Returning to the scene 24 years later, I could see the explosions, hear the fallen men cry, “Medic! Medic! Medic!” I could smell the cordite from rockets, bombs and artillery shells thundering down upon the Viet Cong fortifications. Once again I watched enemy fire cut Lt. William Torpie down as he tried to rally his trapped company. I heard the ammunition chopper crash with its crew chief trapped inside the metal inferno, and heard his screams until death ended his agony. I watched medics Dan Evans and Rick Hudson drag troopers across that bullet-swept field, inch by bloody inch. I saw a company commander go literally mad; his babbling tied up the radio until he was relieved. I threw everything I had at the enemy-airstrikes, artillery napalm, white phosphorus. Nothing silenced the guns. By nightfall, the gallant but shattered B Company had 5 dead and 18 wounded out of 60 men.
The battle of My Hiep was only one of the thousands of such contacts in 1969, only one of the tens of thousands that had occurred since 1955 in the tragedy called the Vietnam War. It was not significant enough to call to the attention of Gen. Creighton Abrams, then the commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam. My troopers were not fighting to take critical ground. They were just rolling the dice, looking for “Cong”–as were more than 100 other U.S. grunt battalions that beat the bush in the flawed strategy called “Search and Destroy.” By then, few grunts believed the war was winnable. Their main concern was staying out of the body bags.
Today, the shell-scorched earth where Joe Holleman and Dennis Richards died is rich with rice, and the bunker line where Roger Keppel was shot in the chest is now a peaceful banana grove. The mines, booby traps and fighting positions are gone. The men of the Viet Cong have hung up their AKs, and built a new hamlet over that field where more than 100 soldiers fell.
RECENTLY, I BECAME THE first American to visit My Hiep (it was called Long Hiep under the Saigon regime) since the war. I had gone to Vietnam to bury the past. The Vietnam War scarred every soldier who served there, and I was no exception. But I never hated the Vietnamese, and I saw no point in continuing America’s policy of official hostility to Vietnam, symbolized by our ongoing trade embargo. So I arrived in My Hiep hoping for a kind of reconciliation.
I found it. The village chief, Vo Van Dut, welcomed me with open arms. He thought it was a good omen that the first American to visit was the “former enemy commander.” Dut assembled a dozen of the soldiers and commanders who had fought against my battalion, and together we visited the rice field and relived the battle.
The forces opposing the 4/39 that day were the Viet Cong’s 261A Main Force Battalion under Col. Le Lam, and the 502d Main Force Battalion commanded by Col. Dang Viet Mai. The three of us swapped war stories as we traveled down the wide canal to the scene of the battle. It was eerie riding down canals in a sampan with men I had once hunted and who had hunted me. These waterways were once scenes of ambush; I half expected to hear the pop of Claymores and the chatter of M-16s.
These tough fighters were all retired and in their late 60s now, but still fighting trim. There seemed to be no bitterness or rancor. Back then, we were soldiers following the orders of politicians. Now we were just old soldiers out for what seemed like a Sunday picnic, drinking coconut juice and eating papaya. Throughout the day we discussed tactics and operations like young lieutenants at infantry school. When I gave village chief Dut a copy of the unit journal for March 25, he said, “But this is a secret paper” (it was marked CLASSIFIED, but contained only the driest recitation of the battle). I replied, “Hey, the war is over, remember?” He smiled. “Yes, we now friends, good friends.”
We talked about the difference between our two sides. I told Dut that the terrain and conditions in the delta–as in most of Vietnam–had favored his side and that the Americans there were like fish out of water. “Yes, your army acted like the British fish during your own war for independence,” he said with a laugh. ‘America lost here because its commanders didn’t understand the people’s cause, the terrain or the nature of the war." He was right. The U.S. military fought an unconventional enemy with conventional tactics. We pummeled our opponent with three times the bomb tonnage and more artillery shells than we used against both Japan and Germany in all of World War II. One general after another believed firepower would prevail, that the strategy of attrition would grind the opponent down. Instead the insurgents played the tune. and the U.S. forces danced.
