Vietnam: The trail not taken

More than anything else about Vietnam, young Americans must keep in mind that their most influential seniors have a large stake in having the war remembered as both unnecessary and unwinnable.

This bias pervades the HBO movie "Path to War," which premiered this month (See additional play times at article's end.). The network bills the production as "an inside look at the men who got us into Vietnam but couldn't get us out." The narrative begins at Lyndon Johnson's inaugural ball in January 1965, and ends with the president's surprise announcement on March 31, 1968, that the war had caused "division in the American house" and he would not seek reelection in the name of "national unity."

Why the emotional investment in the futility of the war? Shame, guilt, and the desire to deflect it.

Vietnam was the first war in U.S. history that elite young men, who are now running the country, avoided fighting. Older Americans in the arts, the media and academia encouraged and abetted their evasions, fostering disrespect for those who served. The anti-war movement heartened the Hanoi Politburo and hastened the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina. After South Vietnam was conquered in 1975, some 1.5 million boat people cast themselves into the sea in a desperate bid for freedom, tens of thousands of our former allies were sent to "reeducation camps," and American credibility in foreign affairs was damaged for decades. "Several hundred thousand" of the boat people perished, a State Department official told United Press International Tuesday.

To admit that one's own actions or evasions contributed to this disaster is to assume a greater psychological burden than most people can bear. Representing the U.S. effort as doomed from the start assuages the conscience.

This is not to cast all opposition to U.S. involvement as self-serving. "Path to War" shows how Undersecretary of State George Ball, played with wonderful midwestern plainness by Bruce McGill, served as the principal critic of intervention within the Johnson administration. But for every George Ball there were 1,000 antiwar protestors whose hypocrisy the Iowan found "stupid and unattractive" for "declaring in sanctimonious tones that American policy is thoroughly in the wrong and that we as a nation are as brutal and viciously ambitious as the other side."

Preserving the freedom of the South Vietnamese people would have been a difficult and protracted effort, and success was not guaranteed. But those who insist the communist victory was inevitable advance arguments that have more in common with theology than historiography.

Nor did such principled critics as Ball argue that the war was wrong. "The qualifications I have are not due to the fact that we are in a bad moral position," Ball told Johnson at a meeting on July 21, 1965. He said he expected South Vietnam to come under Hanoi's control soon after U.S. forces pulled out.

"But George," the president responded, "wouldn't all these countries say that Uncle Sam was a paper tiger? Wouldn't we lose credibility, breaking the word of three presidents, if we did as you have proposed? ..."

"No sir," Ball answered. "The worse blow would be that the mightiest power on earth is unable to defeat a handful of guerrillas."

But a multi-division cross-border blitzkrieg with massed armor and artillery -- not "a handful of guerrillas" -- defeated South Vietnam in April 1975, two years after the last U.S. combat formations had departed. And although the titles at the end of "Path to War" refer to the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973, they tellingly omit the fact that North Vietnam broke the agreement, resumed its aggression and won.

The movie is worth watching if taken with a grain of salt. It does a good job of depicting the situation Johnson faced at home, including his determination not to allow the war to interfere with his "Great Society" -- a legislative package to fund programs designed to improve the quality of life for all Americans. It serves as a useful reminder that the Vietnam buildup occurred at the height of the civil rights struggle. Martin Luther King's belief that his own country was "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" and King's view that the war was an "enemy of the poor" in the United States were trials to Johnson. It also shows how the president felt trapped by the Kennedy legacy and betrayed when Robert Kennedy turned against the war Johnson had inherited from Kennedy's late brother.

But the viewer learns almost nothing about the situation LBJ faced in Asia, and the show gives short shrift to options that might have led to a better outcome.

"Path to War" is dialogue-driven. HBO says screenwriter Daniel Giat and executive producer Howard Dratch spent more than a decade researching the script, interviewing several of the principals in the story and consulting their memoirs. Rather than trying to verify who said what to whom when, and what constitutes legitimate artistic license and what does not, this essay will explore (1) how things looked to the writer as a college student, (2) the situation in Asia in 1965, and (3) what might have been done differently.

I was not hoodwinked or coerced into going to Vietnam. As a youth I knew that with my "smart" mouth and defiant attitude, I would last about 45 minutes under communist rule before being dragged off. I was profoundly grateful to be living in democratic society, where the penalties for such traits are relatively mild. I saw no reason why my counterparts in South Vietnam, in my own and future generations, should be denied the right to be equally oppositional. The sacrifices of Americans and their allies had preserved the freedom of millions of Koreans south of the 38th parallel. I was aware that the United States was bound to South Vietnam by the Southeast Asia Treaty, ratified 82-1 by the Senate in 1955. Our SEATO ally was being invaded in stages by its larger communist neighbor. President John F. Kennedy, recently assassinated by an American defector to the Soviet Union, had pledged a "long twilight struggle" against communism in his inaugural address. Great powers do not betray allies.

