The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns have authored one of the finest efforts to address the war from multiple perspectives and is perfect for Gen X and Millennials. This compliments Burns’ highly acclaimed 2017 PBS series.
Many already recognize that Ken Burns is a gifted storyteller mixing media together to produce: The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009), Prohibition (2011), and The Roosevelts (2014).
Prior to the PBS 10-part series, I knew Burns would deliver another great experience. For the book release, Ward and Burns do not disappoint. Their detailed stories and personal testimonials from soldiers and their families are deeply moving. Many young and old will more accurately understand a very tumultuous period in our nation’s history.
Burns’ access to newly released interviews and declassified materials from both sides show greater insights that inject confusion to long-held beliefs. This will lead many to question truths on all sides, from past government leaders to military generals.
Burns and Ward offer a number of key revelations:
The November 1963 removal of Diem, Kennedy and Ho Chi Minh
In November 1963, three major changes forever altered the American war. Presidents Ngo Dinh Diem and John Kennedy were assassinated. During the week of Kennedy’s assassination, Le Duan ousted Ho Chi Minh as leader of the Vietnamese communist party. The NVA kept this secret from the world not only during the war but for decades:
There had been change and turmoil in North Vietnam, too, just as there had been in Saigon and Washington, though Americans knew little about it.
At the Ninth Party Plenum that had coincidentally begun in Hanoi on November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was killed, the politburo had argued over how best to proceed with the war.
North Vietnam’s two “big brothers”—the Soviet Union and China—were offering conflicting advice. The Soviets, now championing peaceful coexistence rather than open confrontation with the West, counseled caution. The Chinese accused Moscow of “revisionism” and continued to call for worldwide revolution. Ho Chi Minh was most sympathetic to the Soviets; he was still concerned that his country remained fragile, and believed it better to wage a protracted guerrilla war than to step up the conflict in the South and force the Americans to take a more active role in the war.
First Party Secretary Le Duan, closer to the Chinese, argued that the time was right to strike, and outlined a new military strategy, aimed at ending the war in 1964….The politburo debated for two weeks. When Ho raised objections to Le Duan’s plan, the younger man argued that he was too timid; the two most momentous decisions Ho had made—not to oppose the French return to northern Vietnam in 1945 and to accept the temporary partition of Vietnam in 1954—were proof of it, he charged.
In the end, Le Duan carried the day, and when the votes were about to be cast and Ho saw that he would lose, he stepped out of the room; from then on, while he would always remain the symbol of the revolution, his actual power over day-to-day operations would diminish, while Le Duan’s increased.
pg. 205
Ward and Burns convey the split regarded Le Duan’s insistence that a general offensive and uprising in the south would bring quick victory to the North. This alone was his top argument against Ho Chi Minh at the party plenum. This would develop into the Tet Offensive.
However Ward and Burns shed new light to allow us to understand the American Army so soundly defeated the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong almost completely collapsed as a fighting unit in the south.
Tet was a major disaster for the Le Duan. As the key planner, his key general uprising never developed. Ward and Burns also show during the last planning stages, Le Duan pushed both Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Gaip out of the country! Ho departed to China, Gaip to Hungary. Duan had truly placed a stronghold upon his control of the military war effort.
The Tet debacle resulted in two more coordinated attacks to deliver an uprising, a ‘mini Tet’ in May and a third, smaller mini-Tet in August. All three severly eroded the Viet Cong as a fighting unit.
In retrospect Ho Chi Minh understood the opportunity for a public uprising better than Duan. Americans saw a different story on television.
It is troubling today to understand the misled efforts by President Johnson as he continued to believe Ho Chi Minh directed the war efforts. Did US intelligence overlook his purge from the party. There is no mention in the Pentagon Papers.
Nixon’s Treason
Ward and Burns offer many details surrounding Nixon, as the 1968 GOP candidate committing treason in 1968. In the run up to the presidential election Nixon and Humphrey were close in polling numbers. LBJ worked to offer a peace treaty agreed to by Thieu and the NVA prior to November’s election. Then ‘surprisingly’ Thieu walked away from the deal.
The FBI and NSA had tapped Thieu’s phone. Recordings show Anna Chennault, a contact with GOP Vice Presidential candidate Spiro Agnew communicating with Thieu. Chennault was a prominent GOP donor. Nixon via Chennault pushed Thieu to delay the peace agreement, promising Thieu ‘a better deal’ after the election. The FBI confirmed intercepted communications with LBJ.
