"A Look Down That Long Road"
(See Cover)
To the members of the National Security Council, seated around the coffin-shaped table in the Cabinet Room of the White House, the President of the U.S. said with quiet anger: "I've gone far enough. I've had enough of this." And so, in response to a murderous series of Communist attacks against U.S. military forces and installations in South Viet Nam, President Lyndon Johnson gave the orders that on three different days last week sent American and Vietnamese warplanes smashing north of the 17th parallel at Red supply dumps, communications systems and guerrilla staging areas.
As the U.S. policy evolved during the week, it became increasingly evident that future raids against North Viet Nam will not be carried out on a strict tit-for-tat basis--a dubious strategy that has deprived Washington and Saigon of the initiative. Thus the war in Viet Nam has taken on a brand-new dimension--and can never again be quite the same.
To no one was this more welcome than the man directly responsible for the U.S. military effort in Viet Nam: Army General William C. Westmoreland, 50, commander of the 23,500 American servicemen in South Viet Nam and senior U.S. military adviser to South Vietnamese forces. "The war has quite obviously moved into another stage," said Westmoreland in visible relief. "Now the rules of war have changed, and policymakers in Hanoi are confronted with the necessity of balancing their resources against the damage they may suffer. They've got to take a look down that long road and decide whether they really want what lies ahead for them if they persist in past policies."
After Nothing, Something. It was a long time coming. For 15 months, President Johnson had refused to change course, despite the steadily deteriorating situation in South Viet Nam. To retreat, he said, would be "strategically unwise and morally unthinkable." To expand the war might get the U.S. into a fight "with 700 million Chinese." On the very eve of the current crisis he reiterated to an associate his determination to "go neither north nor south."
Last August, when Red torpedo boats attacked U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, Johnson ordered air strikes against their home bases--but he made it eminently clear that this was a one-shot reprisal and would not be repeated, except under similar provocation. For months afterward, as Hanoi steadily increased the rate of infiltration via jungle trails threading into South Viet Nam until it reached the rate of at least 1,000 men a month, Johnson did nothing. Twice the Viet Cong struck directly at U.S. personnel, and twice they got away with it. Two days before the U.S. presidential election, guerrillas killed five Americans, wounded 76, and destroyed six B57 bombers with a savage mortar barrage against South Viet Nam's Bienhoa Airfield. Last Christmas Eve, a plastic charge demolished Saigon's Brink Hotel, a big officers' billet, killing two Americans and wounding 98 others. Both times U.S. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor pleaded for a retaliatory strike at the North. Both times he was turned down.
Year of the Snake. Given this evidence, it was not surprising that the North Vietnamese thought they could continue to operate with impunity from their privileged sanctuary against the South. Finally, they provoked Lyndon Johnson beyond patience. The attack that started the escalator came on Feb. 7, following a week-long lull in the war while Vietnamese celebrated the lunar New Year. As the Year of the Dragon went out and the Year of the Snake came in, the Viet Cong had unilaterally proclaimed a seven-day ceasefire. They spent that period busily caching explosives and setting up mortar positions near the central highlands town of Pleiku, 240 miles northeast of Saigon. As headquarters of South Viet Nam's II Army Corps and site of a U.S.-run airstrip at nearby Camp Holloway, Pleiku was a tempting target.
Only two hours after the so-called cease-fire ended at midnight, two squads of Viet Cong rushed out of the high grass near Camp Holloway's 4,200-ft. airstrip, cut through a double apron of barbed wire without being seen by guards, began blowing up parked helicopters and light reconnaissance planes with satchel charges. At the same time, guerrillas hiding in a hamlet 1,000 yds. from the camp poured 55 rounds from 81-mm. mortars smack into the compound where 400 U.S. advisers lived. They were right on target. Fifty-two billets were damaged, including some totally destroyed. In one, Cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who happened to be in Pleiku visiting his son Bruce, a 21-year-old U.S. Army warrant officer, leaped up at the first mortar blast, scampered outside in his underwear (see THE PRESS). Within 15 minutes, the guerrillas pulled back, covering their retreat with recoilless rifles and rifle grenades. Seven Americans died, more than 100 were wounded, and nearly a score of aircraft was damaged or destroyed.
