Vietnam War II
Episode W10: LBJ goes to war
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Vietnam War: LBJ Goes to War
If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
Vietnam Shapes a Generation
More than 27 million American men came of draft age between August 1964 (Tonkin incident) and March 1973 (U.S. exit). Two million of them were sent to Vietnam. Twenty-five million didn’t go.
As one draft resister put it, “Almost every kid in this country is either a draft evader,
a potential draft evader, or a failed draft evader.”
Millions actively opposed the war or simply saw no purpose in it. Avoiding Vietnam became a generational preoccupation. Most draft-age men who did not see combat, took positive steps—both legal and illegal—to make that happen.
Legal Steps
claim student deferment
claim CO (conscientious objector) status based on sincerely held religious or ethical beliefs
claim serious medical/psychological problem
claim to be a homosexual
claim economic hardship
join a church, mainstream or not, for a deferment as a “divinity student”
get married and have children
Illegal Steps
decline to register for draft
decline to report for a physical or for induction
burn or turn in draft card
go “underground”
leave country for, say, Canada or Sweden
take drugs to help fail the physical exam
go to jail
find, and maybe bribe, a doctor to certify a healthy person as medically unfit
deliberately fail a military intelligence test
mutilate self
Avoiding Vietnam did not necessarily mean emerging unscathed. For one in four young men, it meant hurried marriages, unwanted children, relocation, misdirected careers, or self-inflicted physical impairments.
Those coming of age in the 1960s were the children of parents united or reunited after World War II, a war they believed in and saw as a noble victory. Their offspring have been called Baby Boomers, Dr. Spock generation, Sputnik generation, Woodstock generation . . . and Vietnam generation.
As with any generation and any war, some Americans, disproportionately Southern, working-class men, were gung-ho, focused on the positives of going to war: an exciting adventure, and a chance to serve your country, prove your manhood, and conquer evil. One such was Bill Ehrhart:
During my senior year, when the government said the Communists were taking over Vietnam, and if we didn’t stop them there, we’d have to stop them eventually in San Diego, I took that at face value. And I saw my opportunity to be a hero.
I’d been accepted at four colleges by my senior year. And then I just decided, no, I’m going to join the Marines. I had to spend a lot of time talking to my parents about it, because at 17, I wouldn’t have been allowed to sign an enlistment contract. They had to sign it, too.
I think what really tipped the scales was when I said, “Mom, is this the way you raised me? To let other mothers’ sons fight America’s wars?” And they were young people during World War II. They believed in their country and that was it. They hadn’t raised me that way.
Conscription
In a 1966 poll of high school sophomores: 7 percent said the draft was a major worry. When the same men were queried three years later, after passage of a new draft law that eliminated student deferments, the number had grown to 75 percent.
The draft spurred protests at draft boards, on college campuses, and in town squares. It pitted a generation of men against one another in a contest for individual survival.
Conscription was an instrument of Darwinian social policy. The “fits”—those with background, wit, or money—generally managed to escape. The draft rewarded those who manipulated the system to their advantage.—Smithsonian magazine
Prior to December 1969, young men who stayed in college received a student deferment. If they dropped out or graduated, they went in the draft pool. Though the student deferment favored a privileged minority, most college students accepted it as their due.
There are certain people who can do more good in a lifetime in politics or medicine or law than by getting killed in a trench.—Graham Talbot, law student
For GIs opposing Hitler or Hirohito in the 1940s, fighting for one’s country was a source of unalloyed pride. Patriotism had no class boundaries, and even the rich bent rules to get in. Winthrop Rockefeller, president of the New York Stock Exchange, was among the first to enlist. By 1946, Congress was filled with military veterans, including John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
Cut to a new era and a new war. A 1971 Harris Poll revealed that most Americans believed 1) those who went to Vietnam were “suckers,” risking their lives for the wrong war, and 2) the fate of the nation was not at stake there.
Few elites had sons or friends who fought in Vietnam. College graduates made up only 2 percent of draftees. Yale president Kingman Brewster, a vocal critic of the war, called the draft system “a cynical avoidance of service, a corruption of the aims of education, a tarnishing of the national spirit, and a cops-and-robbers view of national obligation.”
The draft also had a predictable racial bias. In 1945, Blacks made up 12 percent of combat troops (roughly their share of the U.S. population); in 1965, that number was 31 percent. Black soldiers in Vietnam would suffer 24 percent of the combat deaths. Both poor whites and poor Blacks would do more than their share of dying there.
