Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968

© 2022 by Mark Moyar

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FIRST EDITION

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Moyar, Mark, 1971– author.

Title: Triumph Regained : the Vietnam War, 1965–1968 / Mark Moyar.

Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Encounter Books, 2022. Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2022008881 (print) | LCCN 2022008882 (ebook) ISBN 9781641772976 (hardback) | ISBN 9781641772983 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Vietnam War, 1961-1975. | Vietnam—History—1945–1975.

Classification: LCC DS557.7 .M773 2022 (print) | LCC DS557.7 (ebook) DDC 959.704/3—dc23/eng/20220315

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022008881

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022008882

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 22

For Trent

CONTENTS

Preface

1. Foreign Armies

2. Domino Standing

3. War of Attrition

4. One Foot Back In

5. Return of the Buddhists

6. Shutting the Lid

7. The Real Grand Marshal

8. Internal Contradictions

9. Escalation

10. Record Losses

11. Samson’s Flight

12. Tet

13. Reaction

14. Hawks and Doves

15. The Second Wave

16. The Third Wave

17. More Rope

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Marines from company E, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines move out from Landing Zone White during Operation Starlite.

Indonesian President Sukarno, left, and General Suharto.

A CH-47 Chinook helicopter delivers artillery equipment and supplies to the 1st Cavalry Division in the Ia Drang Valley.

Tuesday lunch in the White House dining room. From left: George Christian, Walt Rostow, Robert McNamara, Tom Johnson, Richard Helms, Dean Rusk, Lyndon B. Johnson.

Captured photograph of Vietnamese Communist soldiers.

F-105 Thunderchiefs assigned to Operation Rolling Thunder bomb North Vietnam.

South Vietnamese armored units enter Da Nang to suppress the Struggle Movement, May 1966.

North Vietnam’s leaders attend an Independence Day celebration in Hanoi. From left: Vo Nguyen Giap, Truong Chinh, Le Duan, Ho Chi Minh.

American and South Vietnamese leaders meet at Cam Ranh Bay. From left: Lyndon B. Johnson, William Westmoreland, Nguyen Van Thieu, Nguyen Cao Ky.

U.S. Marine Corps tanks and infantry near Con Thien.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara speaks at the Stennis hearings, August 25, 1967.

U.S. Army soldiers prepare to assault a North Vietnamese position during Operation Hawthorne.

From left, William Westmoreland, Earle Wheeler, Ellsworth Bunker.

South Vietnamese Rangers search for Communist fighters in Cholon during the Tet Offensive.

U.S. Marines disembark from a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter near Khe Sanh.

South Vietnamese citizens and officials observe funerals for victims of the Hue Massacre.

In Operation Pursuit, a column of American troops traverses rice paddies near Da Nang.

General Creighton Abrams addresses President Lyndon Johnson and the Wise Men, March 26, 1968.

North Vietnamese rockets strike Saigon during the second wave offensive of May 1968.

Protesters clash with police at Chicago’s Grant Park during the Democratic National Convention, August 28, 1968.

PREFACE

Work on this history began at the end of the twentieth century, when it was conceived as a one-volume account of the Vietnam War derived from other, more narrowly focused histories. The initial research revealed a need for a much larger exploration of primary sources than originally anticipated, which turned into a quest so lengthy as to necessitate division of the history, with the first volume ending in July 1965. This book, the second volume of what will be a trilogy, picks up the story in August 1965 and continues to the end of 1968 with the conclusion of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency.

Triumph Regained, like its predecessor Triumph Forsaken, is based on sources from all sides of the conflict. As before, Merle Pribbenow provided translations of hundreds of informative documents, memoirs, and histories from the North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese sides. This book rebuts the orthodox school of Vietnam War history, which views America’s involvement in the war as wrongheaded and unjust. It largely supports the revisionist school, which deems the war a worthy but improperly executed enterprise, because the facts led it there. Many of the book’s major points have been made by the war’s participants or historians but with less supporting evidence and analysis; others are new.¹

As in Triumph Forsaken, the Vietnamese are central actors in the story. Pribbenow’s translations and the research of several American and Vietnamese historians have made it possible to understand North and South Vietnamese perspectives much more fully than was possible in decades past.² The Vietnamese on both sides of the conflict clash not only with each other but with their great-power allies and their own Vietnamese allies. Vietnamese actions often influence, guide, or override the actions of the United States, China, and the Soviet Union.

The political turmoil in South Vietnam that was central to the first volume is absent from the period covered in this book, except for a brief and spectacular return in the spring of 1966. Because the United States has now been committed fully to the war, Asia’s geopolitics are less important in how they influence American strategy than in how they are influenced by it. That influence is felt early on, in Indonesia during the fall of 1965, and continues with the ongoing competition among the great powers, namely the United States, the Soviet Union, and China.

By barring the path to Communist expansion on the Southeast Asian mainland, the American stand in South Vietnam emboldened Indonesia’s military leaders to thwart the Communist putsch of October 1, 1965, and obliterate the Indonesian Communist Party. This turn of events irrevocably changed the complexion of Southeast Asia and inoculated its most strategically valuable country against the influences of Communism and China.³ The upheaval in Indonesia and the thwarting of North Vietnamese ambitions by America’s intervention in South Vietnam caused China’s Mao Zedong to turn inward in his search for enemies, leading to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Commencing in the summer of 1966, the Cultural Revolution was to kill several million Chinese citizens. It would sap China’s enthusiasm for exporting revolution and diminish the economic, diplomatic, and military power it could project abroad.