"Bad, Very Bad." Four miles across the rolling plateau, another Viet Cong unit of six to ten men crept toward a compound at II Corps headquarters, where 180 U.S. advisers lived. Slipping past the outer defense perimeter manned by Vietnamese guards, they cut their way through an apron of barbed wire, crawled on their bellies toward the compound gate. Just as they reached it, a U.S. sentry, SP5 Jesse Pyle of Marina, Calif., spotted them and opened fire, killing one guerrilla. The noise roused the sleeping Americans, saved many from certain death had the Viet Cong slipped inside. As it was, the attack force riddled Pyle--the eighth American to die at Pleiku--tossed homemade grenades wrapped in bamboo or placed in beer cans at the barracks, wounded 25 Americans.
Word of the attack was flashed from the remote outpost to Saigon, thence to Pacific Command Headquarters in Honolulu, the Pentagon and the White House. At his villa in Saigon, General Westmoreland awakened two house guests, both members of the visiting entourage of White House Aide McGeorge Bundy. The three hurried to Westmoreland's headquarters, two blocks away. There they joined Bundy, Ambassador Taylor and other top U.S. officials for an emergency early-morning conference. Their recommendation to Washington: strike back. A few hours later, when Westmoreland inspected the damage at Pleiku and flew to a field hospital where Pleiku's wounded were being treated in five operating rooms, he felt completely certain that his decision had been the right one. "This is bad," he said, "very bad."
The Pleiku attack was undeniably aimed exclusively at Americans; there was not a single casualty among the 4,300 Vietnamese there. It was early afternoon when details about the Pleiku disaster arrived in Washington. Until nearly nightfall, President Johnson stayed on the phone with his security advisers, among them Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, home in bed with viral pneumonia.
Three Things. At the Pentagon, General Earle G. ("Bus") Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, picked up a direct line to the War Room at the Pearl Harbor headquarters of Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp Jr., the supreme U.S. commander in the Pacific (TIME cover, Aug. 14). Sharp was discussing the attack with his aides when the amber light on his dialless gold telephone flashed on. Wheeler wanted to make sure that the Seventh Fleet was ready. Sharp assured him that it was.
That evening, chauffeured black Cadillac limousines came in steady, solemn procession to the west entrance of the White House for an urgent meeting of the National Security Council. In the Cabinet Room, Johnson let the NSC know that the only question was not whether to retaliate, but where. "The worst thing we could possibly do," said the President, "would be to let this go by. It would be a big mistake. It would open the door to a major misunderstanding." He continued: "I want three things: I want a joint attack [including Vietnamese as well as U.S. planes]. I want it to be prompt. I want it to be appropriate."
Just twelve hours after the Pleiku attack, 49 U.S. A-4 Skyhawks and F-8 Crusaders streaked off the decks of the U.S. aircraft carriers Ranger, Hancock and Coral Sea, all steaming about 100 miles off South Viet Nam in the South China Sea. The jets headed for Donghoi, 160 miles above the 17th parallel, a major staging point for Red guerrillas en route south. The bombers inflicted "considerable" damage, said McNamara, up from his sickbed. One plane was shot down, but its pilot was plucked from the sea.
The Key. A joint Vietnamese-U.S. strike aborted because of bad weather, was carried out the next day. Two dozen prop-driven Vietnamese Skyraiders and an unspecified number of U.S. jets from the big Danang airbase 375 miles north of Saigon plastered a major guerrilla staging and communications center at Vinhlinh, five miles north of the 17th parallel. Leading the Vietnamese wave was South Viet Nam's Vice Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, resplendent in a white crash helmet streaked with orange, a violet scarf and a black flying suit. Ky's plane took four hits, and he himself was grazed by shrapnel. Despite heavy ground fire, only one plane was lost; the pilot was rescued.
