"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War

1 March 5, “This day in history.” www.history.com

2 Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Vintage, 1996), p. 434.

3 Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, p. 434.

4 The term is taken from the title of Marilyn B. Young’s The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990.

5 Mary McCarthy, in a discussion of the terms used to designate the National Liberation Front, points out that although the term “Viet Cong” (Vietnamese Communist) was a derogatory label (like “Commie” in the US in the 1950s) and therefore unacceptable to the North Vietnamese, for whom the correct term was “People’s Liberation Army,” it became the common term “in the Western World” to refer to the insurgent forces. She writes that “the derogatory term was “Charlie,” an abbreviation for Victor Charlie, or radio parlance for the Viet Cong. She also writes that just the initials VC were a “half-affectionate diminutive, like ‘G.I.’” McCarthy, Hanoi (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968), p. 74. In my discussions of the literary works in succeeding chapters, I usually refer to the fighters of the National Liberation Front (NLF) as Vietcong or VC, owing to the greater familiarity of these terms, but, based on that literature, I cannot distinguish any real difference, positive or negative, in VC, Vietcong, Viet Cong, Victor Charlie, or just Charlie, terms that American soldiers seemed to use indifferently, although they understandably never called their enemy the NLF.

6 The Pentagon Papers, as published by The New York Times (New York: Bantam, 1971), p. 54.

7 Ellsberg tells the story in his memoir Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York:Viking, 2002).

8 Summarized, with quotes, from the Introduction by Neil Sheehan, pp. ix-x. The Pentagon Papers cited in this and subsequent chapters always refers to the Times collection in the form of the Bantam paperback of 677 pages. The Pentagon Papers are often the source for the facts cited in many histories of the war.

9 Schulzinger, Robert D. A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 17-21. It is sadly ironic that Ho Chi Minh worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the predecessor of the CIA--during World War II, helping to rescue downed American pilots.

10 Herring, George C., America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975. Second Edition (New York: Knopf, 1986), p. 25; Halberstam, David, The Best and the Brightest; Halberstam, David, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Ballantine, 1992), p. 145

11 The Rector of the important Vietnamese University of Hué told the American reporter and writer Ward Just on his trip to that city that the war was really between the Americans and the Chinese., saying that “the Vietnamese had no real part to play except to offer the state”. On the same trip, Just interviewed a revolutionary student leader “who did not feel a part of what the war was supposed to be about, nor especially anxious to die for what they regarded as American foreign policy objectives.” Just, Ward S., To What End—Report from Vietnam (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1968), pp. 132, 134.

12 Butterfield, Fox, “The Truman and Eisenhower Years 1945-1960,” Chapt. 1, Pentagon Papers, p. 10.

13 Butterfield, Pentagon Papers, pp. 3-4.

14 Qtd. in Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 47.

15 Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 46.

16 Herr, Michael, Dispatches err (New York:Vintage edition, 1991), p. 49.

17 Young, Marilyn B., The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 (New York: Harper’s, 1991), p. 42.

18 Sullivan, Marianna P., France’s Vietnam Policy: A Study in French-American Relations (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), pp. 51-54.

19 Qtd. by Butterfield, The Pentagon Papers, p. 13.

20 Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1969; New York: Ballantine, 1992), p. 339. The term “containment” is attributed to the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union George F. Kennan.

21 Smith, Hedrick, Pentagon Papers, Chapt. 3, “The Kennedy Years: 1961-1963,” p. 79.

22 Pentagon Papers, p. 91.

23 Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 75.

24 Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, p. 60.

25 Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 113.

26 Morganthau, Hans, “We Are Deluding Ourselves in Vietnam,” in: The New York Times Magazine (April 18, 1965), rptd. in: The Vietnam War: Interpreting Primary Documents, ed. Nick Treamor (New York: Greenhaven Press, 2004), pp. 176.

27 Smith, Hedrick, Pentagon Papers, Chapt. 4, “The Overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem: May-November 1963,” pp. 158-159.

