Through a scrim of red, dry-season dust,
the sign appeared like an apparition hanging low
over the no-man's land of the South Vietnamese-Lao
border: "Warning! No US personnel beyond this
point." Its big, white expanse was already
festooned with grunt graffiti, both American and
Vietnamese. It was February 1971, the afternoon
before the invasion of Laos, and the sign but the
latest bizarre development in the Pentagon's
campaign to "Vietnamize" the war in Vietnam. The
journalists who had hoofed it all the way to the
border found the sign so grimly funny that we
lined up for a group photo in front of it.
It all started in late 1969, when
president Richard Nixon announced the first
withdrawal of American soldiers from South Vietnam
and their replacement by South Vietnamese troops.
The new policy was dubbed "Vietnamization" by
secretary of defense
Melvin Laird and hailed as
the beginning of the end of America's war in that
land. But the North Vietnamese leadership in Hanoi
wasn't fooled for a minute. The communists
believed Vietnamization was only intended to
de-Americanize the war, not to end it.
Hanoi was right - more right than anybody
at the time could have imagined. In the five-plus
years of war that followed, more than 20,000
American soldiers would still die; Nixon would
actually widen the war by invasions of both
Cambodia and Laos; and brutal US bombing campaigns
would kill over a million more Indochinese. In
fact, more Indochinese and Americans would be
killed or wounded during the Vietnamization years
than in the war before 1970.
While
comparisons to Vietnam and terms from that era
like "quagmire", "hearts and minds" and "body
counts" swamped the media the moment the invasion
of Iraq began in March 2003, "Vietnamization"
didn't make it into the mix until that November.
Then, the White House, which initially
shied off anything linked to Vietnam, launched a
media campaign to roll out what it was calling
"Iraqification", perhaps as an answer to critics
who doubted the "mission" had actually been
"accomplished" and feared that there was no "light
at the end of the [Iraqi] tunnel". But the term
was quickly dropped. Perhaps it resurrected too
many baby-boomer memories of Vietnamese clinging
to the skids of choppers fleeing the fruits of
Vietnamization.
It seems, however, that
there is no way of keeping failed Washington
policies in their graves, once the dead of night
strikes. I was amazed when, in 2005, in Foreign
Affairs magazine, Melvin Laird resurrected a claim
that his "Vietnamization" policy had actually
worked and plugged for "Iraqification" of the war
there. Soon after, journalist Seymour Hersh, famed
for his reportage on the Vietnam-era My Lai
massacre (and the Iraq-era Abu Ghraib abuses),
reported in The New Yorker that the Vietnamization
policy of the Nixon era was indeed being reclothed
and returned to us - with similarly planned US
drawdowns of ground troops and a ramping up of US
air power - and I wondered if we could be
suffering a moment of mass post-traumatic stress
syndrome.
When General George William
Casey Jr - whose father, a major-general, died in
Vietnam in July 1970 - announced in June 2006 that
the Pentagon might soon begin the first US troop
withdrawals from Iraq, I couldn't help wondering
where the Iraqi version of that sign might
eventually go up. In the desert? On the Iranian or
the Syrian border? (The "withdrawals" were,
however, rescinded before even being put into
effect in the face of an all-out civil war in
Baghdad.)
However it feels to anyone else,
it has distinctly been flashback city for me ever
since. One of the great, failed, unspeakably
cynical, blood-drenched policies of the Vietnam
era, whose carnage I witnessed as a reporter in
Cambodia and Vietnam, was being dusted off for
America's latest disaster of an imperial war. Some
kind of brutal regression was upon us. It was the
return of the repressed or reverse evolution. It
was enough to drive a war-worn journalist to new
heights of despair.
While brooding about
Iraqification, I was reminded of what historian
and Vietnam-era New York Times journalist A J
Langguth said about Vietnamization. "By [1970],
well over a hundred thousand [South] Vietnamese
soldiers were dead, crops destroyed, cities in
ruins, and we're talking about Vietnamization as
though the Vietnamese weren't already bearing the
brunt of the war," he told historian Christian G
Appy for his oral history of the Vietnam War,
Patriots. "It was one of those words that
gave a reassuring ring in Washington, but it was
really insulting."
