Warning: War, death, violence

I just finished reading Mark Bowden’s Huế, 1968. Since it’s history, I won’t warn you of any spoilers.

Bowden’s story-telling about battles is in the vein of the many new books of military history, such as Stephen Ambrose and Rick Atkinson – they blend personal stories and vignettes of incidents with higher-level analysis. I find this sort of military history to be engaging and interesting, though ultimately when it’s all said and done I’m left grasping for higher-level “take away” ideas from the whole bloody mess. In that sense, I think I’m like everybody else except for the fan of violence who’s interested in an adrenalized frisson from reading about people’s bodies being blown apart. It’s probably telling that Bowden’s previous venture into military history, Black Hawk Down, got made into a pretty elegant piece of combat pornography: lots of shooting and explosions and visceral special effects if you like that sort of thing.

Maybe it’s my age, or my broadened perspective, but I’m interested in why these stupid things happen, and less interested in the excruciating details of how individual humans met with, and coped with, terrible events. I suppose that war histories like this show that it’s a human interest story on both sides; one of the things I like about what Bowden did in this book is he includes interview stories with some of the Vietnamese who were fighting on the other side. He’s fair about it: the Vietnamese are just as confused and scared, hopeful and disappointed, as the Americans. It’s sad that that’s not immediately obvious to most people, and that we need to look closely into the swirling toilet-bowl of battle in order to see what’s good in both sides.

Bowden’s high-level analysis is interesting and, perhaps, important. He reinforces what Halberstam, Sheehan, and others have already said about Westmoreland’s willful ignorance about the state of the war. It’s important to note (as Bowden doesn’t, really) that Westmoreland was running the war from the wrong end of a telephone-line: he created a situation where the field was “spinning” the reports he got, and the “spun” them further – resulting in a completely distorted view of what was happening. [bowden]

Four US Marine companies had now been fed into Hue. They were getting creamed. It was clear enough to them that the city was in enemy hands and taking it back was going to be hell.

Denial persisted higher up, however, even with the alarming casualties – about one hundred in three days. When one memeber of the Task Force X-Ray command staff at Phu Bai suggested to Jim Coolican on the phone that there might be a “few platoons” of enemy in the city, the marine captain rebuked him, “hell, we’ve got a platoon of NVA dead on the wire!”

General Robert Cushman, the I Corps commander at Da Nang, forbade American bombing and shelling in the city out of concern for its historic treasures – there was no similar expression of concern for its tens of thousands of trapped residents. He said the use of such heavy firepower should be left to ARVN commanders. This might have been less a reflection of delicacy than further proof that the high command still had not accepted the fact that Hue was in enemy hands; the ban would be lifted promptly as this sank in. General Truong’s lack of progress in the Citadel was chalked up to ARVN deficiencies, which in the American command’s view were only to be expected, but the marines’ inability to advance was judged more harshly. It was seen as a failure of leadership. The forces there were at best a patchwork, units assembled on the fly and poorly coordinated by the compound’s ranking marine, Lieutenant General Gravel. His persistent protests against attack orders looked like a classic case of the jitters. The fact that he had been proved right repeatedly didn’t seem to matter. Being defeated and dead would have made his point more forcefully, and might have restored Gravel’s reputation.

In Saigon and Washington the strategy was to insist that the Tet Offensive had been a complete bust. It had not been a surprise. Westy had forseen it, and it had been a shattering disaster for Hanoi. The Joint Chiefs’ chairman, General Wheeler, characterized it as “desperation tactics.” He said no major city had been taken. He fell back on Westy’s all-purpose yardstick: body counts.

The denial went all the way to the top:

The defiant Communist flag before the Citadel was portrayed as little more than a publicity stunt.

McNamara, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, argued that Westy’s Checkers maneuver had fully anticipated and countered Hanoi’s objectives, which he speculated had been twofold:
“He [the enemy] may be trying to inflict on the South Vietnamese, the U.S., and allied forces a severe military defeat. I believe we are well prepared for that. Or, alternatively, in the event that such an objective eludes him, he may be seeking to achieve a substantial psychological or propaganda victory.”