28 Pentagon Papers, pp. 158-159.

29 Cable, Larry, Conflicts of Myths (New York: NYU Press, 1986), p. 225.

30 Butterfield, Pentagon Papers, Chapt. 2, “Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam,” p. 67.

31 Butterfield, Pentagon Papers, pp. 69, 73.

32 Sheehan, Neil, Pentagon Papers, Chapt. 5, “The Covert War and Tonkin Gulf: February-August 1964,” p. 235.

33 Sheehan, The Pentagon Papers, p. 238.

34 Sheehan, The Pentagon Papers, p. 239.

35 Sheehan, The Pentagon Papers, p. 242.

36 Sheehan, The Pentagon Papers, p. 243.

37 Vlastos, Stephen, “America’s ‘Enemy’: the Absent Presence in Revisionist Vietnam War History,” in: Rowe, John Carlos, and Rick Berg (eds.), The Vietnam War and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 66.

38 All the quotes are cited from James Bamford’s review of Matthew M. Aid´s The Secret Sentry: The Untold Story of the National Security Agency: “Who’s Who in Big Brother’s Database?” in: The New York Review of Books (November 5, 2009), p. 30. The second quotation is taken from Aid’s text.

39 Schulzinger, The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975, pp. 152-154.

40 Karnow, Vietnam—A History. 1983. (Revised Edition, New York: Viking Penguin, 1991), p. 432.

41 Boettcher, Thomas, Vietnam—the Valor and the Sorrow (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1985), p. 212.

42 Karnow, Vietnam—A History, p. 412.

43 Fussell, Paul, Wartime. Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 16. Fussell notes that 14% of the bombs dropped turned out to be duds.

44 Boettcher, Vietnam—The Valor and the Sorrow, pp. 209-212.

45 Boettcher, Vietnam—The Valor and the Sorrow, p. 262.

46 Cf. Chapter 12, below, for journalistic commentaries on this operation.

47 Schmitz, David F., The Tet Offensive: Politics, War and Public Opinion (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), p. xiii.

48 Bowman, John S. (ed.), The Vietnam War Day by Day (Hong Kong: Mallard Press, 1989), p. 120. For a detailed description of how the Tet Offensive failed as a military operation, see Chapter 10 of Victor David Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Doubleday, 2001), pp. 349-439.

49 Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, p. 379.

50 Herring, America’s Longest War, pp. 221-223.

51 Qtd. in Pratt, John Clark, Vietnam Voices (New York: Penguin,1984), p. 551.

52 Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, p. 436.

53 In a review of the 2017 documentary “The Vietnam War” by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Frances Fitzgerald writes that Burns was asked why he had undertaken the project: “Burns said that more than forty years after the war ended, we can’t forget it, and we are still arguing about it.” Novick added that we are all “searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy.” Fitzgerald, “The Pity of It All,” The New York Review of Books, November 23, 2017, p. 30.

54 Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 285.

55 Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990, p. 319. There seems to be an erroneous perception that World War II was also fought by teenagers, as reflected, for example, in the title of Paul Fussell’s memoir, The Boys’ Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945 (New York: Modern Library, 2003). As stated above, the average age of American soldiers in that war was 26, reflecting no doubt the universal participation of men in what was seen as a necessary war.

56 While only 2% of Americans in the 1960s came from towns with populations of fewer than one-thousand people, four times as many of those who died in the war (i.e. 8%) came from towns of that size. Appy, Christian G., Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill, 1993), p. 14.

57 Appy, Working-Class War, p. 12.

58 Appy, Working-Class War, p. 37

59 Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990, pp. 319-320; Appy, Working-Class War, p. 33. Appy adds that only 6% received training, mostly in elementary reading skills, as compared to the 40% trained for combat.

60 These various motives are commented on, with examples, by Appy, Working-Class War, pp. 44-85.

61 Appy, Working-Class War, p. 106.

62 Capps, Walter H., The Unfinished War: Vietnam and the American Conscience. Second Edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), p. 1. A caveat here: poet-scholar-veteran William H. Ehrhart, LaSalle University Library Director, and veteran John Baky, spent considerable time tracing the origin of that statistic, which “seems to go back to a 1976 pamphlet put out by the AFSC…that offers no basis for the assertion, no footnote, no source; the ‘fact’ is simply stated without support” (Ehrhart, personal communication).