“We were a superpower,” I said. “How could you stand up against a force that filled the sky with aircraft and could fire more artillery rounds in one engagement than your side used in one year?” Mai responded: “At first your helicopters and aircraft [were] hard to fight. They go fast. [So] much rocket. bomb and artillery fire scared our fighters. But we learned. We set ambushes. We knew you [would] run out of aircraft and bombs before we ran out of spirit.”
“Yes, we were weaker materially,” Lam chimed in. “But our spirit and will were stronger than yours. Our war was just; yours was not. Your brave soldiers knew this, as did the American people.”
With such spirit and determination. this light-infantry force whipped three great military powers over 30 years of war. First Japan, then France and finally the United States. “To the Vietnamese people, nothing is more precious than our freedom and independence,” Lam said. “It was worth dying for.” The Pentagon leaders didn’t understand this until too late. They were convinced the conflict was purely military, that technological superiority could break the will of men like Lam and Mai. Nor did Washington see how corrupt and spiritless our South Vietnamese allies were. The irony was that those of us at the bottom in the trenches understood the human factor: we hated the ARVN (Army of Vietnam). We had watched them shuffle and sniffle through too many operations while “searching and avoiding” the VC. Our opponent we held in the highest esteem.
By now we were in the heart of Cai Be district, in the center of the Mekong Delta, where half of Vietnam’s food supply is grown and 16 million people now work fertile land crisscrossed with irrigation canals. The Cai Be area was the birthplace of the revolution, a Viet Cong stronghold since 1955. I spent more than two years here as a U.S. commander or as an adviser to the South Vietnamese Army. I had a firebase here, named Danger to remind my warriors we were at dead center of a hornet’s nest. A booming gas station stands where Danger’s sandbagged entrance was. There are fishponds where my bunkers and barbed wire used to be.
RETIRED COL. LE NGOC DIEP, THE former commander of the 261B, a tough battalion my unit tangled with a number of times, now lives not far from the site of my command post. His house is well built. with a beautiful garden. The war cost Diep ail of his family. His last son, a Viet Cong captain. died just before the fighting stopped. Diep is neither angry nor resentful, but heartbroken: “Look at me, I’m an old man of 67. and all alone.” He showed me a picture of his handsome, fallen son. “During the war we never hated the American people,” Diep said. eves suddenly lit with fire. “But we hated the American ‘government that brought us such pain and suffering.” Three million Vietnamese–1 million soldiers and 2 million civilians–died in the war: 4.4 million were wounded, and 300,000 human beings ire missing. Diep paid his portion of this great price. Now his loss was my pain. Warriors seldom hate each other; they know they Ire pawns in a killing game.
I met Pvt. Nguyen Van An at a roadside cafe across from Danger. He had lost his leg during a fight with my battalion. He said, without bitterness, “Your soldiers [were] good shots.” After he recovered, he had slapped on a wooden leg and “proudly fought for five more years.” I showed him the scar where on March 25 one of his guys’ bullets came a millimeter away from putting me in the peg-leg set. He laughed and said, “Your doctors are better.”
The town of Cai Be and its district were savaged. but since its fighters refused to give in, it remained at the leading edge of’ the hurricane throughout the war. When the war ended, in 1975, Cai Be’s population was 75,000. It had 30.000 killed–26,000 of them civilians. My division fought here, and the military imperative was body count. The 9th Division’s commanding general was called the Delta Butcher. Civilians counted, along with soldiers.
Col. Bay Cao fought from 1945 to 1975, rising from guerrilla soldier to vice commanding officer of Military Region 8, a chunk of the delta that includes Cai Be. Cao lives in a peasant’s but on the outskirts of My The. A modest man, he is 74 with rotting teeth, but walks soldier-straight. In 1969 he escaped death by minutes; he was in a sampan less than 300 yards from our ambush position when “local people warned me by beating on the water with paddles.”
I asked him about Gen. William Westmoreland’s claim in 1967 that “We will prevail.” Bay Cao said that was a “big laugh.” He recalled Operation Attleboro of late 1966, a search-and-destroy campaign involving 22,000 U.S. troops, aimed at flushing the VC into the open to be pounded from the air. The U.S. military called it a great success. But it convinced Bay Cao his side could actually win on the battlefield. I agreed. Over and over during Attleboro, the VC lured our troops into well-laid killing zones. and consumed them at close range. Once again we had ignored a basic principle of guerrilla warfare: if the guerrilla is not losing, he is winning. I asked Bay Cao what he thought about the former U.S. Army officers who now preach. “We won all the battles in Vietnam.” He had a simple retort: “If they won all the battles, why did they always want to bring in more troops?”