Sunday morning on NBC’s Meet The Press, Secretary of Defense McNamara said, “It’s quite clear that the military objective of the attack has not been achieved. It was to divert US troops and South Vietnamese troops from the probable offensive action of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese around Khe Sanh. And secondarily it was to penetrate and hold one or more district or provincial capitals. In that sense the military objective has not been achieved. Nor have they fully achieved their psychological objective, although I think there have been pluses and minuses psychologically.”

In Hue the marines were not weighing psychological “pluses and minuses.” The body bags were piling up.

Bowden’s narrative is not dispassionate; as you can tell by that last sentence’s timing – it’s a rebuttal to McNamara. An important one. Unfortunately for the Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, and Americans, it’s a rebuttal that people like John Paul Vann were also making at the time – it was just being ignored. I don’t think there’s any new or particularly brilliant analysis in Bowden that goes beyond Halberstam, Fall, and Sheehan but it’s important to hammer this point home: the US war in Vietnam was incompetently run. The people who say “we could have won if only the people back state-side had supported us!” are wrong and were wrong: the people state-side who lost the war were people like Robert McNamara and General Westmoreland – who gave the military everything it wanted and they wasted it.

For me, the hardest part of the book was near the beginning. Bowden does a job of describing how Hue was suborned and taken over, by infiltrators that were well-armed, organized, and competent. When the marines began to react, it was horribly inept: at one point a small force of marines advanced to attempt to re-connect with forces in the city, and they walked right into a prepared ambush and were cut to bits. Then, as the wounded, broken force went reeling back to recoup, the commander’s only brilliant idea was to send the same sized force in, the exact same way. There are many descriptions of what amount to fundamental failures to use basic military common-sense, let alone good tactics. As Bowden tells it, the main turning-point around which the battle of Hue revolves is Big Ernie Cheatham, who was apparently the only marine in the area with any tactical sense at all, who – before beginning the attack on Hue – actually sat down and read a bunch of books in the marines’ library about how to do house-to-house fighting WWII-style. Cheatham comes across as the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. Inevitably, the fighting becomes a house-to-house slog full of atrocities a’plenty; remember, this is all taking place in a city with thousands of civilians trapped in the middle of a grinding battle of eradication. Bowden doesn’t hide the damage the city and its populace suffered; it’s pretty gruesome, but I suspect it’s only a shadow of the actual gruesomeness that happened. There are many descriptions of soldiers who simply shot everyone that wasn’t obviously American. There were horrific reprisals on both sides: when the Vietcong took over, scores were settled against Vietnamese who had supported and assisted the Americans, and then scores were settled by the Americans against Vietnamese who had supported and assisted the Vietcong. The famous picture of the police chief putting the gun to the captured VC’s head, and shooting him – that was part of the aftermath of Hue during Tet. The house-to-house tactics Big Ernie Cheatham learned from those books: “flatten everything, then fight through the rubble.” When the Americans were done with Hue it looked like Stalingrad, Atlanta, or Berlin: walls and bricks and corpses.

There’s an undercurrent in the book that Bowden doesn’t quite talk about, but which wafts strongly from the pages: the Americans didn’t take the Vietnamese seriously because they were a bunch of dumb racists who, basically, only took white people seriously. That’s the simplest way I can put it. It’s one explanation for some of the tactical debacles the marines keep getting in, over and over again. At one point they are lured right into a fairly simple trap- they were fired upon from a few foxholes, charged across a field into heavy fire, went to ground with some casualties, regrouped – and a few brave marines made it to the foxholes and discovered they had been stopped by a whopping three Vietcong. As soon as they were spread out and disorganized, they were taken in defilading fire from well-prepared positions along their flank, shot up badly, and the Vietcong retired in good order, having turned a 400-man unit into a shambles: 9 dead and 48 wounded. In normal military terms taking 12% casualties in 15 minutes is a disaster; units become rapidly ineffective once you go beyond 5% casualties. Those marines’ company commanders put an entire company out of action because they didn’t respect their enemy enough to wonder “is this a trap?” and put some flankers out, or wait for a sharpshooter team to scope out the foxholes before they attacked them.