So it became clear well before the big buildup of 1965 that Vietnam would be "my war." In the shower one warm spring day, I pictured maps of Korea and Indochina. It was going to be tough. Our sea and air supremacy had all but quarantined the Korean peninsula. The communists had access to the south only along 130 miles of border. South Vietnam, on the other hand, had a long land frontier with Laos and Cambodia through which the enemy could infiltrate. This spaghetti-like network of roads and paths came to be called the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

What to do? Isolate the battlefield. Cut west through Laos to Thailand at the border between the two Vietnams, blocking the North Vietnamese Army. Then the insurgency within South Vietnam could be put down, as the British had suppressed the Malayan communist rebels in the 1950s.

Walt W. Rostow, Johnson's national security adviser from 1966 to 1968, is played by Gerry Becker. In a phone interview Sunday from his home in Austin, Texas, Rostow said he hadn't seen "Path to War" and couldn't comment on it. I had called to ask him about interdiction, but he surprised me by stating, without being asked: "I believed that we should cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I still hold to the view, and I expressed that view, but I did it properly, because I have great affection and respect for what Johnson was doing at home and abroad."

Rostow said the war was primarily about the balance of power in Asia, a continent Johnson believed would become at least as important to the United States as Europe. The president's reluctant decision in July 1965 to send large U.S. forces to Vietnam was made in the context of a larger Asian crisis. This context is perhaps the most important missing element in the historiography of the war, the former national security adviser said.

"In 1965 the Malaysian confrontation was on," Rostow said. Indonesia's leftist leader, Sukarno, had vowed to crush the new state, Singapore withdrew from the federation, and a communist insurgency broke out in Sarawak. At the same time, regular North Vietnamese forces were entering South Vietnam.

Rostow said Sukarno was maneuvering with China and the leader of the Indonesian Communist Party, or PKI, to effect a communist takeover of his own country. In this "nutcracker" the small nations of the region, including Thailand, would be caught between two giants -- China to the north and Indonesia to the south. "There were few doubters of the domino theory in the Southeast Asia of mid-1965," Rostow said.

Of course, in the fall of that year, the attempted communist coup in Indonesia backfired. Tens of thousands of communists were killed, and the PKI was destroyed.

Rostow said that at least as early as April 1965, Johnson viewed the containment of communism in Vietnam as a way of buying time for a strong, regionally organized, independent Asia to emerge. By April 1973 Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew was able to predict, accurately, that even if the communists took over in Vietnam, it did not follow that dominoes would fall, as they would have earlier. By this measure, the Vietnam War was a success.

Our "gift of sanctuary" to the North Vietnamese Army in Laos and Cambodia inevitably rendered the war long and inconclusive, Rostow said. Never has a guerrilla war -- or a war dependent on external supply -- been won when one side was granted sanctuary by the other. Blocking the trail network on the ground would have forced NVA troops to mass, and two or three reinforced infantry divisions plus U.S. airpower could have dealt with them on favorable terms.

Rostow said since the war Gen. William C. Westmoreland, U.S. commander in Vietnam from 1964-1968, has been invited to speak in North Vietnam. "We heard from the North Vietnamese a number of times -- Westmoreland knows about this. They much respected his military part in Vietnam. It turned out that all of the North Vietnamese said, 'Why didn't you cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail?'"

He referred to John Prados' 1999 book "The Blood Road: The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War." Prados gives the account of Bui Tin, the North Vietnamese officer who accepted the surrender of the Saigon government in 1975. In 1990, filled with disgust at the "reeducation" camps and communist officials extorting bribes from desperate boat people, he fled to France. Bui Tin once asked Gen. Le Trong Tan (1914-1986), former NVA chief of staff, what he would have done to win the war if he had been an American general. Tan replied that if the Americans had cut the trail and assumed defensive positions, "We would have been stuck. We would never have been able to fight and win as we did."

In his own memoir, "Following Ho Chi Minh" (1999), Bui Tin wrote: "If Johnson had granted Westmoreland's requests to enter Laos and block the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Hanoi could not have won the war."

Rostow told UPI that Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk rejected the option because they had been "traumatized" by the China's unexpected intervention in the Korean War "when we moved up the Yalu" River in November 1950.

"I believed it was a false analogy," he said. "The Yalu abutted onto Manchuria. ... And it was a very sensitive area. Whereas the boondocks around the southern part of China were very difficult terrain ... more than 200 miles away" from the place in Laos where it would have been logical to cut the trail.

"Johnson made a quite firm decision not to let American troops outside the borders of (South) Vietnam, and in my view that was the wrong way to fight the war," Rostow said.