During the period covered by this volume, both the Chinese and the Soviets continued to share the view of their North Vietnamese allies that the Vietnam War was a pivotal contest between Communism and capitalism. Both showered the North Vietnamese with aid to further the cause of Communism and to bolster their own claims to preeminence in the Communist world. Repeated North Vietnamese flirtation with both suitors exacerbated the jealousies and antagonisms among all three.⁴

Although these changes did serious damage to the prospects for Communism in Southeast Asia, the Communist threat to the region remained high. The Johnson administration still maintained that a rapid withdrawal from South Vietnam would cause a loss of confidence in the United States so severe that the region’s other countries would bow to the Communist powers or succumb to them by political or military means. That judgment proved correct.⁵

On August 18, 1965, American and North Vietnamese forces fought their first major battle, at the village of Van Tuong. American air and artillery strikes decimated large North Vietnamese forces in this battle and several that followed soon after. Demonstrations of American superiority in firepower and mobility compelled Hanoi to cancel its plans to seize Saigon, and to pursue a strategy of protracted attrition aimed at breaking America’s will. North Vietnam’s most famous general, Vo Nguyen Giap, advocated reliance on guerrilla tactics to inflict the casualties, but the majority of the North Vietnamese committee in charge of military strategy sided with General Nguyen Chi Thanh, the general in command of the war in the South, who favored large conventional battles.

The top American commander, General William Westmoreland, also adopted a strategy that emphasized attrition of enemy forces through combat but for the purpose of eroding the enemy’s capabilities rather than its will. By depleting North Vietnam’s military forces, Westmoreland intended to buy time for the rejuvenation of the South Vietnamese government and the reassertion of governmental control over South Vietnam’s villages. Westmoreland’s primary tactical instrument was the search and destroy operation. American ground forces looked far and wide for enemy troops and exploited superior American firepower and mobility to annihilate any units they could find. While American forces hunted for large enemy troops, South Vietnamese forces focused on counterinsurgency—the security, governance, and development activities required to wrest control of South Vietnam’s villages from the Viet Cong insurgents.⁶

Westmoreland ordered his commanders to conduct search-and-destroy operations in remote, unpopulated areas. His critics, at the time and long afterward, assailed such operations as a senseless misapplication of conventional warfare against an unconventional opponent. The criticism was undeserved. Attacking enemy forces in every corner of South Vietnam forestalled enemy attacks on vulnerable South Vietnamese targets and prevented the North Vietnamese from maintaining bases and staging areas close to the South Vietnamese towns and cities that were Hanoi’s ultimate objectives. The absence of civilians freed American forces of the firepower restrictions that were in place near the civilian population. South Vietnamese civilians were spared the ravages of war, and American forces were spared the negative publicity and personal anguish caused by civilian casualties.⁷

Search-and-destroy operations also took place amid populous rural areas to prevent the North Vietnamese from taking the citizenry’s rice and using these areas to stage attacks on cities or military installations. American forces seldom killed civilians deliberately, but the crossfire between powerful adversaries inflicted sizable casualties on the civilian population and compelled great numbers of people to flee their villages for safer areas. The North Vietnamese Army’s practice of impressing civilians as laborers added to the toll of civilian deaths.

American search-and-destroy operations inflicted massive losses on the North Vietnamese during the period from August 1965 to December 1968. The North Vietnamese military histories cited herein, many of which have been unknown outside Vietnam until now, dispel longstanding allegations that General Westmoreland and other American leaders vastly overstated the successes of these operations in their statements and statistical representations. In addition to attaining high levels of attrition, American search-and-destroy operations wreaked havoc on North Vietnamese logistics, imposing much greater constraints on North Vietnamese military operations than historians have hitherto recognized.⁸

The only senior leaders who grossly overestimated their side’s military successes were located in Hanoi. To maintain the good graces of superiors, North Vietnamese military commanders in the South exaggerated their battlefield achievements in reports to higher headquarters. The most influential North Vietnamese leaders, General Nguyen Chi Thanh and Communist Party First Secretary Le Duan, took these reports as evidence that their conventional military tactics were working and hence kept ordering commanders to fight large battles that resulted in additional large North Vietnamese defeats.⁹

Hanoi compensated for heavy combat losses by stepping up infiltration of North Vietnamese troops into the South. President Johnson responded by boosting American troop strength. Mutual upping of the ante and of casualties recurred. At times, the North Vietnamese held their losses down by hiding forces in remote South Vietnamese bases or in the sanctuaries of Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam. When it kept its forces out of combat, however, Hanoi could not make progress toward its strategic objectives of inflicting casualties on American and South Vietnamese forces and controlling South Vietnam’s rural population.

The North Vietnamese Army’s reliance on Laotian and Cambodian territory to evade battle and resupply its forces led Westmoreland and other senior American generals to urge President Johnson to send American ground forces into the sanctuaries. They wanted a strategic campaign against the North Vietnamese logistical system of the sort that the United States had conducted against the Confederacy in the Civil War and against Germany and Japan in World War II. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk convinced Johnson to stay out of Laos and Cambodia by discounting the relevance of those countries and by raising the specter of Chinese retaliation. Enemy infiltration through those countries, they said, could be stopped through bombing and secret programs that used chemicals to stimulate rainfall and turn soil to mud.¹⁰

North Vietnamese sources that became available after the war have made clear that the American generals had been right about the importance of Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnamese leaders had feared that American intervention in Laos and Cambodia would devastate their war effort. Postwar disclosures also revealed that China was never interested in fighting the United States in Laos, Cambodia, or North Vietnam. American bombing and chemical programs failed to stop the infiltration.

The American bombing of North Vietnam, codenamed Operation Rolling Thunder, slowly increased in intensity and scope according to the Johnson administration’s policy of gradual escalation. American generals, former President Dwight Eisenhower, and other hawks recommended intensifying the bombing and mining of North Vietnam’s ports but to no more effect than in the preceding period. Robert McNamara and his Whiz Kids at the Pentagon repeatedly convinced Johnson to reject those recommendations, first by claiming that the actions would incite the enemy to escalate, and later, after the enemy escalated anyway, by arguing that the bombing did not impede North Vietnamese infiltration of supplies into the South. McNamara supported both of these erroneous arguments by misusing statistics and dismissing contrary intelligence estimates.