Tonkin Gulf Incident
Approaching the 1964 presidential election, the pressure on LBJ to hold the line on Communism came mostly from Republican conservatives. In July, they nominated Senator Barry Goldwater for president. An outspoken anti-Communist: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
President Johnson wanted to keep Vietnam out of the campaign. He found his opportunity in the Gulf of Tonkin.
One day in late July, the USS Maddox, a destroyer on an intelligence mission, sailed into the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam. It was later joined by the USS Turner Joy.
As the Navy told it, the ships were on routine patrols in international waters on August 4 when, “In a deliberate and unprovoked action, three North Vietnam PT boats unleashed a torpedo attack against the Maddox. At once the enemy patrol boats were brought under fire by the destroyer.”
This account omitted crucial facts. Days earlier, before dawn on July 31, unmarked South Vietnam patrol boats had attacked two North Vietnamese island bases, part of a covert operation supported by the CIA. The next night the Maddox was seen cruising up the coast, at one point within five miles of those same island bases. Hanoi, not unreasonably, linked the attacks with the appearance of the Maddox; they struck the destroyer with patrol boats 10 miles from the coast.
But it was the alleged second incident two days later that emboldened LBJ to appeal to Congress for more authority, an incident that North Vietnam has always denied and historians now agree never happened. In fact, the second Tonkin incident was pure fabrication, manufactured by the National Security Council.
For President Johnson, however, it was the casus belli (justification for war) he needed. He pressured his old friend and fellow Democrat, Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, for a broader congressional mandate. Fulbright, persuaded that the second attack had indeed occurred, whisked a War Powers resolution through Congress with minimal debate.
The vague mandate gave the President the authority in Southeast Asia to take “all necessary measures to repel any armed attacks against forces of the U.S. and to prevent further aggression.” After passage, LBJ quipped: “Like Grandma's nightshirt, it covers everything.”
The vote was unanimous in the House and 90-2 in the Senate. Only Wayne Morse (Oregon) and Ernest Gruening (Alaska) dissented.
Being in the minority never proves that you’re wrong. In fact, history is going to record that senator Gruening and I voted in the interest of the American people when we voted against this resolution.
And I’d have the American people remember what this resolution really is. It’s a resolution that seeks to give the President of the United States the power to make war without a declaration of war.—Senator Morse
Backed by both political parties, Johnson had removed the war as a campaign issue. Able now to portray himself as tough on Communism and Goldwater as a dangerous extremist, LBJ won reelection in a landslide.
Troops Arrive
National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, and others advised the President to retaliate by bombing North Vietnam. Johnson refused, though he did agree to send planes to South Vietnam.
When the Communists attacked Bienhoa airbase, destroying some of those planes and killing American personnel, the cry both to bomb the North and to send in the Marines grew louder. Still LBJ refused. But after two more deadly attacks in the next few weeks, the President relented. He ordered a sustained bombing campaign of North Vietnam and gave in to General Westmoreland’s request for troops to protect the vulnerable airbases in South Vietnam.
On March 8, 1965, 3,500 Marines landed to protect the airbase at Da Nang. More requests for troops followed, and by the end of the year nearly 200,000 soldiers had arrived. Johnson soon changed their mission; the passive defense of airbases lasted less than a month. The new objective was to seek out and destroy the Vietcong.
Most of the new recruits were too young to vote; all were unprepared for the mystery and complexity of Vietnam.
Charles Sabatier: When I was drafted, I was a naïve 20-year-old, hardly a man. I first spotted Vietnam from the plane, and only then did I truly understand there’s a war going on here. There were bomb craters, artillery craters everywhere.
When we got off the plane, we got into buses. They looked like prison buses, green prison buses with wire mesh over the windows. I asked why—I thought we were in friendly country—and they told me it was to stop people from running up and throwing grenades into the bus. Oh my God, you mean people are trying to kill me?
Bill Ehrhart: I knew when I went to Vietnam that I had to be there for 395 days, and if I was still alive after those 395 days, I could go home and forget the whole thing.
Charles Sabatier: I probably saw half a dozen dead Americans before I ever shot at the North Vietnamese or Vietcong. Strictly from our own mistakes. People walking along behind somebody with their trigger guard undone, and tripping and accidentally shooting someone in the back. You trusted yourself only.
The Enemy
Escalation was met with escalation. As American troops expanded their combat role, infiltration of North Vietnamese army units into South Vietnam increased rapidly. When the North Vietnamese reached the South, they hooked up with Vietcong guerillas recruited from Vietnam’s predominantly peasant society.