In publicly explaining the strikes against North Viet Nam, the White House emphasized that they were in response to "provocations ordered and directed by the Hanoi regime." Despite the strikes, said the President, "we seek no wider war." But he added, in a clear enunciation of U.S. policy: "Whether or not this course can be maintained lies with the North Vietnamese aggressors. The key to the situation remains the cessation of infiltration from North Viet Nam and the clear indication by the Hanoi regime that it is prepared to cease aggression against its neighbors." When he explained his action to congressional leaders at lengthy White House briefings, he won clear expressions of support from both sides of the aisle.
No Substitutes. Predictably, the Communists mounted demonstrations outside U.S. embassies from Moscow to Montevideo. At Moscow University, a bulletin-board notice cordially invited students of all nationalities to the bash. Some 2,000 accepted, marched ten abreast to the iron gates of the nine-story U.S. embassy, pelted it with ice, bricks, ink bottles, and chunks of coal from a truck that was conveniently stalled a few doors down the street.
Under the benign eyes of hundreds of Russian cops, the "students" spattered the embassy's yellow pastel facade with ink, smashed 202 windows. By way of contrast, when 400 American students later picketed the Soviet embassy in Washington in orderly fashion, police kept them 1 1/2 blocks away from the building.
In Washington, the U.S. protested the Moscow demonstration--the eighth such occurrence since June 1958--as an "outrage." President Johnson authorized the release of a statement to the effect that such attacks severely damage U.S.-Soviet relations. "Expressions of regret and compensation," it said, "are no substitute for adequate protection."
Official Moscow noisily protested the U.S. bombings, and its anger almost certainly came in part because Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin happened to be visiting Hanoi at the time (see THE WORLD). Peking was even shriller. The Chinese warned that they "absolutely will not stand idly by" and that "we are waiting for you in battle array." After a close reading of the Communist complaints, Washington experts concluded that what Russia and China said did not threaten drastic action. North of the 17th parallel, U.S. intelligence sources noted no unusual signs of activity, either in Hanoi's 225,000-man army or in a Red Chinese force of 300,000 that has been massed just over the North Vietnamese border since last summer's Ton kin Gulf crisis.
Other Moves. Even as he ordered the air strikes against North Viet Nam, President Johnson took other actions aimed at convincing the Communists that the U.S. really means business in Viet Nam. For one thing, he ordered an Okinawa-based battalion of 550 Marines armed with 54 Hawk ground-to-air missiles to Danang to protect scores of aircraft parked wingtip to wingtip on aprons. The Hawk is a killer at up to 45,000 ft. and at a distance of 22 miles, homes in on enemy aircraft by radar. The dispatch of the Hawks was merely an extra precaution against the possibility that some 50 MIG-15s and MIG-17s--a gift from Red China--sitting still unused at Phucyen airbase near Hanoi, might be called into action. One 18-missile Hawk battery flew out of Okinawa, was in position at Danang little more than 24 hours after being alerted.
To give the U.S. more flexibility in Viet Nam, Johnson ordered all 1,819 dependents of Government and military personnel out of the country--a move long opposed by Taylor and Westmoreland. "We have no choice now," explained the President, "but to clear the decks and make absolutely clear our continued determination to back South Viet Nam in its fight to maintain its independence."
Most of the dependents were reluctant to leave. "I don't like it. I like to be with my husband," said Mrs. Maxwell Taylor. But she, as well as Westmoreland's wife and three children, was ticketed for departure along with the rest. "We don't want to go," said Westmoreland's 16-year-old daughter Katherine as she bade friends farewell at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut Airport. When a teen-aged acquaintance taunted Katherine that the move was her father's fault, she bristled: "It is not. It's the fault of Lynda Bird's father, not mine."
At Hue and Saigon, mothers burdened with hastily wrapped packages and damp-eyed children boarded commercial airliners barely 36 hours after learning they were to be separated from their husbands, many for at least a year. The evacuation was scheduled to be completed early this week. Remaining behind: 440 dependents of private U.S. citizens.