Despite its limitations, American bombing did at times cause great harm to North Vietnamese capabilities, especially after the loosening of self-imposed restrictions in the middle of 1967. North Vietnamese ground forces often avoided battle because of supply shortfalls resulting from the combination of Rolling Thunder, the bombing in Laos, and the ground war in the South. Deficits of food and ammunition increasingly caused North Vietnamese units to seek shelter in external sanctuaries. The escalation of bombing in 1967 disrupted North Vietnam’s importation of food so thoroughly that the country approached starvation conditions by the late summer. President Johnson, not knowing the severity of North Vietnam’s difficulties, allowed the North Vietnamese to recover from this blow when he curtailed the bombing at the end of August 1967.¹¹

By alleviating North Vietnamese military pressure, American military operations gave the South Vietnamese government time and space to stabilize. In the spring of 1966, South Vietnam’s leaders faced one more challenge from the militant Buddhists. As during the 1963 Buddhist crisis, much of the U.S. press corps gave unjustifiably positive coverage to the Buddhists, and U.S. officials urged the Saigon government to use more restraint and conciliation than the government preferred. Unlike 1963, however, top U.S. officials sided with the government against the Buddhists, having concluded that the Buddhists were abetting the Communist cause. A forceful response by the Ky government in June put an end to Buddhist machinations once and for all.¹²

In September 1967, Nguyen Van Thieu won South Vietnam’s first truly democratic national election. Thieu, a man often underestimated by Americans both then and since, devoted great energy to the vital task of installing better leaders in the government and armed forces. Gradually he reduced restrictions on speech and political activity, accentuating the differences in personal freedom between the two Vietnams.

The North Vietnamese, who in subsequent accounts would often be depicted as supremely patient, had become intolerably impatient with the pace and results of the war by the middle of 1967.¹³ They resolved to seek a rapid victory by attacking South Vietnam’s cities in January 1968. In launching surprise attacks during the Tet holiday truce, they expected to catch their enemies off guard and induce the urban population to rise up against the South Vietnamese government. As it turned out, the people shunned the Communists during the Tet Offensive, leaving Communist troops to fend for themselves with only light weapons. Unable to scatter as they had in jungle fighting, the Communist forces were chewed to pieces in futile efforts to hold ground. The North Vietnamese leadership ordered large urban offensives in May and August 1968 over strenuous objections from field commanders and suffered even more calamitous defeats.¹⁴

The North Vietnamese siege of Khe Sanh was not a mere feint designed to divert American attention from the urban attacks of Tet, as it has almost invariably been described.¹⁵ In actuality, it was a genuine offensive operation aimed at winning a military victory as magnificent as the Communist triumph at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. American forces frustrated the North Vietnamese ambitions at Khe Sanh by controlling the hills around Khe Sanh and directing massive air and artillery barrages onto North Vietnamese forces with the assistance of new sensor technologies. The siege force of forty thousand North Vietnamese soldiers sustained crippling casualties during the three-month contest while killing fewer than five hundred U.S. Marines.

By most accounts, President Lyndon Johnson’s announcement of a bombing halt north of the twentieth parallel and his withdrawal from the presidential race after the Tet Offensive were the first steps toward American disengagement from South Vietnam. Johnson’s tepid reaction to the Tet Offensive did, in fact, increase popular dissatisfaction with his leadership and may have helped convince him to forswear a run for reelection. The Tet Offensive did not, however, cause him to set the United States on course for withdrawal from Vietnam. After Tet, Johnson rejected recommendations from the liberal wing of his party to remove American troops from Vietnam and compel South Vietnam’s leaders to form a coalition government with the Communists. Nor was the bombing halt that Johnson announced at the end of March 1968 a harbinger of retreat. Rather, it was temporary suspension in areas that could not be bombed effectively in subsequent months because of bad weather, and it was replaced by heavy bombing in other locations, where it damaged North Vietnamese logistics far more seriously than was known at the time.¹⁶

When General Creighton Abrams replaced General William Westmoreland as commander of U.S. forces in June 1968, he initially employed the same tactics as Westmoreland. The debilitation of the North Vietnamese Army that culminated in the August 1968 offensive compelled Hanoi to discontinue urban attacks and shift to guerrilla warfare, which then led Abrams to reorient American forces toward pacification. Search-and-destroy operations did not end, but they occurred less frequently because they had become less lucrative.¹⁷

The failed Communist offensives of 1968 and the ruthless massacre of South Vietnamese civilians in Hue in February and March of that year galvanized the South Vietnamese people into more vigorous action. During the latter part of 1968, the Saigon government prosecuted the war with a newfound intensity, enabling South Vietnam’s armed forces to shoulder a much larger burden of the allied casualties than before. Broad counterinsurgency gains followed.¹⁸

By reducing Communist access to South Vietnam’s villages, the counterinsurgency operations deprived the Communist armed forces of native Southerners. The idea that the war was fundamentally a South Vietnamese civil war had contained a degree of truth early in the war, when South Vietnamese peasants had fought as guerrillas under North Vietnamese leadership, but that truth had eroded as tens of thousands of North Vietnamese soldiers streamed into the South after the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, and now it had been stripped of any plausibility by the complete Northern domination of the war effort.

North Vietnam’s attrition warfare was unable to break America’s will by the end of 1968. America’s attrition warfare failed to break North Vietnam’s will but did accomplish other key strategic objectives: gaining time for strengthening the Saigon government and restoring governmental control over South Vietnam’s villages. The bolstering of South Vietnam could eventually convince Hanoi to relent and would in any event permit a reduction in American participation in the war, which would alleviate antiwar sentiment in the United States and promote self-reliance in South Vietnam. The bloody attrition struggle of 1965 to 1968, therefore, was not the result of American lack of imagination or unfamiliarity with counterinsurgency, as has often been portrayed. Nor was the inability of attrition to break Hanoi’s will the stunning revelation of the limits of American power depicted by critics, for the American leadership had not expected that outcome.¹⁹