Americans in Vietnam faced two huge disadvantages unknown to World War II fighters: 1) There was no frontline dividing the good guys from the bad guys; 2) the good guys (ARVN) and bad guys (Vietcong) looked alike.
Moreover, GIs knew almost nothing of the terrain, the people, the language, the culture—and thus the enemy.
Mark Smith: The villages were hidden because they were almost always surrounded by thick hedges. From outside you might not even see any evidence of a village. Then you’d walk through this hedge—and there was this whole society. We knew the people who lived there probably led normal lives, that we might even understand if we were a part of it. But we weren’t a part of it. All we saw were the people staring at us like we were from Mars.
Edward Banks: It’s not like the San Francisco 49ers on one side of the field and the Cincinnati Bengals on the other. The enemy is all around you. One second you might be fired upon from the rear, the next from straight ahead or either flank. You never knew. You never knew who was the enemy or who was a friend. They all dressed alike, they were all Vietnamese. Some were Vietcong.
Mark Smith: Whenever you did make contact with the enemy, you’d go from the most horrible boredom, I mean just deathly boredom, to absolutely the other extreme, the most intense continual excitement I’ve ever known in my life. The excitement was there for everyone. You couldn’t go through combat and remain detached. It was the idea of someone shooting at you, trying to kill you, and you were trying to kill someone. You were using that finger to try to take someone’s life. And that sends a real charge through you.
Bill Ehrhart: When we went into the field we took 60-70 pounds of gear. Your average Vietcong guerilla might have 10 pounds of stuff. He’d carry a rifle and a few rounds of ammunition, and a little plastic bag or a leaf filled with some rice, and that’s all he needed.
Most of our enemy contact wasn’t contact at all—it was mines and snipers, mostly mines. Our battalion had something like 75 mining incidents per month, most of them producing casualties. And so day after day you had dead Marines, wounded Marines, and nobody to fight back at. You go out, you run a patrol, somebody hits a mine, and there’s a couple of dead people. And there’s Joe the rice farmer out in the field. He don’t even stop. It’s like he didn’t even hear the blast. After a while you start thinking, these people must know where these mines are . . . they must be VC . . . they must be VC sympathizers.
Conditions
GIs had no experience fighting in a mountainous jungle, much less one thousands of miles from home.
Bill Ehrhart: There were leeches everywhere, so whenever you stopped for a break, you’d have to take your boots off and check for leeches. Another problem was “immersion foot,” this rot you got on your feet because they were always wet.
It did get cold at night when we were out on operations during the monsoon. But the heat in the summer months was a lot harder to deal with. We took a lot of chances. You’d go without a flak jacket or without a helmet, trying to decide what the odds were of getting heatstroke versus the odds of getting hit.
Environmental Destruction
Between 1965 and 1968, the U.S. bombed North Vietnam, an operation called Rolling Thunder. By the end of the war, the U.S. had dropped more bomb tonnage on Vietnam than the Allies dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II. Bombs, including napalm, destroyed over two million acres of land in Vietnam; even today millions of unexploded bombs are scattered about Vietnam.
A massive herbicidal program was carried out, aimed at destroying the forest cover sheltering Vietcong guerrillas and depriving Vietnamese peasants of food. Spraying destroyed 14 percent of Vietnam’s forests, diminished agricultural yields, and made seeds unfit for replanting. Further depleting agricultural production, the military set fire to haystacks, soaked land with aviation fuel and burned it, and shot thousands of livestock.
The spraying of millions of gallons of chemicals killed land, animals, and people. One chemical, Agent Orange, was particularly harmful. Its main ingredient, dioxin, was found in soil, water and vegetation during and after the war. Dioxin is carcinogenic and has resulted in spontaneous abortions, congenital abnormalities, cancer, and developmental problems among children. Agent Orange continues to threaten the health of the Vietnamese today.
Vernon Gillespie: I was part of a firefight in which my battalion alone fired 22,000 artillery rounds into a very small area. This had been heavy jungle when we started the fight, and it looked like a moonscape when we got through. It wasn’t just artillery—you had air strikes, too.
Strategic Hamlets
To deprive the enemy of peasant support, the American command tried a new tactic: moving the population out of Vietcong reach into fortified encampments called “strategic hamlets.” Army medic David Ross was involved in the evacuation of a village called Ben Suc:
During the evacuation of villagers from Ben Suc, I was struck by the sense of resoluteness by the villagers. They understood what was happening. They understood they couldn’t change the situation. They were going to be taken out of their homes. I’m sure deep down they knew this was the end of Ben Suc as a village, that we were going to destroy it. They seemed to accept it with a special kind of strength.