"Strike Hard." Even as the decks were being cleared, Radio Hanoi blared an order to the Viet Cong to "strike hard, very hard, at the enemy on all battlefields." The Viet Cong lost no time in obeying. Guerrillas struck at two points near Danang, overran the town of Ducphong, beating to death four U.S. advisers, then killed another American and wounded a dozen in a battle outside Saigon. And at midweek, reports began reaching the capital that the Viet Cong had dealt the South Viet Nam army one of its worst defeats of the war in a battle near Phumy, a coastal city 70 miles east of Pleiku.
Two South Vietnamese companies bivouacked in the mountains north of Phumy were overrun in a nighttime Viet Cong raid. In reply to their radio calls for help, a full South Vietnamese infantry battalion, reinforced by an armored troop, was dispatched north on guerrilla-infested Highway I, a 700-mile coastal route that runs from Saigon to the 17th parallel. At a narrow defile, three infantry companies fanned out to scout the jungle-cloaked hills towering above the road. They made no contact, but as the rest of the force entered the defile, a Viet Cong battalion swarmed out of camouflaged foxholes, poured machine-gun and recoilless-rifle fire down on the trapped troops below. When the three scouting companies doubled back to help, a second Viet Cong battalion overran them from behind. Most of the armored troop and four U.S. advisers escaped, but the infantrymen were butchered. Five South Vietnamese companies were decimated, with at least 300 killed, 300 wounded.
Beneath the Rubble. In Saigon, officials were still pondering those losses when the Viet Cong struck again--this time at a U.S. enlisted men's hotel at Quinhon, a port city of 50,000. As Army SP5 Robert Marshall recalled it, he was lying on his bed in the newly built, four-story Viet Cuong ("Strength of Viet Nam") Hotel, occupied by 62 Americans, when he heard gunfire. Marshall dashed to a balcony, squeezed off 50 shots at black-clad guerrillas shooting up at him from the street. He killed two, ran back to his room for more ammo.
In the confusion, Viet Cong demolition teams placed friction charges on the front and rear walls of the building and a 100-lb. TNT charge in the lobby. The building folded like an accordion. Nothing remained but a one-story heap of rubble. "My first impulse was to grab my steel folding bed and pull it over me," said Marshall. "This must have saved my life. I was on the third floor and the hotel simply disintegrated beneath me." Nearly three hours later, he crawled and gouged his way to safety.
Others were less fortunate. A Korean doctor crawled through a hole to a soldier whose leg was pinned and crushed under a heavy beam. He administered morphine, tried to amputate the leg with a surgical saw. "That boy is young," the doctor said. "His bones are strong. It is difficult to cut through." A surgical aide crept in, broke through the bone and severed the agonized soldier's leg to free him. Another soldier stripped off his clothes, smeared himself with soap to wriggle through a narrow aperture after 35 hours in the ruins.
For days, U.S. marines, soldiers and Seabees, New Zealand engineers and Vietnamese troops dug with cranes, shovels and picks. But at least 20 G.I.s had been in the small ground-floor bar when the hotel buckled, and all were feared dead. The toll: 21 Americans dead or missing, 22 wounded.
Soon after the hotel was destroyed, 50 junks carrying up to ten Viet Cong guerrillas apiece inched toward Quinhon's docks. The junks were 200 yards from shore when armed U.S. helicopters swooped down and forced them to disappear into a mangrove swamp.
The U.S. reply to the Quinhon attack was the biggest air attack of the war. Within 18 hours, more than 100 Navy planes screamed off the decks of attack carriers, ducked under a cloud canopy that limited their ceiling to as little as 700 ft., and blasted a supply and staging base at Chanhhoa with everything from fragmentation bombs to 750-pounders. Two hours later, 28 Vietnamese Skyraiders and 28 U.S. jets from Danang hit a regimental-sized barracks at Chaple, just north of the partition line. Three U.S. planes were lost. Two of the pilots were quickly rescued, but the North Vietnamese captured the third, Lieut. Commander Robert H. Shumaker, 31, when he parachuted from his disabled plane.
Obviously, an important question raised during the week of thrust and counterthrust was that of security against future Viet Cong attacks. But it is doubtful whether anything approaching real security can be achieved in a guerrilla war. "I don't believe it will ever be possible to protect our forces against sneak attacks of that kind," said Defense Secretary McNamara after Pleiku. Quinhon occurred despite stringently tightened security, including U.S. sentries patrolling the hotel's roof.