Throughout the period covered in this book, the North Vietnamese regime faced pressure from the Soviet Union and other Communist and neutral countries to negotiate an end to the war. The Johnson administration, under pressure itself from allies and some of its own politicians, undertook several bombing pauses to entice the North Vietnamese into talks. From 1965 to 1967, Hanoi thwarted all diplomatic efforts by refusing to negotiate unless the United States first made huge unilateral concessions. While some pessimists in the North were becoming more interested in a realistic diplomatic compromise, they were overruled and in some cases arrested by North Vietnamese hardliners. Le Duan, the leading hardliner, saw no need for negotiations until North Vietnam had prevailed on the battlefield, at which point Hanoi would negotiate the withdrawal of American forces. In the eyes of the top Communist Party leaders, the American bombing pauses were indications of American weakness that ought to be exploited, not gestures of goodwill that ought to be answered with like-minded goodwill and earnest diplomatic dialogue.²⁰

After the catastrophic failures of North Vietnam’s three offensives of 1968, the Hanoi government became more amenable to negotiations. In October of that year, the North Vietnamese agreed to negotiate on terms much more favorable to the United States and South Vietnam than any offered previously. President Johnson agreed to suspend Rolling Thunder in exchange for Hanoi’s concessions. Recent Rolling Thunder strikes in southern North Vietnam had inflicted severe damage on North Vietnamese logistics, but the approach of foul weather meant that the bombing effort would be more effective in the coming months if it were shifted to Laos, as it was in November. Whether the North Vietnamese were prepared to negotiate a peace settlement or were simply using the negotiations to obtain a reprieve from the American bombing of North Vietnam had yet to be seen.²¹

When American ground troops first entered the fray in the middle of 1965, the war was, by all measures, popular among the American people. Most retrospective accounts have asserted that public support declined sharply between 1965 and 1968 as the result of mounting American casualties, the shock of the Tet Offensive of 1968, and growing awareness that the war could not be won.²² Opposition to the war did in fact increase during this period among highly vocal groups—particularly the elites of the media and academia—but support for the war actually rose among the American people as a whole. Although the curbing of draft exemptions in 1967 led to heightened antiwar activity and draft evasion among select segments of society, hundreds of thousands of young men continued to go into the armed forces each year as either volunteers or conscripts.

The persistence of support for the war reflected the nation’s culture rather than its leadership. President Johnson deliberately avoided selling the war to the American people because he feared that arousing patriotic sentiment would drain energy from his domestic programs and hamstring his efforts to improve relations with the Soviet Union. The American people supported the war through the end of 1968 because they still viewed international Communism as an existential threat and believed that turning against the war would undermine the nation’s credibility and harm the young Americans serving in Vietnam.²³ Hubert Humphrey’s endorsement of Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policy in August 1968 underscored the reality that even in the Democratic Party, the supporters of the war outnumbered the opponents.

The activities of the antiwar movement, well publicized though they were, failed to turn significant numbers of Americans against the war during this period. The movement alienated much of the American population through the bad behavior of its demonstrators, its collusion with Communists, its contempt for American culture and society, and its unrealistic proposals for achieving peace. Revulsion at the movement actually sustained support for the war among some of the Americans who were beginning to weary of the bloodshed. The extensive media coverage of the antiwar movement, however, encouraged the North Vietnamese to believe that American public support for the war was diminishing and hence encouraged them to believe that their persistence would eventually lead to American capitulation.²⁴

A few days before the U.S. presidential election of 1968, Hubert Humphrey’s sagging poll numbers received a boost from President Johnson’s announcement that Hanoi had agreed to negotiate. South Vietnamese President Thieu promptly diminished Humphrey’s bump by saying publicly that he would not participate in the upcoming talks. Thieu was motivated not by the conspiratorial whisperings of Anna Chennault, as has often been believed, but by his own calculation of South Vietnam’s interests.²⁵ Whereas Humphrey had talked of reducing American involvement in Vietnam and making large diplomatic concessions to Hanoi, Nixon was a diehard anti-Communist whom most observers expected to take a harder line against North Vietnam if elected.

When Nixon won the presidential election, Thieu and most of his countrymen rejoiced, believing that they would have a strong supporter in the White House for the next four years. The North Vietnamese sulked, anticipating that Nixon would be more forceful and resolute than his predecessor. Nixon’s vague and at times contradictory campaign rhetoric had left the world guessing as to his precise intentions, but he had privately formed strategic ideas that would guide his decisions. Having criticized Lyndon Johnson for failing to explain the war to the American people and for rejecting recommendations from American generals for bolder actions, Nixon would have ample opportunities to correct these and other errors of the past.

CHAPTER 1

■ ■ ■

FOREIGN ARMIES

August 1965

The village of Van Tuong lies on the seacoast of Quang Ngai Province, atop the narrow strip of rich soil that drew Vietnamese noblemen and rice farmers to the coastal plain one thousand years ago. Rice paddies stretch to the coastline, where sandy beaches alternate with sheer cliffs that plunge fifty feet into the lapping waves of the South China Sea. During the rainy season, the paddies flood to a depth of two feet or more, turning the soil into a thick mud that clings to shoes and hooves.

When thousands of soldiers from the other side of the planet arrived at Van Tuong in the middle of August 1965, the rice paddies were dry and hence easy to traverse by foot or vehicle. But interspersed among the paddies were hedgerows, earthen mounds, and marshes that presented formidable natural obstacles to any would-be conqueror. And, as the U.S. Marines were to discover when they disembarked from their helicopters and landing craft on August 18, North Vietnamese soldiers had turned Van Tuong into what they called a combat village. By constructing fortified fighting positions and crisscrossing the area with trenches five feet deep and ten feet wide, the North Vietnamese had ensured that the village could be taken from them only at heavy cost.

