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Jack Mallory
We approach the 50th anniversary of the end of the American war in Vietnam—so labeled by the Vietnamese who had fought the French, each other, and the Americans since the end of WWII.
April 30, 1975 was the day that the People's Army of Vietnam captured Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, reunifying the country, free of foreign domination. This anniversary, like many since the war ended, is the focus of many reflections on the meaning of that war, its causes, effects, and why it ended in loss for the U.S.
What follows here is loosely based on a book review I wrote in 2016, published in The Veteran.
We lost. They won. When a nation loses a war, it’s not a judgement on the morality of the war, on the bravery of soldiers, on Congress, on the media, on hippies or anti-war protesters. It’s because one side fought longer, smarter, “better” than the other.
This is Col. William Haponski’s thesis in An idea and Bullets: A Rice Roots Exploration of Why No French, American, or South Vietnamese General Could Ever Have Brought Victory in Vietnam.
And what he really wants to know is why and how the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were able to fight longer, smarter and better than the French, the Americans, and the South Vietnamese. How and why, as he puts it, “the Vietnam War was lost before our first American shot was fired,” or the first French shot, or the last South Vietnamese shot. How did the North Vietnamese win on the ground in Vietnam, which was the only place that mattered?
Col. Haponski was a career Army officer with two tours in Vietnam (yes, John, he has lain bleeding on the battlefield, so he has a right to an opinion), and subsequently a military historian. This book is his attempt, a very successful attempt, to answer the question that I and many other Vietnam veterans ask, “what in the hell was THAT all about?” To answer this question, Lt. Col. Haponski uses his own experiences and US, ARVN and North Vietnamese unit histories, interviews with Vietnamese military on both sides, information from Vietnamese civilians, and myriad secondary accounts.
So what did the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong have that enabled them to fight longer, smarter, and better? What did we lack? “Fire in the belly,” says Haponski. The power of an idea: independence and unification—goals that evolved throughout centuries of Vietnamese history, the same goals that drove American independence in the 18th Century. We attempted to combat this idea in Vietnam the way the British fought the colonists during the Revolution, and the way we fought German and Japanese armies during WWII—with firepower, destructive capability. We were unable to destroy this idea militarily, and unable or unwilling to convert our WWII thinking into strategies and tactics that could destroy or change the idea. Anti-communism, the Domino Theory, international credibility, these aren’t goals that create “fire in the belly.”
In a world in which we are too frequently at war, we should want to know why we lost the war in Vietnam. An Idea, and Bullets, provides answers.
On a personal level, An Idea, and Bullets explains why I always felt like the red-headed stepchild as a Psychological Operations/Civil Affairs officer in the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. Haponski explains the enormous “cultural” power of the WWII military and political generation and their immediate descendants. Trying to change their determination to fight WWII again and instead fight a war focusing on pacification and turning the war over to the Vietnamese rather than trying to engage the VC/NVA in major battles wasn’t happening. As a fellow 11th Cav trooper put it to me, "It always seemed to me that the mission of the Blackhorse in the war was almost the definition of hubris. By the time you are committing an Armored Cavalry Regiment in a counter-insurgency operation, you have already lost.”
I went to officer candidate school at Ft. Knox, got trained to be a tank officer fighting the Russians in Europe, and then got orders to Ft. Bragg and was trained in counter-insurgency at the JFK Center for Special Warfare. A couple of years in Panama with the 8th Special Forces converted me completely to the special warfare model of counter-insurgency, which makes the political, hearts and minds battle—the struggle to put more fire in the belly of your side than the enemy has in theirs, of equal or even greater importance than the military battle.
MAYBE I could sit down with the village chief, the school teacher, a local Buddhist monk, and talk about what the villagers needed from their government in order to win their allegiance. But facilitating that interaction was a far lower priority to colonels and generals than getting tons of armored scout vehicles and tanks across the farmers' fields to attack the enemy. While combat units in Vietnam like the 11th Cav had organizational slots for psychological warfare folks like me, the military establishment never really “got” the importance of that critical aspect of the war. The VC/NVA did, and that made all the difference.
During my 5 months as regimental assistant S5 with the mission of winning those hearts and minds I was also: base camp defense officer, assistant operations officer, liaison to US Military Assistance Command in An Loc and to the Special Forces team in Loc Ninh (refrigerator full of cold beer and steak!). That S5 might be a full-time job was not a priority for regimental HQ, which was concerned primarily with blowing things and people up.
While in Vietnam I knew something was “wrong,” but I didn’t know what. In the daily hurly-burly of medical clinics in Vietnamese villages, hurling leaflets out of helicopters, checking bunkers on the green line, flying orders out to squadrons in the field, and when I was lucky, living high off the hog in the Loc Ninh SF camp it wasn’t possible to compare lessons from Ft. Bragg to realities in III Corps. But a month after I got to VN, Nixon announced the beginnings of unilateral US withdrawal. Then through the summer we had the attacks on LZ Andy and the other fire bases: seeing the inability or unwillingness of the South Vietnamese army and militia to respond while our units did all the fighting suggested that pacification and Vietnamization had some problems, to say the least.
I remember riding a tank into a firefight to do loudspeaker appeals to the North Vietnamese troops to defect. On the way to “the sound of the guns” we passed a South Vietnamese army unit with hammocks still slung between trees, brewing tea. No matter how hard we hammered the NVA, or how many inane chieu hoi leaflets we dropped or loudspeaker broadcasts we did, NVA defectors were almost nonexistent. Attempts to do civil action in the villages, like school or clinic building, were frustrated by corrupt village/district/province authorities. And even if we had built them, as I knew at the time, it would have been us, not the GVN, doing the work—and the point was to convince the local folks that their government was working for them.
While going from our firebase to An Loc one day, doing my liaison with MACV, I was the first adult on the scene at the death of a young Vietnamese girl, killed by a VC booby trap. I tell this in my story, The Little Girl at my Door. On the way back, I was almost first on the scene when an ARVN soldier was run over by one of our deuce and a halves on the side of 13. I tried to do CPR, but his chest had been crushed. Meaningless, unnecessary deaths, both.
A few months later, as I did another job unrelated to my training, I sent a new, young officer into combat to replace an officer due to go home. The were both killed that same day by a rocket-propelled grenade while riding on the same tank, one on his first day at war, the other in his last. By then I had lost any belief that the war was winnable, or that the winning was worth the cost.
After leaving Vietnam and beginning my obsessive reading about the war, I was able to come to more refined conclusions about what had been “wrong." A friend who also served in the 11th Cav summed it up well when he said that it seemed to him that the mission of the Blackhorse in the war was almost the definition of hubris. By the time you are committing 50 ton tanks to a counter-insurgency operation, you have already lost.
Insurgency and counter-insurgency training and units had existed since at least 1952. But the allure of the historical military mission of closing with and destroying the enemy distracted Westmoreland and Abrams from the more realistic, and potentially effective, goal.
A telling exchange took place between between Col. Harry Summers and Col. Nguyen Don Tu, US and NVA negotiators at the Paris peace talks, a week before the fall of Saigon: Summers said, “You know, you never beat us on the battlefield.” Tu replied, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
I have couched this in terms of military history, but as with all history there should be lessons for the present and future. Since Vietnam, our wars have been counter-insurgencies in the Middle East and Afghanistan. We have not “won” these wars any more than we won the war in Vietnam. Haponski quotes “the commander of U.S. Special Operations in the Middle East” who says, “We do not understand the movement, and until we do we are not going to defeat it . . We have not defeated the idea. We do not even understand the idea.”
Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Same-o, same-o, as we used to say incountry.
Should we go on into the future the same way?
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