It was sad because Ben Suc was a pretty village. It was a very old village and the people there seemed to enjoy a better standard of living than the people in many other villages.
The villagers were taken out by boat, by helicopter and by truck to relocation centers. Once they were gone, the whole village was just turned into a parking lot.
Besides destroying the village, anything of material value was eliminated. Mattresses were slashed, rice was poisoned or dumped in the river, crops were defoliated. It made it much more difficult for the Communists to continue without this material base.
Atrocities
By late 1967, American forces in Vietnam numbered nearly half a million, and U.S. commanders were asking for more. Given the rapid influx of raw recruits and the conditions described above, atrocities were inevitable. Though the genocide that occurred at My Lai made international headlines, it was no aberration. Similar killings of unarmed villagers were disturbingly common.
Below we hear from both sides, American and Vietnamese, describing what happened when the Marines entered a village, Thuy Bo, to clear it of suspected Vietcong. The incident occurred just 10 miles from where U.S. troops first landed in 1965.
Jack Hill: We were the first team in. It was mass chaos, everyone running around screaming. We asked where the VC were, and they said no VC.
We unloaded several rounds and dropped a couple of grenades in the hootches [thatched huts] to get the people out. We didn’t speak perfect Vietnamese, so in order to get them out of there you either cranked off a couple of rounds or you dropped your M-26 grenade down there. They get the message and they come out of there.
The assault lasted less than five minutes. When Captain Banks determined they were no longer receiving enemy fire, he ordered a ceasefire and “consolidation.”
Le Ton, villager: When they came to my house, there were 10 family members inside, including my 14-year-old son. Four or five soldiers came in. I stood up and greeted them. They laughed when I did that. They seemed to hate us. They just turned and threw a grenade into the house. Nine people were blown to pieces. I was the only one who was wounded and survived. I was extremely frightened and crawled quickly into a corner of the house. Although the grenade had already exploded, the soldiers fired their guns at the people to make sure nobody would survive.
Nguyen Bay, villager: They came and asked us about the Vietcong. There were mostly women and children around then, and no one knew where the VC were. But they shot at us anyway and burned down the houses, and then they killed all of our farm animals.
Some of the wounded people went to their beds to lie down. The soldiers shot their ears. Blood was coming out in pools as they lay there. Then the soldiers shot at their stomachs and their insides splattered all over. Then they smashed people’s heads, using the butts of their guns. This terrified everyone who was still alive. The children screamed at the brutality they were seeing. But the soldiers kept on with their questioning. They shot our water basin to pieces, then they opened fire at us, just opened fire continuously. I was wounded and fell down. Several dead people fell on me so I escaped being killed.
Thuong Thi Mai, mother: After they killed the people, they burned down all the houses so the survivors had no place to live. They burned everything. Even dead children were burned. So I could collect only this much of the remains of three children. It’s only a handful of bones.
Jack Hill later tried to explain the mind set of frightened GIs who killed unarmed civilians:
You got an angry 18-year-old kid behind the gun and he’s just seen his buddy get killed. He’s not gonna have no remorse for who’s on the receiving end. You get in the way of an M-14 or M-60 caliber machine gun, and there’s no tellin’ who’s gonna get killed.
Disillusionment
For many Americans serving in Vietnam, disillusionment arrived quickly. Some came to see the war as unwinnable, others as morally indefensible. A few, like Everett Bumgardner, civilian advisor to the U.S. Army, were even able to see what Communism had to offer Vietnamese peasants. Here he describes the alternative:
In Vietnam, for generations power was in the hands of a very few people. Maybe three percent of the population controlled the government, controlled the economic life of the country. If you were a peasant, or lowly born, it was impossible to break out of this chain. The Vietcong can turn the peasant’s mind with the idea that if you revolt, if you join us, we can change this system.
Bill Ehrhart: One of the first things I began to wonder about was the soldiers who were our allies, the Army of the Republic, ARVN. They wouldn’t fight . . . And it occurred to me that these are the same people. The ARVN and the VC [Viet Cong] are the same people, the same race, the same culture, and yet one side seems to be chicken, and the other seems to fight in the face of overwhelming disadvantages. And I started wondering why.
After a few months you begin to think, “This is crazy.” But I didn’t dare draw conclusions from that, because they pointed in directions that were just terrifying. I mean, America may not be the guys in the white hats. Maybe we shouldn’t be in Vietnam, maybe I’ve gotten my ass out here in the bush for nothing. You can’t think about that stuff in a situation like that. If you spent a lot of time thinking about that—particularly is this the day I’m going to buy the farm? —you’d go nuts!