The population of Van Tuong had strong ties to the Vietnamese Communists. In 1954, many of its families had sent sons to North Vietnam, and a large number of those sons had returned to the South as trained insurgents in the early 1960s. The days of local men leading the opposition to the Saigon government in Van Tuong had, however, passed by well before the Americans paid their visit. In August 1965, the village was occupied by what the Americans dubbed the 1st Viet Cong (VC) Regiment. In American minds, the term Viet Cong implied that a unit was manned by natives of South Vietnam, in contrast to a unit designated as North Vietnamese Army (NVA), which was believed to be made up of native Northerners. But the 1st Viet Cong Regiment, like most of the other so-called Viet Cong units, was replete with North Vietnamese soldiers and fell within the same chain of command as the North Vietnamese Army units. To the North Vietnamese, it was simply the 1st Regiment.¹

Although American engineers had begun constructing a large military base at Chu Lai, a mere seventeen kilometers from Van Tuong, the commander of the 1st Regiment was sure that the Americans would not find his unit. He was so sure that in early August he took all his battalion commanders with him to a conference of military leaders in the central highlands. When the Americans came to Van Tuong, therefore, the 1st Regiment and its four battalions would be under the command of their political officers, whose strengths lay in political indoctrination rather than combat leadership. As a further consequence, two of the 1st Regiment’s battalions, the 45th and 90th, would at that time be collecting rice at a site fifteen kilometers to the south, leaving only the 40th and 60th battalions at the village.

The American assault on Van Tuong, like so many orchestrations of American military power that were to follow, originated with signals intelligence. Through the triangulation of enemy radio transmissions, American direction-finding equipment had pinpointed the 1st Regiment’s headquarters at Van Tuong a few days earlier. Corroborating this intelligence was an enemy defector who told South Vietnamese soldiers that the 1st Regiment was massing near Van Tuong for an attack on the American base at Chu Lai.

Major General Lewis W. Walt, the senior U.S. Marine commander in South Vietnam, decided to attack the enemy at Van Tuong as soon as he learned of its presence. Although American combat forces had fought a few skirmishes with Communist soldiers since first coming ashore in March 1965, they had not previously engaged a large enemy unit, concentrating instead on defending expensive American aircraft and installations while their South Vietnamese allies undertook the major offensive operations. By the beginning of August, however, Communist offensive operations had depleted South Vietnam’s armed forces to the point that the commander of the U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, had decided that American forces needed to go on offense. On August 6, he had notified General Walt that his orders had changed. Walt and his Marines were now authorized and encouraged to seek battle with large concentrations of the enemy.

General Walt assembled three battalions for the assault on Van Tuong, which was given the code name Operation Starlite. To lead the operation, he plucked the commander from the 7th Regimental Combat Team and put him in command of the three battalions. That officer was Colonel Oscar Peat Peatross, a twenty-five-year veteran who had earned Walt’s respect as a battalion commander in the Korean War. Peatross developed a plan to converge on Van Tuong from all sides so as to trap and annihilate the North Vietnamese. One Marine battalion was to assault by helicopter, a second would land amphibiously on the beach, and a third would float in the USS Talladega and USS Iwo Jima offshore in reserve, ready to fly from helicopter pads to the shore at a moment’s notice. Few of the Marines in these battalions had seen combat before, but they arrived with the confidence of well-trained and well-armed young men, certain that they could crush the armed forces of an impoverished Communist dictatorship, excited that they would escape the boredom of military routine to put years of preparation to real use.

At 5:00 a.m. on the morning of August 18, in a scene reminiscent of Tarawa, Saipan, and other epic struggles of World War II in the Pacific, ships of the U.S. Navy anchored off the coast near Van Tuong to disgorge amphibious Amtrac vehicles. Descendants of the tracked landing vehicles that had driven the Marines of World War II onto beaches studded with Japanese mines and machine guns, the Amtracs carried seven-hundred-horsepower engines that could propel their thirty-seven-ton hulks and thirty-seven passengers through the sea at a speed of eight miles per hour. The American destroyers Orleck and Prichett and the cruiser Galveston watched over the proceedings, their main guns pointing like eagle’s talons at the shoreline as they awaited targeting data from the Amtracs.

The approach of the amphibious vehicles caught the eyes of North Vietnamese sentries on shore. The sentries rushed a report on the size and bearing of the Marine flotilla to the command post of the 1st Regiment, which was four kilometers from the coast. Based on this report, the staff at the regimental command post concluded that the axis of advance would bring the Marines directly to the command post’s location. The acting regimental commander ordered 150 troops to conduct a delaying action while the command post and its staff relocated farther inland.

The small arms fire of the delaying force hit several Marines as they came ashore. One of them was Staff Sergeant Catfish Campbell, who suffered a wound in the scrotum. Evacuated to an American warship, Campbell was stitched up within a matter of hours and sent back into the fight later in the day. The amphibious battalion nonetheless had little difficulty in securing the beach. The Marines pressed forward for two kilometers in the Amtracs before encountering significant resistance, at which point the battalion slowed to a crawl while officers considered how best to press the attack.

The first American helicopters touched down at 7:00 a.m. One company of Marines was scheduled to land at each of three landing zones, dubbed Red, White, and Blue. Lacking enough helicopters to land an entire battalion at once, the Marines had to shuttle them in stages, which afforded the enemy time to move forces toward the landing zones while Marines were still arriving. At Red and White, successive clumps of Marines disembarked from UH-34D Seahorse helicopters without incident. At Blue, the first helicopters encountered no display of hostility, but the subsequent waves met heavy fire from the automatic and semiautomatic weapons of the 60th battalion, whose defensive perimeter was very close to LZ Blue. Camouflaging themselves to look like bushes, North Vietnamese troops advanced toward the landing zone unseen and then hit the Marines at close range. We were taking fire from everywhere, remembered Lance Corporal Ernie Wallace.²

The Marine company at LZ Blue—Hotel Company of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines—sustained a considerable number of injuries and fatalities during the opening minutes of the engagement. Nevertheless, enough of its Marines reached the fringes of the landing zone to establish a solid perimeter. Helicopter gunships and fixed-wing A-4 Skyhawks and F-4 Phantoms hurried to the assistance of the Marines, loosing gushers of firepower that held the North Vietnamese battalion back.

At 9:00 a.m., the acting commander of the 1st Regiment concluded that the Americans were sending the preponderance of their troops to LZ Blue, owing to the amount of air support being marshaled in defense of Hotel company. He therefore decided to mass the 40th and 60th battalions, the entirety of his fighting strength at Van Tuong, to annihilate the Marines at LZ Blue before they could move into better defensive terrain and receive reinforcements. The 40th battalion marched toward LZ Blue in three columns to join the 60th battalion for a concerted onslaught.