There are Americans at some 200 installations throughout Viet Nam, and according to one Pentagon estimate, it would take 50 military police battalions--roughly 200,000 men--to guard those installations adequately. By another reckoning, a big airfield like Danang would require a 17 1/2-mile perimeter to keep it out of the range of 81-mm. mortars; a full U.S. division would be required for the job. Lacking such manpower, U.S. troops are improvising. At Quinhon's airstrip, officers and enlisted men alike have begun hiring rugged Mung tribesmen for $5 a month--paid out of their own pockets--for sentry duty. Such an arrangement is hardly S.O.P. for the Army, but in South Viet Nam, as one Defense Department official puts it, "there is no book--nothing fits."
The 25th Hour. General Westmoreland, a brilliant "book" soldier, has been learning that lesson since he reached Saigon in August. A lean, greying six-footer, "Westy" was first captain of cadets at West Point (1936), saw World War II combat in Tunisia, Sicily, at Utah Beach on Dday. During the Korean War, he led the tough 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team. A bird colonel at 30, he became the youngest major general in the Army in 1956. Max Taylor, the Army's Chief of Staff, pinned his second star on him. As superintendent of West Point, Westmoreland helped put a modernized curriculum into effect, oversaw a major expansion program.
While Westmoreland was commanding the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., in 1958, he led a routine paratroop drop that turned to tragedy when the winds shifted. Five men were dragged to their death, one when the wind caught his grounded chute and swept him over a cliff. Westmoreland pitched in to help the wounded, from that day on refused to give the go-ahead for a drop until he had jumped first and had time to gauge the wind.
Westmoreland leads by asking much of his men--and by asking even more of himself. "He's been trying to wring the 25th hour of the day out of my hide since he arrived," says one staff officer, "and I'm afraid that some day he's going to make it." He tells his men in Viet Nam: "You're only going to be here for one year, so work like the very devil. A seven-day, 60-hour week is the very minimum for this course."
In the Paddies. Charting a rough course for himself, Westmoreland rises at 6:30, breakfasts in his bathrobe, and does not put on his uniform until just before leaving for the office--so as to keep the creases sharper. He usually works a twelve-hour day, lunching at his desk. But he also tries to get out into the field at least for one or two days a week. "He's already been in every paddyfield in Viet Nam," said an aide.
Westmoreland has worked closely with Taylor to integrate U.S. military and civilian operations that had previously seemed at cross purposes. But for a 28-year Army man, the cloudy lines of command can be frustrating. Westmoreland has 15,000 soldiers, 6,000 airmen, 1,150 land-based sailors and 1,400 Marines under his command. Yet his chief job is not to command but to train and advise South Viet Nam's army. "He's used to telling men what to do and seeing them do it," says Executive Editor Charles Moss of the Nashville Banner, an old friend. "Working through a foreign government can be difficult."
How Long? Still, Westmoreland remains an optimist. "I think the job can be done," he says. "In no manner do I underestimate the magnitude of the problem, but I am realistically hopeful that we can move out in a successful way." How long will it take? Warns Westmoreland: "It could be a long, drawn-out campaign. In Malaya it took twelve years."
Sometimes even twelve months seems an impossibly long time for the Americans involved in the dirty jungle war. For the 10,000 or so who lived in Saigon before the dependents moved out, the life was often a beguiling blend of two worlds: there were Stateside movies, women's auxiliaries and PX privileges. There were also roomy villas with two or three servants, broad, tree-lined boulevards, and a delightfully Gallic tang to the city.
But the life had a darker side. At the American Community School, pupils were told not to put their hands in their desks without checking first for booby traps, and those roomy villas were often ringed with barbed wire to ward off terrorists. A year ago, five Americans died, 100 were wounded in a week when the Viet Cong bombed a ballpark and a movie house.
For those further afield, the comforts are fewer, the dangers greater. Amoebic dysentery is endemic. Few amusements are available. Four U.S. soldiers went on a fishing trip near Quinhon last month, were later discovered murdered; three had been weighted with rocks and dumped in watery graves.