LBJ confronted Nixon, who denied any backchannel. Ward and Burns even provide a transcript of a call between LBJ and Everett Dirksen, GOP Senate Minority Leader:
He explained that until October 28, President Thieu had seemed to be on board.
JOHNSON: Then we got some of our “friends “involved.
EVERETT DIRKSEN: Uh-huh.
JOHNSON: Some of it your old China crowd.
DIRKSEN: Yeah.
JOHNSON: And here is the latest information we got. The agent says that she’s just…talked to the “boss” in New Mexico. [Spiro Agnew was campaigning there, and was thought to have spoken with Anna Chennault.]
DIRKSEN: Uh-huh.
JOHNSON: And that he says that “You must hold out…just hold on until after the election.” Now, we know what Thieu is saying to them out there [because the CIA had bugged the South Vietnamese president’s office].
DIRKSEN: Yeah.
JOHNSON: We’re pretty well informed on both ends.
DIRKSEN: Yeah.
JOHNSON: Now, I’m reading their hand, Everett. I don’t want to get this in the campaign.
DIRKSEN: That’s right.
JOHNSON: And they oughtn’t to be doing this. This is treason. [The 1799 Logan Act forbids any American citizen from negotiating with a foreign government without authorization.]
DIRKSEN: I know.
JOHNSON: I know this, that they’re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war.
DIRKSEN: That’s a mistake.
JOHNSON: And it’s a damn bad mistake. Now, I can identify them, because I know who is doing this. I don’t want to identify it. I think it would shock America if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter this important.
DIRKSEN: Yeah.
JOHNSON: I don’t want to do that.”
pg. 616
In plain sight via our American intelligence community, Nixon’s was caught in the act of treason:
The president explained again how everything had seemed to be moving forward until Saigon suddenly balked because Thieu had been told he’d do better with Nixon as president. “I didn’t say that it was with your knowledge,” he told Nixon. “I hope it wasn’t.”
Nixon was lying: he was determined that Johnson get no political credit for peacemaking, and at his personal direction and in secret had done everything he could to make sure it didn’t happen.
On Monday morning, the day before Americans went to the polls, The Christian Science Monitor asked the White House to confirm or deny a story from their Saigon correspondent that said “political encouragement from the Richard Nixon camp” had been “a significant factor” in President Thieu’s sudden decision to stay home. At first, Johnson wasn’t sure what to do. He thought it likely Nixon had lied to him but had seen no absolute proof of his personal involvement. (That would not be made public for thirty-nine years, in the form of H. R. Haldeman’s notes of the candidate’s October 22 late-night telephone call.)
pgs. 618-19
The war may have ended in late 1968 or 1969. After Nixon’s election the war expanded to Cambodia. Americans would continue dying for 7 more years.
Nixon willing to use nuclear weapons
The Eisenhower Administration offered three atomic bombs to French foreign minister Georges Bidault in the last days of Dien Bien Phu. In the opening months of JFK’s Presidency, Attorney General Robert Kennedy supported the atomic bombing of Cambodia.
Ward and Burns now offer greater insights to Nixon’s plan to drop atomic weapons on the Vietnamese/Chinese border in operation Duck Hook in the weeks leading up to the Paris Peace treaty. Ward and Burns also give greater insights to Henry Kissinger and President Nixon view of South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu as a weak, worthless leader.
Project 100,000: Race, Drugs & Fragging
In late 1966 Robert McNamara launched a controversial program called Project 100,000 which lowered both physical and mental standards for new inductees:
Forty-one percent of the 240,000 draftees inducted between 1966 and 1968 under the new dispensation were African American. Impatient old hands in the military dismissed the newcomers, white as well as black and brown, as “McNamara’s Morons.” “We had kids in our platoon that should have been in special ed,” one infantrymen remembered, “lots of kids who couldn’t read. One kid we had to write ‘L’ and ‘R’ on his boots so he’d know which way to go.”
A disproportionate number of these draftees were assigned to combat. The death rate among them would prove twice the overall rate, and a postwar study of those who survived showed that the training they were supposed to have received actually did little to prepare them for civilian life.”
pg. 318
As more men enlisted under this project, so rose drug use. More importantly fragging began to rise. Most fragging was against NCOs and junior officers. Ward and Burns however relay battle-related fragging:
After Hamburger Hill, parties unknown were said to have advertised a $10,000 bounty in the underground newspaper GI Says for the fragging of Blackjack Honeycutt, who had ordered his men up that bloody slope too many times. Colin Powell, then a major in the Twenty-third Infantry Division stationed at Duc Pho, made a point of moving his cot every night, both to thwart enemy informants who might be following him and to “rule out attacks on authority from within the battalion itself.”
pg. 314
The problem grew so serious at one point that American military commanders stopped issuing grenades for a week throughout Vietnam and then ordered shakedown inspections to search for unregistered ordnance.