In the title of this review, I stole a piece from The Charge of The Light Brigade, which was another military disaster in which reasonably good troops were led to slaughter by incompetents. The feeling I got reading the early parts of the book were reminiscent of accounts I’ve read of Balaclava: solid troops, terrible tactics, questionable overall mission, lots of people die. There’s no glory there at all. What never fails to piss me off is that, almost invariably, the idiots who cause these debacles die in comfortable beds with fresh linen, hundreds or thousands of miles from the disasters they caused.

I remember when I asked Sazz [sazz] about Tet and he said that it was the end of everything. It was when the troops realized that Washington had no idea what it was doing, and Westmoreland was in la-la land. A bit about that: at the time Westmoreland had this idea that he was going to do a magnificent reverse Dien Bien Phu and lure a massive NVA/VC force to come do battle at Khe Sanh, where superior US forces and tactics were going to slaughter them. I’m not sure if I should call that a “reverse Dien Bien Phu” because that was actually the plan for Dien Bien Phu, as well, only it didn’t work. And neither did Khe Sanh – it just didn’t fail as badly as Dien Bien Phu did, for the French. While the US began noisily building a base and fortifying at Khe Sanh, the Vietcong began planning an attack against the US’ rear lines – the Tet Offensive. It’s not appropriate to say “it’s obvious” about a war, except in retrospect, but Westmoreland’s bizzare fixation on re-fighting Dien Bien Phu (only better than the French!) resulted in his being simply unable to believe that his opponents were at least as smart as he was. Of course, they actually were quite a bit smarter: they put Khe Sanh in the crosshairs of some mean artillery, and caused substantial damage – which looked like the opening moves of another Dien Bien Phu – so Westmoreland actually saw the casualties he was suffering at Khe Sanh as evidence that his strategy was working. Westmoreland deserves a place in the history of great military incompetents – not because of the body count his side suffered – but because he was so out of touch that he was fighting a war in his head, that was not happening anywhere else. Westmoreland was constantly looking at everything that he saw as the final, dying gasp of a defeated foe. In other words, he wasn’t taking the Vietcong seriously either.

One of the most important outcomes of the battle was that the military lost control of the media narrative. There were reporters in the area, who started writing back articles about the truth of what was happening. That collided with Westmoreland and McNamara’s “we are winning!” and created the first fracture-lines of doubt. So, Walter Cronkite goes and looks around and sees it’s a mess, then comes back and – seriously – says it’s a mess. Cronkite’s report set a new bar for media talking heads confronting the rest of the establishiment about critical talking-points, but Cronkite was part of the establishment, and the language he used was also establishment talking-points:

Summary: a good read but depressing unless you are amused by other people’s suffering or incompetent leadership. This book did add more to my knowledge about the Vietnam War, but mostly it served to confirm my suspicion that it was a failure of vision and leadership at every level from the president down to the company commanders. Props to Bowden for acknowledging that the other side was real and their suffering was also intense, unlike Black Hawk Down where the Somalis are mostly pop-up targets murkily seen through shadows.

Cronkite: it really pisses me off that Americans tend to trust these authoritarian media talking heads. Why did it take Walter Cronkite going over there and coming back and saying “wow, this is a mess?” There were already any number of indicators that it was a mess. McNamara certainly knew it was a mess; he was no idiot. Westmoreland was probably an idiot, OK. But why did it take Walter Cronkite? I mean, seriously, WTF America? Are you only going to realize that Afghanistan is a mess if Anderson Cooper goes over there and reports, “wow, this is a mess!”? It does not take a strategic genius to figure this stuff out.

Bowden goes into considerable detail about John Olson’s famous picture of the American wounded being evacuated on the wings of a tank, after getting shot to bits; basically the aftermath of the first picture I included in this piece. It’s a great picture, for sure, but I was kind of skeeved out at Bowden’s detailed description of what, exactly, the marine in the foreground (the unconscious one with the bandaged chest) went through. There are a lot of spots in the book where it’s as if Bowden was maybe thinking “this would be a good bit if they decide to make a movie out of it” and this part was the worst of them. Because his interview sources were mostly Americans, there’s a fair bit of gruesome bloody chunk-spewing destruction of Americans. It serves merely to infuriate me at stupid nationalists and fools who see “send in the marines” as a substitute for foreign policy.