"Yes, but also (Secretary of Defense Robert) McNamara was all over the lot," he replied.

After a recent preview of "Path to War" at the French Embassy in Washington, panelists were asked if -- in retrospect -- the United States could have done anything to win the war. I was astonished to hear the reply of Harry McPherson, special counsel and speechwriter to LBJ, who is known as a dove on the war.

McPherson's said the idea of cutting the Ho Chi Minh Trail was the only one that had made any sense to him.

I told Rostow of my surprise and wondered why McPherson didn't express that belief as a presidential adviser.

"He didn't believe it back then," Rostow said. "He sort of got it in retrospect, I think. And he's a very nice man, incidentally. That was not his view at the time.

In that case, the Rangers and LRRPs were in mortal danger from the git.......CIA ever pay that guy a visit after they found out who he was? They should have.

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The general's name was Giap, I believe. He was also a general on our side and was given enormous influence in determining our strategy and tactice. After the war he laughed about it and remarked how stupid the Americans were to take his obviously destructive advice. Unless he's dead from old age, he's still over there and is viewed as a hero by the North. Clinton will probably have a cigar with him when he goes there for his visit.

McNamara was essentially a high level subversive who undermined the war.

Actually, I think Clark Clifford was the real subversive, Mac was more of a blowhard (as someone said upthread) and an ass-coverer. After all, he was a privileged actor, and he had to have some sort of justification for all that privilege......and so when things started to lose traction, Mac started looking for the door -- leaving half a million men in the field that he did so much to put there, and coming home in boxes at the rate of, what was it, 450 a week during Tet? While Clifford oozed into office with subversion dripping out of every pore, and actually bragged about it to his liberal shower-buddies after the war. I never had any use for that guy, none, zero, zilch.

I think the bottom line on those two is, Macnamara spent his time at DoD trying to convince us how great he was. Clifford didn't even bother.......he just came in and slimed everything and everybody, and then left. Dick Nixon and Melvin Laird shoulda fumigated the place after Clifford left.

My experience in late 67 was that extracting units while under fire from the "trail" area was the exception rather than the rule.

Yes,and I can tell you that as a member of these teams,things had changed by late 68,and we were getting shot-up on a fairly regular basis. The reason for this seems to be that Tet-68 destroyed the VC,and the NVA started moving larger numbers of conventional troops down the trail for the build-up to take over.The smaller teams you refered to were recon teams,and the larger teams were the "Hatchet Force" platoons like used during "Operation Tailwind". I ran operations with both types of teams,and HF teams ALWAYS came out under fire. This is definitely true about the teams that launched out of Dak To.

You should also know that a lot of the teams had already made contact with NVA forces and been shot-up before a extraction was ever called for. They managed to escape from the NVA and call for a extraction after enduring several running gun battles. They were already sitting near a cold LZ before the call ever went out to bring the slicks in.

Thanks for your insight, sp. There is no doubt that Tet68 was the watershed event of the war. I left in the first week of 68 and came back in November of 69. Except for the fact that I was back in the same country, it was two different wars. From the perspective of morale, mission, drugs, belief in what we were doing, everything had changed.

I'd sure love to have a beer with ya sometime. So many war stories - so little time. Didja ever hear of a couple of SF NCO's out of FOB2 (Kontum) named Snake and Squirrel?

The snake-eaters' beef is with my source (cited above). He was writing about his in-country experience from early 1969 to sometime in 1970. He emphasizes how quickly the insertion teams were picked up by the NVA

First off,he wasn't SF and working in Laos,Cambodia,or North Viet Nam. He was a conventional LRRP recon man. Having said that,it seems like he had the misfortune to "work" the Ashau Valley area,and that was ALWAYS a MF'er. Nobody I ever knew in SF ever had any "beef" with these LRRP's,only sympathy. It was almost impossible to get in or out of that area without being spotted. Conventional and SF teams worked the VN side,and SF teams worked the Laotian side. The NVA were VERY concentrated in that area,and had elaborate cave systems set up with AAA pieces,12.7's,etc,etc,etc. that were almost immune to bombing and artillery strikes. By 69 EVERY spot in the Ashau Valley big enough to land a helicopter on had NVA "trail watchers" setting on it,ready to call in the tracker dogs and the Soviet Spetnaz-trained "anti-recon team" teams on your trail. Yeah,you could lose them if you were lucky,or even fight them off if you couldn't lose them. The thing is you couldn't accomplish your mission while you were doing all this and looking over your shoulder.