While the 40th battalion was en route, the amphibious U.S. Marine battalion pushed toward the right flank of the 60th battalion. In response, a large detachment of the 60th battalion pulled back from LZ Blue to protect its flank. The movements of the American amphibious battalion spooked the North Vietnamese regimental commander, causing him to order all his units to shift from the offensive to the defensive.

The reduction in pressure on landing zone Blue convinced the commander of Hotel company, 1st Lieutenant Homer K. Jenkins, to send two of his platoons forward to the hamlet of Nam Yen 3, which he believed to be lightly guarded. Only when the two platoons reached the edge of the hamlet did they learn that scores of enemy soldiers had hidden themselves in trees and in fortified houses whose walls dropped down for firing. The North Vietnamese gunned down some of the Marines when they neared the hamlet. The remaining Marines laid poncho liners over the dead as best they could and withdrew to a berm that was dotted with trees.

Behind the berm, Sergeant Jerry Tharp gathered Marines from third platoon of Hotel company and barked out instructions for a renewal of the attack. One of the Marines listening to him was Private First Class Richard Boggia. As we waited for Sergeant Tharp to give the command to assault, I saw him raise himself above the berm, Boggia recalled. With a loud crack, he grabbed his chest and started pulling off his equipment to see what happened. Within a few seconds blood ran out of his mouth and he fell over.³ Another Marine crawled to Tharp but found that he was already dead.

The loss of Sergeant Tharp did not slow the momentum of the Marines as another man was ready to step into his position. Employing tactics that had been drilled into them for months at bases in the United States, the Marines assaulted Nam Yen 3 from multiple directions. Although they suffered additional casualties in the approach, enough Marines penetrated the hamlet to give the enemy a good fight. Scattered groups of Americans and North Vietnamese engaged in close-quarter melees, with mortar rounds and grenades exploding among them in such a fashion that few could tell who was hitting whom.

If the North Vietnamese had hoped that the Americans would refrain from using heavy weapons in the presence of civilian noncombatants, they were sorely disappointed. When North Vietnamese soldiers fired at Americans from fortified positions in Nam Yen 3, American aircraft and tanks blasted the fortifications and their occupants into rubble. The Americans were not seeking to harm South Vietnamese civilians, but when forced to choose between risking civilian casualties by shooting their weapons and risking American casualties by not shooting, they chose to shoot. The same had been no less true of the Americans who had gone before them at Normandy, Okinawa, and Seoul. Like the civilians of France, Japan, and South Korea, the residents of Nam Yen 3 would subsequently be treated by American medical personnel in large numbers for wounds inflicted by American weapons that had been aimed at hostile combatants. The American firepower eventually broke the resistance of the North Vietnamese, enabling the Marines to take control of Nam Yen 3.

India company of 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, one of the companies that had driven ashore in the Amtracs, took the fortified hamlet of An Cuong 2 later in the morning. In this case, too, American tanks dislodged sizable numbers of North Vietnamese defenders from fortifications and trenches. After the firing subsided, one of the Marines began shooting enemy bodies strewn across the ground in case any were feigning death. One faker had already caused injury to two Americans. The company commander, Captain Bruce Webb, ordered the Marine to desist, on the grounds that firing bullets into the bodies was inhumane. A few minutes later, a North Vietnamese soldier who had been playing dead hurled a grenade at Captain Webb, killing him.

A column of five Amtracs and three M67 flame tanks motored from the south to resupply India company 3/3 with ammunition and water. In its haste, the column drove past India company, traveling another four hundred meters until it ran into the 3rd company of the enemy’s 60th battalion, which had been hiding in hedgerows and thickets on the side of the road. The North Vietnamese opened fire with 57mm recoilless rifles, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades. Their initial volleys missed. The American vehicles circled around to the northeast and assaulted the hedgerows and thickets, a bold move but one that underestimated the enemy’s firepower.

As the Americans closed within one hundred meters, North Vietnamese recoilless rifles knocked several Amtracs out of action. The assault was halted so that the undamaged vehicles could come to the assistance of those that had been disabled. The officer commanding the rescue column, Lieutenant Robert F. Cochran Jr., dismounted and methodically organized the evacuation of the immobilized Amtracs and tanks, then positioned the other vehicles into a defensive formation. Once he had completed these tasks, he returned to one of the Amtracs. Rather than having the ramp lowered, which would have endangered the men inside, Cochran climbed up the side to crawl through the crew hatch. Hostile fire struck him while he was scaling the vehicle. Mortally wounded, he fell into the dust.

The remaining Amtracs and tanks stayed put, which made it easier for both them and their adversaries to score hits. North Vietnamese heavy weapons quickly disabled most of the vehicles, aside from one tank that fled the scene in what the battalion’s executive officer subsequently adjudged an act of cowardice. Some of the surviving Marines disembarked, took up positions in the rice paddy, and used their assault rifles to pick off North Vietnamese infantrymen who attempted to close in on the smoking vehicles.

An Amtrac radio operator transmitted a message stating that the column was surrounded and about to be overrun. So panicked was he during his pleading that he held down the call button, which prevented him from hearing the operator on the other end asking questions about the unit’s location. He kept his finger on the call button for over one hour.

Answers to those questions would have been of great assistance to the two infantry companies that Colonel Peatross had sent to rescue the supply column. Forging ahead based on vague estimates of the column’s position, both companies stumbled into large enemy forces and were caught up in intense fighting that kept them from venturing any farther that afternoon. An American account noted that during these engagements, The Marines discovered that some of the most macho among them in peacetime became very careful when real bullets were being fired, and that some of those most reticent around the barracks were tigers in combat.⁴

In the next few hours, as Marines were incapacitated and ammunition was expended, the bark of weapons from the beleaguered supply column became steadily softer. By the middle of the afternoon, only a dozen Marines remained alive in the vehicles, some of them seriously wounded, while another five were sprawled out in the rice paddies. They had only one machine gun that still worked. Lack of radio communications left them bereft of air or artillery support.