A point well taken as
Iraqification is heralded in the land.
The Sound of Vietnamization One
night back in 1971 on the Laotian border, not far
from that big, white sign, I was to witness
Vietnamization in action in its starkest terms.
Two photographers, another reporter, and I were
camped out with South Vietnamese Army troops who
were to lead the next morning's invasion of Laos.
(As it happened, the Vietnam War lacked a
speechwriterly slogan like President George W
Bush's, "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down,"
but the policy was the same.) What I heard then
was three sharp cracks, the sound - we figured
later - of cluster bombs hitting the ground no
more than 6 meters from us, mistakenly dropped by
a US Navy fighter-bomber. A hurricane clatter of
shrapnel fanned out toward us. It felt like
sharing the same foxhole with a machine-gun drawn
dead on you. As the universe exploded in flames,
our brains were blasted blank.
We thrashed
for cover in what seemed like slow motion. Minutes
later, with the plane long gone, the slopes around
us were drenched in blood and strewn with the
broken bodies, shredded or pockmarked with
shrapnel, of hundreds of young Vietnamese
soldiers. Helping drag the wounded to the medics,
I left my tape recorder running. For me, the
screams recorded on that tape have remained
forever the sound of Vietnamization.
The
US Air Force called it "precision" bombing back
then - and still does. In guerrilla war, where
fighters live among civilians, no bombing
missions, no matter how carefully targeted, can
avoid killing civilians. The Pentagon reports
that, right now, on average on any given day, 45
US and British warplanes are in the air over Iraq,
plus US Army, Marine Corps and Special Forces
helicopters. Most of the bombing is being done by
US F-15s and F-16s from bases outside Iraq and
F-14s and F/A-18s from carriers in the Persian
Gulf.
They mostly drop 500-pound
(227-kilogram) bombs, though
Hellfire-missile-armed Predator drones and other
unmanned aircraft do their share of damage, and in
Afghanistan both B-52s, those old Vietnam
warhorses, and B-1s have been called in. In
addition, as one would expect in a
"Vietnamization" program, the number of air
strikes has risen sharply in recent months.
Occasionally, American military commanders
remark that civilian casualties, sanitized with
the euphemism "collateral damage", are
regrettable, but in areas where local residents
are believed to support the guerrillas, civilian
casualties may actually be the goal rather than so
many mistakes. In Vietnam, the Pentagon created
"free-fire zones" in the countryside where any
living thing was fair game. The theory was simple,
if bloody-minded: if the guerrillas swam in the
sea of the peasants, as Chinese communist leader
Mao Zedong had so famously argued, then, as
American counter-insurgency experts were fond of
explaining, it was necessary to "drain the sea".
With last week's announcement that more US
troops were being rushed to Baghdad to put a brake
on the fast-developing civil war in the capital,
we may be seeing a new twist on the old theme of
Vietnamization - Americans may expand the use of
air power in al-Anbar province and elsewhere in
the heartland of the Sunni insurgency as a
substitute for troops shifted to Baghdad. As I saw
in Indochina, however, air operations rarely
succeed anywhere as a substitute for crack ground
troops. They can kill enormous numbers of people
without significantly tipping the military
balance.
Here's how one helicopter pilot
described the effectiveness of air ops during Lam
Son 719 (the official name for the invasion of
Laos): "Before the first insertion of ARVN [South
Vietnamese] troops on one firebase, we laid in
B-52 raids, tac air, and napalm for five hours.
Then we waited a half-hour and went in. Our first
three helicopters were shot down. There were still
a million guys out there."
Flunking
Counter-insurgency 101 In his recent book
Fiasco and accompanying articles in the
Washington Post, reporter Thomas Ricks argues that
neither the US military nor the Bush
administration learned even the most elementary
counter-insurgency lessons from Vietnam. Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Ricks reports, has
refused even to admit that his troops were
fighting a guerrilla war in Iraq, just as the
Pentagon insisted in Vietnam that the North
Vietnamese were the real enemy, discounting the
guerrillas in the South.
The use of
high-profile, aggressive tactics such as roundups,
constant patrolling, indiscriminate firepower, and
the abuse of prisoners has alienated civilians in
Iraq just as such tactics did in South Vietnam.