The loneliest life of all is that of the isolated adviser to small Vietnamese units. In a letter that his wife received in Junction City, Kans., last week, Captain Carlton J. Holland described the life. "I had some Saigon brass out here on the 3rd of February," he wrote. "I get a kick out of some of their forms and questions: Do I keep a mess fund, who does the laundry, how is the filing system, any complaint on the movies, can we send you a hi-fi set? I just laugh at them; my bath, laundry and drinking water are in that creek; filing systems in my pockets; no large mess bill on dried fish and rice; the movies and hi-fi--I'm lucky to get power for a flashlight . . . The rats are very bad tonight, and I keep coughing up this stuff in my lungs. These damned rats. I have to keep my feet up; they are running across them."
The day Mrs. Holland received the letter, she was notified that her husband was dead--one of the four Americans slain at Ducphong.
Bogged Down. The reason Captain Holland was in Viet Nam at all is often forgotten. Basically, the policy goes back to June 1950 and Harry Truman's decision to halt Communist "armed invasion and war" in Korea. In Viet Nam, the goal remains the same as it was when Dwight Eisenhower enunciated it in 1954, just after the Geneva Conference that partitioned Viet Nam. In a letter to then Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, Ike pledged U.S. aid to maintain "a strong, viable state, capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means."
In recent months, with stepped-up Viet Cong attacks and chronically unstable governments in Saigon, that objective seemed to be slipping beyond reach. To save the situation, President Johnson was advised by the Joint Chiefs to strike guerrilla sanctuaries in the North. He hesitated, in no small part because of a bit of a cautionary word on fighting in Asia that he once received from a surprising source. As the President tells it, when he visited the late General Douglas MacArthur at Walter Reed Hospital for the last time, the two got to talking about the Far East. Said MacArthur: "Son, don't ever get yourself bogged down in a land war in Asia."
Guerrilla Turnpike. Now that the President has taken a strong course, there is great concern and debate about what comes next. Johnson has been criticized for not enunciating a point-by-point policy in light of last week's events. But his stance is at least partly to avoid forewarning the Viet Cong, who have enough sources of information in South Viet Nam as it is. Army officers claim that the guerrillas generally have top-secret plans for major operations within eight hours after adoption. The U.S. has repeatedly made known its general policy. "We have a very simple and a very limited long-range objective: to put South Viet Nam on its feet and to get North Viet Nam to keep its hands off," says a top U.S. official in Saigon. "As long as the enemy continues to obstruct that objective, he's going to be hit and hit again."
Where? A number of future North Vietnamese targets stand out: Highway 12 to Laos, a newly built guerrilla turnpike; the military-industrial complex of Vinh, where the Hanoi railway ends; a big rail bridge at Tanhhoa, spanning a deep ravine; the Hanoi-Haiphong highway; petroleum storage tanks in Haiphong; the rail line entering North Viet Nam from China at Dongdang. As a heavily populated civilian center of 644,000, Hanoi is unlikely to be hit before the others, although the North Vietnamese do not seem sure of that: one eyewitness saw residents digging trenches in parks and gardens there last week.
Who Shall Pay? There are obvious dangers in the new U.S. firmness. But the perils of pulling back or showing a lack of resolution are greater, the chief one being that Red China's expansionist government would see U.S. weakness as an invitation to crawl over South east Asia.
Inevitably, there has been pressure from such sources as Paris, India and the United Nations for negotiations. Citing "dangerous possibilities of escalation," U.N. Secretary-General U Thant urged "shifting the quest for a solution away from the field of battle to the conference table." Replied the State Department: "We see no purpose to be served until there is evidence that the Communists are willing to abide by their previous commitments to leave their neighbors alone."
At week's end the Viet Cong demonstrated just how unwilling they were to do so. In a broadcast aired by their clandestine radio, the guerrillas warned U.S. servicemen that they would soon "pay more blood debts." The U.S., in its new mood of resolve, might see to it that the Communists of North Viet Nam are made to pay enough that they cannot afford to continue their aggression and subversion.
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