Perceiving that American firepower had dwindled, a North Vietnamese deputy company commander summoned additional soldiers to wipe out what was left of the Marines. Organized into three-man cells, the assault troops received instructions to climb onto the vehicles and kill the occupants. Although the North Vietnamese commander could have sent one hundred or more soldiers to attack at once, he instead opted to send them forward in small groups. No record of the battle explains this fateful decision; most likely it resulted from the cautiousness that typically induces commanders to probe the enemy with small units rather than commit large forces simultaneously.

Had the North Vietnamese attacked in strength from multiple directions, they undoubtedly would have overrun the Marines. By approaching piecemeal, they permitted the Americans to concentrate their limited fire. With the instinctive tenacity of men on the verge of extinction, the small band of Marine defenders unleashed well-aimed bursts of bullets at each three-man cell that came near the Marine Amtracs and tanks.

Some of the North Vietnamese soldiers reached the American vehicles, but none were able to overpower the Marines. According to a North Vietnamese history, When 1st Cell charged, all of its men were killed. Then 2nd Cell charged, and all of its men were killed as well. 3rd Cell launched its assault and suffered heavy losses. The following cells continued to run up next to the vehicles, but they were unable to climb up onto the vehicles because the enemy vehicles were very tall and very slippery. When some of our men managed to climb up on an enemy vehicle, they were killed or wounded by fire from the other enemy vehicles.

When dusk came, the Marines were still alive. There was, however, no sign of the relief forces that should have arrived by now. After dark, the Marines kept their fingers on their triggers in expectation of a night assault by the North Vietnamese. It never came, for the North Vietnamese had decided to depart the area during the night. The next morning, an American aircraft would spot the isolated Marines and guide Marine ground forces to their rescue.⁵

The North Vietnamese forces on the other sections of the battle-field also disengaged at day’s end. The regimental headquarters ordered the 40th and 60th battalions to leave Van Tuong because of the severe losses of life they had incurred during the day. As a result of the unexpected twists and turns in the fighting, some of the American units did not end the day in the places that had been planned, leaving gaps in the American cordon through which enemy soldiers could slip. Some of the survivors from the 40th and 60th battalions escaped from Van Tuong through these gaps, while others fled through an intricate tunnel system. The Americans spotted one group of a hundred men trying to flee by boat, and the main guns of the USS Orleck and USS Galveston riddled them with heavy shells. A similarly sized group was fleeing overland when the Americans sighted them in the open and summoned Marine aircraft to plaster them with napalm and rockets.

The headquarters of the North Vietnamese Army’s 1st Regiment did not, however, intend to end the battle. Its 45th battalion, which had been informed of the fighting and was on its way to Van Tuong, received orders to attack the Marines upon reaching the village. At 0200, with all the soldiers of the 45th Battalion present at Van Tuong, the battalion’s officers reported their men ready for combat. When regimental officers inspected the battalion, however, they determined that it was not yet ready. If the attack were delayed to complete the necessary preparations, the inspectors said, the battalion could get caught in open terrain by U.S. firepower after sunrise, to devastating effect. The acting regimental commander therefore decided to abort the attack and evacuate the entire regiment from the area.

During searches of the battlefield the next day, the Marines found the corpses of 614 enemy combatants. Interrogations of prisoners revealed that the 60th Battalion had been almost completely destroyed and the 40th Battalion had been badly damaged. From the stenches that persisted on the battlefield long afterward and from evidence that demolitions and air and artillery strikes had killed or trapped additional soldiers in bunkers and tunnels, the Marines estimated total enemy fatalities to be 1,430.

The North Vietnamese high command deemed the magnitude of its losses at Van Tuong to be nothing less than calamitous. Henceforth, it decreed, conventional North Vietnamese units were prohibited from maintaining bases on the coastal plain. They would instead set up camp in rougher terrain in the country’s interior, where they could find better shelter from the boulder-crushing might of American air and artillery, and where they would be outside the range of American naval gunfire and amphibiously landed American battalions. From these base areas, they could march to the coast for offensive operations when the time was right.

U.S. Marine losses in Operation Starlite totaled 45 dead and 203 wounded. American officers who had witnessed previous battles as advisers to the South Vietnamese Army would not have been surprised that the Marines suffered this many casualties in such a battle. The price in blood was, however, higher than had been expected by newly arrived Marines, unfamiliar as they were with the enemy’s tactical proficiency and tenacity.⁶

Operation Starlite had showcased most of the advantages that the U.S. military had brought with it to South Vietnam. Sophisticated intelligence equipment and techniques had pinpointed the forces of an elusive enemy. Helicopters, ships, amphibious vehicles, and ground vehicles had transported thousands of American troops to advantageous positions on the battlefield. Through radio communications and visual signals, American ground forces had rapidly directed the firepower of helicopter gunships, fixed-wing strike aircraft, and artillery tubes at enemy troops and fortifications.

The American strengths were not merely technological. The young American men who wielded weapons in Operation Starlite were products of a culture that had developed an aptitude for war over thousands of years. Western civilization had been carried to the American continent by the Englishmen who began settling there in the seventeenth century and was revised, nationalized, and institutionalized during the break from the English motherland. Protestantism had shaped every aspect of American culture, including those that the rest of the world deemed peculiarly American, such as rugged individualism and workaholism.

The giant hands of geography and climate had also helped sculpt the American nation and its approach to war as well as giving each of its regions unique cultural contours. Migrations across the harsh western frontier had fostered a spirit of pragmatic innovation, a readiness to use overwhelming force to resolve disputes, and a contempt for intellectuals and distant politicians and other would-be elites. The Americans who set down in the vast flatlands of the Midwest had developed, in the sedentary diligence of agricultural life, pronounced habits of moderation, agreeableness, and provincialism. Along the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards, the oceans had drawn Americans toward seafaring, trade, international travel, and foreign ideas. In the south, the need for agricultural labor capable of withstanding pestilence and heat had driven the importation of slaves from Africa, resulting ultimately in the region’s devastation in the Civil War. That epochal event had ended slavery but had done little to change the white south’s hostility to racial egalitarianism or its fondness for the use of force.