When American soldiers in Iraq complain - just as
they did in Vietnam - that the enemy "melts" away
or that they're "hiding" among civilians, it's
because, on some very basic level, they and their
commanders just don't get how a guerrilla war
actually works.
One American general I
interviewed in Vietnam was incredulous when I told
him that I attended a Vietnamese wedding in the
largest, most "secure" provincial capital in the
Mekong Delta, only to discover that about half the
guests were National Liberation Front (NLF)
officials - that is, Southern guerrillas.
He was no less shocked to hear about a day
I spent in 1971 in a "secure" Delta village
watching most of the residents line up placidly to
vote for the only candidate on the ballot,
US-backed president Nguyen Van Thieu. The next
morning, back in Saigon, the South Vietnamese
capital, I found an NLF flag in my hotel mailbox
wrapped in a message from those same villagers.
The point they were making was a simple one about
the hidden complexities of that war. The NLF, they
explained, had decided to urge the villagers to
vote for Thieu so that the area would continue to
look "secure" and village support for the NLF
would remain under the radar.
Recently,
the Pentagon claimed that it was changing course
in its counter-insurgency tactics in Iraq, each
zig and zag like this one seemingly intent on
replicating the worst of that long-gone era. In an
eerie echo of Vietnamization, the old, failed
military policy of "clear and hold" - the idea of
clearing designated limited areas of guerrillas
and supportive civilians, securing those areas,
and then, in "ink blot" fashion, spreading out
from there - is being resuscitated.
It is
meant to replace the modern equivalent of General
William Westmoreland's discredited big-unit
"search and destroy" operations. In Iraq, however,
in a deft, cynical public relations twist, the
phrase has been recoined as "clear, hold, and
rebuild". (No matter that Iraqi "reconstruction",
long ago bankrupted by corruption, cronyism, and
pure administration incompetence, has already
wound down without a "mission accomplished" banner
in sight.)
Standing up or standing
down? Well, forget "rebuild". Key to
whatever new strategy does exist is the Bush
administration's stumbling, fumbling, already
bloody Iraqification policy aimed at "standing up"
a national army. The US media dutifully pass on
the administration's impressive stats on new
troops and police trained. Critics insist those
troops are ill-equipped and badly trained.
I remember identical glowing reports on
US-trained troops in South Vietnam in the early
1970s. Unfortunately, deeper questions about the
effectiveness of proxy armies are almost never
explored. How do you really get them to do your
bidding? How do you even make them believe that
what they are doing is for them and not for you?
In South Vietnam, there was a draft for
the army and, by 1970, when Nixon was praising US
efforts to create an effective indigenous force
(as is George Bush today), the desertion rate was
50%. In Iraq, there's no military draft, but there
is an economic one in which the desperate and
jobless sign up because they can find no other way
to get a half-decent paycheck or support their
families.
Many of them, like the South
Vietnamese grunts I spent time with, are loyal to
the idea of survival, not to a corrupt, divided,
and ineffective government. Any number of these
Iraqi young men are, in fact, already pledging
allegiance to powerful Shi'ite militias, even
while serving in the government's police or army.
Now the US finds itself fighting those
same militias as well as the insurgents. US troops
have battled the Mehdi Army on more than one
occasion, have demanded the disbanding of Shi'ite
militias and death squads to no avail, and are now
being drawn into a Sunni/Shi'ite civil war, which
is now killing an estimated 100 Iraqi civilians a
day.
As George Orwell wrote in his famed
essay "Shooting an Elephant", about his days as a
British colonial policeman in the Burma of the
1920s, pesky locals always seem to manage to muck
up the best-laid plans of foreign occupiers, no
matter how good those plans may look on paper or
sound on the lips of high officials.
Two
weeks into Lam Son 719, we international
journalists mounted our daily assault on US and
South Vietnamese military flacks at the Saigon
press briefing known then as the "five o'clock
follies".
"Why haven't the so-called crack
South Vietnamese troops from the 1st Division
advanced even a meter in Laos in the last week?"
my notes quote one exasperated reporter as asking.
"Why did General [Creighton] Abrams [commander of
US forces in South Vietnam] fly north yesterday?"
shouted another. "General Lam [South Vietnamese
commander of I Corps] will advance his troops when
he desires to," the South Vietnamese military
briefer answered stiffly. "General Abrams is
reviewing the situation," his US counterpart added
wearily.