63 Hynes, Samuel, The Soldiers’ Tale—Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 221.

64 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, p. 222.

65 Baum, Dan, “The Price of Valor,” in: The New Yorker (July 12 & 19, 2004), pp. 45-46. The findings of Marshall, in Men Against Fire (New York: William Morrow, 1947) have had considerable impact on the US Army. Marshall also wrote a widely distributed manual for soldiers in the Vietnam War. For Marshall’s influence: Frederick D. Williams, SLAM: The Influence of S.L.A. Marshall on the United States Army (Ft. Monroe, VA: US Army Training and Doctrine Command, 1990).

66 Baum, “The Price of Valor,” p. 46.

67 Baum, “The Price of Valor,” p. 46. The study referred to is a PhD dissertation (1999) by Rachel McNair on the psychological effects of violence, using data from the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study, which interviewed 1,700 veterans in the 1980s. Reanalyzed P.T.S.D. data obtained from these veterans suggested that one in five veterans suffered from the malaise, rather than one in three, as formerly believed. Baum, however, thinks that this new analysis may have been motivated by the desire of the Veteran’s Administration to cut back expenses for their treatment (p. 46).

68 Shay, Jonathan, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner, 1994), pp.108-109 and 111-115.

69 Bilton, Michael and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai (New York, Penguin, 1992), pp. 120-121. This book was an outgrowth of a British TV documentary and contains the photographs of the massacre by an Army Sergeant that served as proof at Calley’s trial. Many veterans naturally resented being called “baby-killers” by American civilians, but this terrible crime was evidence that the accusation was at least true for some soldiers in some documented cases.

70 Herzog. Tobey C., Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 106.

71 Cronin, Cornelius A., “Lines of Departure: the Atrocity in Vietnam War Literature.” In: Jason, Philip K. (ed.), Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), p. 215.

72 Fussell, Paul, Wartime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 113, emphasis in the original.

73 FitzGerald, Frances, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1970), p. 359.

74 Just, To What End—Report from Vietnam, p. 71.

75 Qtd. in Appy, Working-Class War, p. 233.

76 Fox Butterfield, “Who Was This Enemy?” The New York Times Magazine (February 4, 1973), rptd. in: Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1969-1975 (New York: Library of America: 1998), pp. 408-409.

77 Roth, Robert, Sand in the Wind (New York: Miracle Books, 1974), pp. 563-564.

78 Herring, America’s Longest War; p. 243; FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 422-423. For Loren Baritz, the figure for hard-drug users is much higher: 28%. Baritz, Backfire: A History of how American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 315.

79 FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 422.

80 O’Nan, Stewart, “Introduction” to The Vietnam Reader, ed. Stewart O’Nan (New York: Anchor Books, 1998), p. 1.

81 For example, Renny Christopher’s The Vietnam War/The American War: Images and Representations in Euro-American and Vietnamese Exile Narratives (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).

82 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, The Sympathizer (New York: Grove Press, 2015). The quote is from page one.

83 O’Nan, “Introduction” to The Vietnam Reader, p. 3.

84 Hanley, Lynne, Writing War: Fiction, Gender, and Memory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), pp.103-104. The internal quotations are cited by the author from Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook (1973).

85 Hanley, Writing War, p. 105; FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, passim.

86 Tal, Kali, “Speaking the Language of Pain: Vietnam War Literature in the Context of a Literature of Trauma.” In: Jason, Fourteen Landing Zones, pp. 217-218.

87 Tal, in “Speaking the Language of Pain” (cf. previous note) argues that while trauma resulting from war, the holocaust, rape, etc. can be managed, it cannot be completely exorcized, as it can never really be forgotten.

88 Ringnalda, Don, Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War (Jackson, Miss.: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), p. viii.

89 Ringnalda, Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War, p. 91.

90 Fussell, Wartime p. 268.

91 Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990, p. 328.

92 Jason, Philip K., Acts and Shadows: The Vietnam War in American Literary Culture. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), p. 3.

