. Sometimes we had to bribe them with extra food or clothing.’ Patrolling Americans were exasperated by ‘accidental’ discharges of weapons to cause bangs to push away the VC, or wilfully tall plumes of smoke from cooking fires. ‘It takes a while to learn that the American way isn’t always the right way … In Vietnam, the poor bastards had been at war for fifteen years. And here we come, full of piss and vinegar, wanting to win in six months.’ That A Team nonetheless felt good about its own little corner of the action, singing a song that a host of Americans would reprise before it was all over: ‘We were winning where we were.’
Yet the vast majority of the three million Americans who eventually served in the country departed without holding any more meaningful intercourse with its inhabitants than a haggle about the price of sex. It was inevitable that US forces should require access to ersatz-American facilities when serving in a faraway country – so do all foreign armies in such circumstances. Even the correspondents who reported the war took for granted their privilege of receiving sanctuary in American messes to write dispatches often savagely critical of American failings. But the manner in which most of Kennedy’s crusaders lived apart from the Vietnamese, save when orchestrating violence, was a formula for alienation.
Robert Kennedy, as attorney-general present at the creation of much Indochina policy-making, said that ‘a military answer is the failure of counter-insurgency … Any effort that disregards the base of social reform, and becomes preoccupied with gadgets and techniques and force, is doomed to failure and should not be supported.’ Lyndon Johnson reported after his 1961 trip to Vietnam on the importance of ‘responsible political institutions … There must be a simultaneous, vigorous and integrated attack on the economic, social and other ills of the Vietnamese people. The leadership and initiative in this attack must rest with the Vietnamese leaders.’ Roger Hilsman of the State Department opined that insurgency ‘isn’t a war, it’s a political struggle with military aspects’. Such good sense should have led the policy-makers to a harsh conclusion: unless a political foundation existed, the military commitment was futile. Vietnamese were unimpressed by programmes and systems: they judged everything by personalities, and most recoiled from the Ngo family nexus – its cruelty, incompetence and Catholicism. Even Americans were embarrassed by the fact that while democracy was the mantra constantly cited as providing a moral basis for promoting resistance to communism, Washington set its face against any outcome determined by ballot.
Yet some influential people continued to argue that the regime’s shortcomings did not matter. The CIA’s Colby cared nothing that Diem was running a dictatorship, only that it should sort-of work. He wrote later: ‘The task in South Vietnam required strong leadership, and Diem’s messianic dedication seemed more appropriate than did the confusion and indecision that could come from overly precise application of the American doctrine of the separation of powers.’ Colby formed an amicable working relationship with Ngo Dinh Nhu – indeed, Agency colleagues were bemused by his enthusiasm for this sinister figure. When the case for replacing Diem became an Agency talking point, Colby bizarrely suggested that brother Nhu might fill the bill.
The 17 April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles backed by the CIA took place less than four months into the Kennedy presidency, and overshadowed all its subsequent policy-making. So too did the communists’ erection of the Berlin Wall in August, and Khrushchev’s taunting that Vietnam was a Soviet laboratory for wars of national liberation. Nobody then knew that the West would win the Cold War. No American heard Khrushchev tell Anatoly Dobrynin, who in 1962 became the new Soviet ambassador to Washington, that he must never forget that an armed showdown with the US was unthinkable, and thus his foremost priority was to work to prevent it: ‘Don’t ask for trouble.’ The world lived in a climate of nuclear fear, and the communists posed a historic challenge. In such circumstances it was hard for national leaders and their advisers to think and act proportionately and wisely. Today, it is easy to forget that the other side blundered as often as and even more brutally than did the Western Powers – for instance in Hungary, Cuba, Berlin, Poland.
Kennedy and his fellow-crusaders saw themselves engaged in a life-and-death global competition with the communists. The president said of insurgencies such as that mounted by the NLF: ‘No one can call these wars of liberation … These are free nations.’ This was half-true – more true than some American liberals recognised then or since – but also half-false, because however ugly was the ruling regime in North Vietnam, that in the South was little less oppressive, and mitigated only by the fact that Diem’s people did not go hungry.
2 McNAMARA’S MONARCHY
An extraordinary aspect of the decision-making in Washington between 1961 and 1975 was that Vietnamese were seldom if ever allowed to intrude upon it. Successive administrations ignored any claims by the people who inhabited the battlefields to a voice in determining their own fate: business was done in a cocoon of Americanness. Frederick ‘Fritz’ Nolting, 1961–63 ambassador in Saigon, once cautioned defense secretary Robert McNamara that it was ‘difficult, if not impossible, to put a Ford engine into a Vietnamese oxcart’. The secretary professed to agree – but went ahead with doing that anyway. There is a great line in David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest about Vice-President Lyndon Johnson’s awed reaction after seeing McNamara, Rusk, Bundy, Schlesinger, Rostow and the rest of the Kennedy Round Table gathered for the first time. He rushed off to tell his friend and mentor Sam Rayburn, speaker of the House, about this brilliant group, only to be deflated by the droll response: ‘Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may