The number of fraggings increased as U.S. forces dwindled between 1969 and 1971. By the time the last U.S. combat troops left Vietnam in 1973 the Army had investigated nearly eight hundred cases.”
pg.315
The most disturbing research by Ward and Burns surrounds the fragging attempt on Lt. Col. Eli Howard Jr., an aggressive commander of third battalion of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade:
A career soldier with a fierce reputation and a forbidding manner, heartily disliked by the draftees he ordered into battle again and again.
“He was trying to make a name for himself,” Sergeant John Borrelli of A Company recalled. “Body count was his goal. He made us dig up North Vietnamese graves to count bodies. If you didn’t get enough body count, you didn’t get clean clothes, maybe you didn’t get enough rations to eat. If intelligence said there’s a buildup of North Vietnamese in a particular area, without checking into it, he’d load you on helicopters and combat-assault you into the middle of it.
Some of the men in Alpha Company were said to have paid a “Kit Carson”—a South Vietnamese scout—$400 to dress as a guerrilla and shoot Colonel Howard as he stepped off his helicopter.
The would-be assassin opened fire with an AK-47 as Howard stepped off a helicopter. He riddled the chopper but somehow missed the colonel.
After that, the sergeant said, “Howard was not a happy man. He went airborne, and sent a message down to the company commander, ‘Your men just tried to kill me. You will pay for that.’
He combat-assaulted us into the Song Chang River Valley thirty miles south of Danang between, I believe it was, two regiments of North Vietnamese. It was a payback mission.
For five days,” Borrelli recalled, “we had to try to fight our way out. They slaughtered us. It was terrible. Everybody that walked point got killed or wounded. No food, no water, no sleep.
On August 19, a helicopter carrying Commander Howard and seven others dipped down too close to a hidden North Vietnamese position on the terraced slope of a hill labeled 102 on Army maps and was shot from the sky. Howard and everyone else aboard were killed.
When the news reached the men of Alpha Company, they cheered, Borrelli remembered. Then a message comes in to us, ‘Saddle up, move out.’ They were to go and find Howard’s body. Well, we’d just given a big ‘Hurrah.’ We didn’t care if they ate him. We didn’t want to go looking for him.
They went anyway. One hundred and nine of them—nearly half of whom were “green seeds,” new to combat—were choppered into the valley where hundreds of soldiers belonging to the Third North Vietnamese regiment were waiting for them, hidden in spider holes and deep bunkers reinforced with logs and skillfully masked by brush and banana leaves.
Two men were killed and ten were wounded the first day. On the fourth afternoon they finally fought their way up Hill 102 through a labyrinth of bunkers. When they reached the top, there were just forty-six of them.
The exhausted survivors weren’t sure they’d killed a single enemy soldier. No one claimed even to have seen one. We follow orders all the time. We go out in small numbers, in platoon-size elements of under thirty guys looking for trouble. It’s stupid. But we do it. Now it was time an outfit stood up and said, ‘You’re killing men for no good reason. And that’s it. If you want to put us in jail, put us in jail. I’ll go. I’ll have a place to lay down every night, three meals a day. It’s got to be better than being shot at every day and watching my friends die.’
pgs. 314-315
Even after 50 years of Howard’s death, Ward and Burns tell a shocking story of fragging and retribution. Easy access to cheap heroin and marijuana contributed to enhanced drug use.
Vietnamese culture of corruption
Maybe Ward and Burns are fully able to discuss the correct assessment of the Vietnamese culture of corruption. Diem was notorious for corruption within the government and armed forces leadership.
Yet Ward and Burns reveal throughout the book, elements of corruption were a larger than life barrier for the American war effort. It seemed like Al Capone’s Chicago in the early 1920s.
Corruption applied to families in the south paying bribes to military officers to keep their sons out of military service.
And yet corruption was the south’s single point of failure….for decades. All the US aid and military efforts could not change their culture. Ward and Burns also shed light on corruption in the North. Corruption was truly a part of daily cultural life in Southeast Asia.
A must read to understand our long national nightmare.