Bay Cao and I lit incense to honor the Viet Cong dead at the Trung Military Cemetery near where the 9th Division base camp was. Thirteen thousand soldiers are buried there. I felt the tears well up. and I relived the wrenching experience I’d had at the black wall of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington: all these dead, all this waste, and to what end?
The war is long over, but peace and prosperity have not come to Vietnam. The bungling of the communist government in Hanoi has seen to that–with help from the United States. We have withheld reconciliation with the Vietnamese government even though in other wars we have been quick to make peace with former enemies. We turned the Japanese and Germans into allies almost before the cannons grew cold, and we offered our help to there publics of the former Soviet Union soon after the Berlin wall started to crumble. But then, it was easy for us to be good sports. We won. they lost.
WITH VIETNAM, WE SEEM INCAPABLE of burying the hatchet. Our collective ride won’t allow the lifting of the trade embargo, or diplomatic recognition. First our leaders said we couldn’t make peace because Hanoi violated the 1973 peace treaty. Our next excuse was Vietnam’s war with the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, and its subsequent occupation of that country. Vietnam withdrew its forces from Cambodia, but by that time our policymakers had raised the threshold still further with the emotion-laden issue of whether Hanoi was still holding prisoners of war, or knew of other U.S. soldiers missing in action.
Of all these issues. the POW/MIA one packs the most political wallop. But it’s a bogus issue. Members of our recovery teams have chased down every rumor. Most of them believe it highly unlikely that any living POWs remain in Southeast Asia. The same goes for every qualified military expert or jungle-wise American and Vietnamese veteran I have interviewed. I have no doubt that POWs were held after 1973 and that some American officials knew this. I was told this repeatedly by insiders who also said that some prisoners, such as B-52 crewmen and electronic warfare specialists, were probably transferred to the Soviet Union and China because they knew America’s nuclear capabilities.
Only the obsessed, the profiteers and some of the unfortunate and manipulated MIA families are convinced that POWs remain. It is doubtful that Americans could survive decades of Asian-style imprisonment–disease, malnutrition and insanity would have killed them long ago. Besides, said Bay Cao, ever the practical soldier. “Why should we keep POWs? We’d have to feed them.” He said that in 1970 he captured three American reporters, but released them after a month: “One alone ate the ration of 10 of my soldiers.”
This issue should not block the path of peaceful relations with Vietnam. Those who keep the war alive because of our missing warriors should visit Vietnam. They should not go there only to sit in air-conditioned conference rooms with American and Vietnamese bureaucrats to hear their respective party lines. Rather, they should visit the people in the villages and witness the punishing effect their intransigence has on the impoverished Vietnamese majority, who suffered the brunt of the war.
FOR US, TOO, VIETNAM REMAINS an open wound. After the war, U.S. military leadership, humiliated by defeat, simply buried the experience. For almost two decades. service schools avoided teaching the lessons of Vietnam and trained primarily for the pleasantly familiar “big battle war,, on the plains of Europe. To this day, there has not been a real postmortem on the tactical and strategic mistakes of that misadventure. Instead of searching for the truth, which could still save lives in the Balkans and Somalia, there has been a full-blown campaign to rewrite the history of the war. The basic idea–embodied in the 1981 book “On Strategy,” by retired Col. Harry Summers Jr.–is that America won the war tactically. We just happened to lose it strategically. But to close the books on Vietnam, we must understand that America lost on the battlefield not because of peace protests at Berkeley or failures of nerve in the Congress, but because our military leadership thought bombs could beat a people’s hunger for independence. The price for that lack of moral courage to tell the politicians that it was a bad war fought with a flawed strategy was death for thousands of young Americans.
On my return to Vietnam, I found a Zippo cigarette lighter in a tiny Saigon store. It must have belonged to some American soldier, long since dead or departed. On it is an inscription–words by which to remember this war, and finally to overcome it: “Vietnam–1968. When the power of love overcomes the love of power, Vietnam will know peace.”