93 Bates, Milton J., The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 2.

94 Bates, The Wars We Took to Vietnam, p. 3.

95 Caputo, Philip, “Postscript.” A Rumor of War (1977; New York: Owl Book, 1996), p. 353-354).

96 The novels of Stephen Coonts may be cited as examples: Flight of the Intruder (NewYork: Pocket Books, 1987) about a Navy renegade bomber pilot later adapted into a film, as well as the two sequels to Rambo: First Blood starring Sylvester Stallone (1985/88).

97 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, p. 177.

98 Jason, “Introduction,” Fourteen Landing Zones, p. xiv.

99 O’Brien, Tim, Going After Cacciato (New York: Dell, 1978), p. 237, italics in the original.

100 O’Brien, Going After Cacciato, p. 320.

101 Jacqueline Lawson believes that virtually all the soldier-writer accounts are divided into these distinct phases. See Lawson, “‘Old Kids’: The Adolescent Experience in the Non-Fiction Narratives of Vietnam,” in: Searle, William (ed.), Search and Clear: Critical Responses to Selected Literature and Films of the Vietnam War (Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988), p. 27.

102 Pratt John Clark, Bibliographic Commentary, “From the Fiction, Some Truths,” in: Lomperis, Timothy J., “Reading the Wind” The Literature of the Vietnam War: An Interpretative Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 127.

103 Jason, Acts and Shadows, p. 77. It should be said, however, that Pratt’s scheme in “From the Fiction, Some Truths” does contemplate other works besides combat novels.

104 See, for example, the works mentioned and discussed in chapters 4, 7, and 8 of Jason’s Acts and Shadows.

105 There are 666 novels listed in the Third Edition of Newman’s bibliography (1966), while Wittman (1989) lists 582 literary and adventure novels, 481 personal narratives up to 1988. Newman, John, Vietnam War Literature: an Annotated Bibliography about Americans Fighting in Vietnam (Landham, Md: The Scarecrow Press, 1996); Wittman, Sandra M. Writing About Vietnam: A Bibliography of the Literature of Vietnam Conflict (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989).

106 Pratt, “From the Fiction, Some Truths,” p. 124.

Part I Partisans

Chapter One

Early Adventurers

In such dangerous things as wars the errors which

proceed from a spirit of benevolence are the worst

(Karl von Clausewitz)

i. Lieutenant-Colonel Landsdale

It will be recalled from the Introduction that in the mid-1940s, at the end of World War II, the French colonial army was allowed by the Allies to regain control of Hanoi, at which point the Communist Viet Minh forces faded back into their bases in the countryside to fight an eight-year-long guerrilla war of resistance to the restoration of French control. Meanwhile, as part of its effort to halt Communist advances in Southeast Asia, the US recognized the French puppet emperor of Vietnam, Bao Dai (February 1950), thereby declaring itself to be an adversary of the Viet Minh leader, Ho Chi Minh. For their part, the Viet Minh built a political organization strong enough to sustain the guerrillas and field a regular army that was eventually successful at the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu (1954).

The imbalance of power in Vietnam was therefore evident by 1954, when the Viet Minh had military and political control of most of Vietnam. During the chaotic situation following the defeat of the French and the migration southward of Catholics and non-Communists after the division of the country into north and south, the southern leader Ngo Dinh Diem, who would be the future President of South Vietnam, barely controlled the capital city of Saigon, much less the rest of the country.1 American leaders reasoned that an expert in dealing with Asian Communist revolutionaries might therefore be useful to the beleaguered Diem. This expert turned out to be the most important of the early American adventurers: Edward G(eary) Landsdale, an Air Force Lieutenant-Colonel on loan to the CIA. Landsdale was both instrumental in convincing President Eisenhower that the US should support South Vietnam against an imminent Communist take-over and indispensable in maintaining Diem, or, to give him his full name, Jean Baptiste Ngo Dinh Diem, in power. With American support, Premier and Defense Minister Diem eventually deposed Bao Dai and adopted his imperial flag.