All this lead to SF even going so far as to insert recon teams by HALO (sky diving)methods at night.Imagine jumping at night into a jungle that is full of enemy troops,and the problems with getting hung up in trees,seperated from your other team members,etc,etc,etc. The fact that the army would even consider something like this gives you a idea of how hard it was to get into the Ashau Valley unnoticed. There are still a few of these guys left living and running around (including the guy who came up with this idea and who was the original HALO recon team leader. He's 74 now,and still jumping),and there IS such a thing as a "HALO combat wing". It wasn't approved and awarded until 20 years after the war was over,but there are a half-dozen or so guys running around who have earned the right to wear it. They are welcome to it. I can get the shivers just thinking about doing something like that.

The reason this happened was one of our top advisors was an Nort Vietnames agent,

He was only one source. There were others under suspiscion,such as a E-4 clerk who worked in Saigon,and even people who worked on the Senate Foreign Relations committee and on Kissinger's "peace"(puke,gag) team in Paris. PLEASE note that Bubba-1 worked for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as a summer intern before he went to England and Russia. Re-read his letters to ROTC Col Holmes,and note the part where he says "I was already oppossed to the war even before I worked for the Foreign Relations Committee,and my work there exposed me to secret information most Americans weren't aware of that......". Fullbright was the one who got Bubba-1 the job there (and his scholarship at Oxford),he was the Senator who was the chairman of the committee,and he was also the one whose office was suspected of leaking this information to the enemy.

BTW,for anybody interested about this subject,get the paperback book "Operation Brightlight",and read about Ambassador Sullivan in Laos denying the US military permission to go into Laos to rescue shot down pilots and POW's who were KNEW where they were. You can also read about the suspiscions about other traitors such as the Saigon clerk,and the efforts US forces made to rescue POW's and shot down pilots,DESPITE all the bureaucratic efforts made to stop them.

Johnson and Mac sent 56,000 Americans to their grave. Plus about 1 million more injured. They didn't even try to win the Vietnam conflict. I refuse to call it a "war" because congress didn't have the balls to declare war. Have you read "Dereliction of Duty"? If not, it is worth the effort to track it down. Also any issues of "The Resister", a magazine that was published for a few years by SFC Michael Barry. But make sure you have a couple of barf-bags ready, what our govt has done to our own troops will make you sick.

I left in the first week of 68 and came back in November of 69.

I got there in Sept of 68,and was medi-evaced in Nov of 69.

Except for the fact that I was back in the same country, it was two different wars.

That's the same thing the SF A-team guys who had been there prior to 66 told me. They said that in the early days,they mostly ran across VC who were poorly armed and poorly trained. They said the intensity level went off the scale after Tet-68 and the NVA moving in to take their place. There were alwasy NVA regulars manning the Ho Chi Mihn Trail.

From the perspective of morale, mission, drugs, belief in what we were doing, everything had changed.

I heard this from guys in conventional units there,but we didn't really have any of these problems in SF.

Didja ever hear of a couple of SF NCO's out of FOB2 (Kontum) named Snake and Squirrel?

I knew several "snake"'s over the years,but there was only one Squirrel. He and I sat next to each other on the flight from DC to Ft.Lewis,and I was his assistant team leader on a special "POW Snatch Team" SOG headquarters put together. I was also based at Kontum. I briefly thought about changing my code name to "Moose" (g) (BIG Bullwindle fan!) while Squirrel and I were on the same team,but this would have been too confusing to people who knew me. He was one of the best recon men to ever live. He survived at least 3 tours in VN and over 90 cross-border missions before he retired,and he then died in a construction accident sometime in the mid-70's.

leadpenny, I agree 100% that Johnson was a bald faced liar. He so lusted for the presidency that he would do anything to achieve the office. Once there he would do anything to stay. He quit in 68 because he had no chance of re-election. I will gladly stand by your side when and if you unzip your fly over his grave.

Interesting reading is Halberstam’s Best and the Brightest which gives a biographical look at the players. As a Harvard grad, Class of ‘55 he posits that JFK would never have supported the build up that Johnson did. Of course this flies in the face of his other theory that the Dems were saddled with the fear of another China loss.

TET68 was a watershed because of the way the media portrayed it. They portrayed it as a complete surprise to our intelligence community and a military defeat. They reinforced that view by continually broadcasting footage of wounded marines riding out on top of a tank at Hue and providing nightly broadcasts of the struggle to recapture the city. It was the only story for them. Walter Conkrite saying night after night how terrible it all was. The offensive, which was country-wide, had been defeated everywhere else. It was a major defeat for Giap and his staff; Charlie was never able to take the field again. From that point on the NVA regulars were the sole opposition. Giap and Uncle Ho were scared to death that the US and ARVN would come North, but the gutless wonders in Washington had no vision of that in their proportional response.

The NVA were finally successful because the DemoRat congress would not live up to their pledge to provide air support if the NVA invaded the South. The nightly news had long made us weary and we had no stomach to continue.

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