Only just now, one hundred years after the Civil War, was the white population of the United States beginning to integrate blacks into its society, and nowhere was that effort progressing as swiftly as in the military. In prior times of war, the U.S. armed forces had made cohesive fighting units from assorted young men of German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Mexican, Chinese, and Polynesian ethnicities, relying upon the rigors and tribulations of military service to strengthen the bonds of common national identity. Now the U.S. armed forces were adding blacks into the military melting pot. Colin Powell, who served two tours in Vietnam and later became the first black to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state, recalled that the military appealed to him as a young man because its meritocracy and indifference to racial and ethnic identity provided blacks unparalleled opportunities for advancement and leadership. You could not name, in those days, another profession where black men routinely told white men what to do and how to do it, Powell recounted.⁷

The Americans of the 1960s differed by region in their attitudes toward trade, diplomacy, government spending, and war, but they were unified by their faith in God and country. 97 percent of Americans surveyed in 1965 believed in God, and 93 percent identified themselves as Christian, while only 2 percent did not identify with a religion. Three in four Americans believed in life after death, an especially important belief for Americans preparing to wage war.⁸ Polling companies did not produce surveys on patriotic sentiment in 1965, but by all accounts national pride was high. Americans young and old shared a common respect for the Founding Fathers, Paul Revere, the Constitution, the American flag, Davy Crockett, D-Day, and apple pie.

The young men of the 1960s had been reared on America’s struggles, sacrifices, and triumphs in World War II. As boys, they had found role models in the movies of John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, the books of Audie Murphy and Richard Tregaskis, and the stories of fathers and uncles who had fought in Europe or the Pacific. They had spent holidays watching veterans parade down Main Street, wearing uniforms and medals that testified to patriotism and manliness. Many of them volunteered for the military because they considered it a duty and an honor for a man to risk his life for his country. That sentiment was particularly strong in the west and south, owing to the high esteem for the military among the descendants of frontiersmen and Confederates, though it could also be found in regions where martial culture was less in evidence. Among the young men who were not excited enough about automatic weapons and jungle combat to join the armed forces voluntarily, some entered the military through conscription, which had been introduced in 1940 and had continued at reduced levels during the periods of peace before and after the Korean War.

Americans were also united in their confidence that their political principles transcended ethnic and cultural boundaries and were worthy of adoption in every corner of the world. They differed on whether the United States should actively coerce others into adoption or only seek to persuade them, but that was mainly a detail for government officials to work out. Although the attention of the American people to international affairs had been known to wane in times of tranquility, Americans came together to launch overseas expeditions in the face of mortal threats. In the middle of the 1960s, international Communism was widely recognized as such a threat by liberals as well as conservatives, Democrats as well as Republicans. Few had voiced objections when Lyndon Johnson began deploying a massive expeditionary force to Vietnam in the first half of 1965.

National zeal made it possible to mobilize Americans for large military ventures on the other side of the world. During America’s rise to global primacy in the first half of the twentieth century and the ensuing interventions in Korea and Vietnam, the United States had shown that it could project military power farther, faster, and in greater quantities than any nation or empire in history. The U.S. military did not always have as much finesse as its opponents, but it always had more weapons thanks to its gigantic industrial base. When faced with opponents of considerable willpower and capabilities, such as the Germans and Japanese in World War II, the United States could overpower them by weight of numbers and perseverance.⁹

The actions of the Americans at Van Tuong reflected the cultural norms of the U.S. military, many of which had been transposed from civilian society. American officers made sound decisions on the battlefield because they had been chosen based on merit rather than social status or personal connections. American troops heeded the orders of officers because military training had imbued them with respect for authority. The ability of American personnel to operate sophisticated equipment depended upon behaviors and skills that had been inculcated through education and training. It was prolonged training in tactics and weapons that enabled the American ground units at Van Tuong to fight effectively when air power and artillery could not be summoned.

Very few of the other nations of the day could assemble anything approaching the military capabilities of the United States. Only a handful had mastered the use of advanced technologies like the helicopter and the aircraft carrier. The military organizations of most countries outside the West trailed far behind the United States in leadership, discipline, and military professionalism, which explained why the United States had never faced a serious military challenge from those countries. In many societies, loyalty to family still trumped loyalty to the nation and its armed forces, with the result that powerful families influenced officer selection to their own advantages and soldiers ran away when confronted by dangerous foes. Cultures that did not value military service or technological innovation were unable to produce military organizations that deployed armed forces with state-of-the-art equipment and training.¹⁰

In recent decades, though, a small number of Asian countries had come close to Western standards in the human dimensions of military effectiveness by importing cultural ideas and military expertise from Western nations and the Soviet Union. These had been the countries with whom the United States had become enmeshed in prolonged warfare. Japan had been the first, its forces inflicting several spectacular defeats on the Americans in 1941 and 1942 before succumbing to America’s military juggernaut and its nuclear weapons. China and North Korea had followed, battling the United States for three years over the Korean Peninsula. North Vietnam came next. In responding to these challenges, the United States had imparted elements of its own military culture to Asian allies.

The Vietnamese Communists had built formidable armed forces in North Vietnam, with extensive assistance from their Chinese and Soviet allies. Stern and industrious, the people of North Vietnam made soldiers of such high quality that European observers referred to them as the Prussians of Asia. The North Vietnamese included the inhabitants of Tonkin, the northern region of the Vietnamese land mass, as well as those living in the northern half of Annam, the central region. Like all Vietnamese, they were the progeny of Chinese civilization, guided by Confucian precepts. Their Confucian heritage, however, had been beaten down by the North Vietnamese leadership, whose ideological convictions drove them to purge the culture of allegedly backward values like loyalty to family and concern for private property. North Vietnam’s rulers nonetheless retained elements of tradition that could motivate the North Vietnamese population to sacrifice for the state and the world revolution. One such tradition was community solidarity, which was unusually