Landsdale arrived in Vietnam on June 1, 1954, the day the Viet Minh celebrated their victory over the French by blowing up an ammunition dump, and (as he noted himself) “rocking Saigon throughout the night.”2 Landsdale came to Saigon to command the top-secret Saigon Military Mission (SMM), to install resistance teams in the north to delay the consolidation of that part of the country while he supported the non-Communist government in the south. By the time of the Geneva deadline prohibiting the introduction of additional military personnel into either side of the country, Landsdale’s teams were already active in paramilitary operations and psychological warfare, perpetrating acts of sabotage and spreading misinformation in both north and south. They were unsuccessful in the areas held by the Viet Minh, however, and many of Landsdale’s Vietnamese agents in the north actually defected to that side.

The sabotage activities included destroying government printing-presses and pouring contaminants into bus motors to undermine the transportation system. Misinformation included the distribution of leaflets about harsh government measures in the north, and a successful rumor campaign that the US would support a new war against the north employing atomic weapons, a rumor that greatly added to the flow of refugees to the south, many of whom, already encouraged by the Roman Catholic hierarchy and organized by Landsdale’s teams, were transported in US Navy ships to the south.3 Thus began the exodus of one million Catholics, which is fictionalized in M.J. Bosse’s novel, The Journey of Tao Kim Nam, discussed in section iv, below.

Landsdale was one of those men of action, usually described as “legendary” or “flamboyant,” who seem as fantastic as any fictional character, an example of the type that novelist Philip Roth once complained about: a real person that would be the envy of any novelist. Roth’s question “Can anybody have imagined him if he did not really exist?” referred to Richard Nixon, but it is, if anything, more pertinent to Landsdale, who inspired more than one fictional character in the early literature of the war (cf. sections ii, iv and v, below) and was far more influential in supporting the American effort in Vietnam than any of his fictional counterparts. After retiring from the Air Force in 1963, with the rank of Major General, he returned to Saigon in 1965 as “special assistant for pacification under [Ambassador Henry Cabot] Lodge.”4

Landsdale was born in 1908 and educated at UCLA. He served in the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, during World War II and later went to the Philippines as counsel to the Philippine Defense Secretary, Ramon Magsaysay, whom he aided in the successful counter-revolutionary repression of the Communist Hukbalahap insurgency, and later helped to become president. Landsdale is said to have developed “the basic concept that Communist revolution [was] best opposed by democratic revolution,” and, with his success in the Philippines he was accordingly sent to South Vietnam as a CIA operative in 1954, where he urged the development of a counterinsurgency force instead of a conventional army (he also “reportedly helped develop the US Special Forces,” which arose as a counter-insurgency force within the US Army).5 He is described in The Pentagon Papers as “well-known but mysterious” and “reticent about his role.”6

Besides his skills in unconventional warfare, Landsdale was evidently a man who could gain the friendship and confidence of Asian leaders. It was his intention to make Diem a progressive, non-Communist national hero on the model of Magsaysay and turn the Vietnam of the Sixties into a Philippines of the Fifties, and he was sent to Vietnam by John Foster Dulles explicitly with that mission.7 The difficulty with this plan was that the two Asian countries were very different. It was unrealistic to think that Landsdale would be as successful in Vietnam as he had been in the Philippines, a former American colony that had granted long leases to US military bases in exchange for independence in 1946. As Neil Sheehan points out, the Philippines was a 95% Christian country that had already been westernized and Americanized for almost half a century:

Landsdale’s Filipinos were Brown Americans...their Independence Day was the Fourth of July. They spoke English with a slightly out-of-date American slang. They liked jazz and much else in American popular culture...They staged operations against the Huks with names like Four Roses, for their favourite whiskey, and Omaha, after the D-Day beachhead at Normandy. The CIA was notorious for hiring Filipinos to staff its Asian operations because they were so Americanized.8

As for the Vietnamese people, on the other hand, “[i]t was not patriotic in Vietnam to collaborate with the Americans. To many Vietnamese, the Americans stood for colonialism, oppression, and social injustice.”9 And the leaders of the two countries could not have been more different: the deeply suspicious, autocratic, and unpopular Diem was nothing like the honest, charismatic Magsaysay.10