It took only a few days for
Vietnamese reporters to nail down the painfully
obvious story. Lam Son 719 was a US construct - we
all knew that from the get-go. It was to be a
major test of Vietnamization, wherein South
Vietnamese troops were, in today's parlance, to
"stand up" decisively. But president Nguyen Van
Thieu didn't like it much, his generals even less.
When the invasion almost immediately turned into a
rout, Thieu feared his generals might try to
overthrow him.
Lieutenant-General Hoang
Xuan Lam commanded the only South Vietnamese
troops tough enough to rescue the operation, but
he was also the only general Thieu could depend on
to block a coup in Saigon. He didn't want Lam's
troops bogged down in Laos; he wanted them poised
to rescue the "palace".
US planning, the
shock-and-awe air ops of that moment, and pressure
from the Pentagon simply couldn't prevail in the
face of local politics on either side of the armed
struggle. Former ambassador to South Vietnam Henry
Cabot Lodge, ever frustrated by how little "our"
South Vietnamese followed his orders, once
complained that when he told prime minister Nguyen
Cao Ky something and Ky nodded yes, all it meant
was that he understood what the ambassador had
just said, not that he would lift a finger to do
it.
Those pesky proxies Prime
Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki hasn't exactly been
rolling over for the White House recently either.
He has demanded that American soldiers be subject
to Iraqi courts, that Israeli attacks in Lebanon
be stopped and that the Bush administration send
even more aid. In fact, so many of the Bush
administration's manipulations in Iraq, including
the financing of favorite candidates in elections
and strong-arm pressure on the Iraqis to form a
government more or less to America's liking, have,
for an old Vietnam hand, a painfully Yogi
Berra-ish "deja vu all over again" feel to them.
The Bush administration finds itself
trapped in a contradiction even the United Nations
has experienced: that democracy introduced by
occupying forces is almost certain to prove
undemocratic. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker was fond
of telling reporters that the United States was
"neutral" in South Vietnamese elections. But the
US Embassy worked tirelessly to manipulate
Vietnamese politics: trying to hand-pick electoral
candidates, approving the disqualification of
"neutralist" ones, sanctioning a presidential race
with only one candidate ("One man, one vote, and
the man is Thieu," I headlined that one), okaying
the jailing of Thieu's most serious opponents
because they advocated negotiating with the
communists, and making sure the South Vietnamese
police were fully equipped to "neutralize" any
other opponents - especially from the South
Vietnamese anti-war student movement. Eventually,
with Vietnamization in ruins, the Nixon
administration would pressure Thieu - with
absolutely no success - to accept a "coalition
government" so the United States could finally
exit Vietnam with all due speed.
By 1970,
a majority of Americans thought the Vietnam War
was a mistake; almost exactly the same percentage
now feels the same about Iraq. Back then, the
White House clung for dear life to Vietnamization
while Congress dithered. Now, the same holds true.
Even the language - "cut and run", "stay the
course" - remains largely the same, as the
repetitive bankruptcy of the enterprise deadens
even our linguistic life.
As then, so now,
the complications on the ground in Iraq seem
insurmountable from the point of view of an
administration and a Congress intent on
maintaining what in the Vietnam era was called
"credibility" and now has no name at all. George
Orwell would have grasped what US politicians are
going through: "My whole life, every white man's
life in the East, was one long struggle not to be
laughed at," is how he summed up his Burmese days.
Every now and then, as yet another grim
Vietnam deja vu rockets by me, I think back to
senator George Aiken, the flinty moderate
Republican from Vermont (the John Murtha of that
time), who, tiring in 1966 of endless
hand-wringing from his colleagues about how to get
out of Vietnam, told the assembled solons one day
that it wasn't hard. All we had to do was declare
victory, Aiken said, and fly the troops home. That
would have been real "Vietnamization".
Judith Coburn covered the war in
Indochina from 1970-73 for the Far Eastern
Economic Review, the Village Voice and Pacifica
Radio. She is working on a memoir about Vietnam
and the 1960s. (Copyright 2006 Judith
Coburn.)