In grade school we learned about the Redcoats, the nasty British soldiers who tried to stifle our freedom, and the tyranny of George III. I increasingly began to have the feeling that I was a Redcoat. I think it was one of the most staggering realizations of my life to suddenly understand that I wasn’t a hero, I wasn’t a good guy, I wasn’t handing out candy to kids in French villages. Somehow I had become everything I’d learned to believe was evil.
When I went on R and R [“rest and recuperation”] in Hong Kong, I came very close to deserting. Somehow in the space of eight months I’d gone from being a volunteer hurrying off to do his duty for his country to seriously contemplating desertion, to just disappearing into the world somewhere.
In the end, I decided not to quit, not to lay down my rifle. Somewhere, lurking in the back of my mind was 20 years of making big rocks into little rocks.
After the War
Jack Hill: The thing I tried to put away was seeing my partners getting killed, laying out in the rain and mud for so long. That’s the only thing that really upset me about that whole operation. I coulda give a damn about what happened inside that village.
Bill Ehrhart: I don’t have nightmares of killing armed soldiers in combat. The thing I have nightmares about is the woman in the rice field I shot one day. Because she was running—for no other reason—running away from the Americans who were going to kill her. And I killed her. Maybe 60 years old, unarmed, and at the time I didn’t even think twice about it.
Barbara Clark (mother of a son killed in Vietnam): You were damned if you went and damned if you didn't. My son was a victim, my family was a victim, all boys of draft age were victims in one way or another.
Americans in Vietnam: The Numbers
2.7 million served
58,000 died.
270,000 were wounded
21,000 were disabled
5,000 lost one or more limbs
500,000 were branded criminals for desertion or other offenses
9,000 were convicted of draft offenses; 3,250 went to prison
250,000 received a dishonorable discharge
300,000 received a general discharge, a handicap in finding a job
Thousands fled the country to avoid the draft
Millions more had their futures shaped by the threat of going to war
Aftermath & Analysis
1) Many have questioned why President Johnson escalated the war. After all, he didn’t want to be a war president; he wanted to be remembered for his domestic accomplishments: the Great Society and War on Poverty. When interviewed by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, he offered a partial explanation:
If I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation as an appeaser, and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.
Everything I know about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I'd be doing what Chamberlain did in World War II.
2) While the average age of a U.S. combat soldier in World War II was 26, in Vietnam it was closer to 20. The youngest soldier was Dan Bullock, a Marine, who was killed in action in 1969. He was 15.
2) Although tales of returning Vietnam vets being spat upon were exaggerated, their reception was certainly muted. Unlike World War II vets, they received no hero’s welcome, no ticker-tape parades. Oddly, the only returning heroes were freed POWs.
3) For opponents of the war, Senators Gruening and Morse were heroes. As the only two in Congress who voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that gave LBJ a blank check in Vietnam, they should be remembered for their courage and foresight. Politicians, however, find their lessons elsewhere. Both Gruening and Morse lost their Senate seats in the next election.
4) Former Marine Bill Ehrhart, much quoted in this chapter, became a writer. Though mostly a poet, he published several collections of essays on the war, including: The Madness of It All: Essays on War, Literature, and American Life; Ordinary Lives: Platoon 1005 and the Vietnam War; and Busted: A Vietnam Veteran in Nixon's America.
5) Over time some vets and war evaders gained a sense of kinship, rooted in the realization that members of both groups were war casualties. As one historian put it:
Unlike other Americans, most members of the Vietnam generation seem reluctant to judge a man by his personal response to the war. They feel that the labels—sucker, opportunist, evader, deserter—are part of the tragedy of Vietnam.
Next Lesson: Vietnam III: Homefront & Nixon Years
Ruminations
1) The theory that buttressed U.S. involvement in Vietnam is called The Domino Theory. First described by President Eisenhower, and supported by Kennedy and Johnson, the Domino Theory said that if Vietnam fell to Communism, other Asian states would inevitably follow, like falling dominoes. In some farfetched scenarios, Thailand, India, Burma, and Japan’s survival all depended on U.S. victory in Vietnam. What flaws, if any, do you see in this theory?
2) Five presidents contributed to the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. They were motivated by a) their desire to appear tough in the fight against Communism, and b) their conviction that America would not lose its first-ever war on their watch. Could the U.S. political system possibly have produced a president who broke that chain?