THE VIETNAM WAR -- BURNS AND NOVICK

EPISODE 3

Thoughts after watching episode 3 of “The Vietnam War.” This episode resonated with me since it depicts the March 1965 landing in Danang of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade to which I was assigned as a U.S. Navy Lt.(jg) in the capacity as a Naval Gunfire Liaison Officer (NGLO). My job was supposed to be to provide the liaison between the Marines ashore and Navy ships offshore in coordination with the other supporting arms: tanks, artillery, mortars, air. When the front-line infantry called for support, we liaison officers back at brigade headquarters would decide which supporting arm would engage the target and then direct our respective forward observers to call in fire missions and adjust fire as needed. As it turned out, an officer with more seniority than I filled the NGLO slot at brigade HQ, so I was sent out with my team of Marines as a forward observer dug in atop hill 327 south of the Danang airbase. An anti-aircraft Hawk missile battalion was emplaced hundred feet behind me at the top of the hill. Fortunately for me, this deployment came at the tail end of a 13-month tour, so by June I was rotated back to Camp LeJeune, NC without ever firing a shot in anger, or more importantly, ever being shot at. These were the early, uneventful days of the war, when my main preoccupation, after performing the daily comm check, was to drive my radio-jeep down to the ville to procure ice to chill the beer. Four months later, in October, a televised news report described a Viet Cong sapper attack on the Hawk missile battalion. The attackers would necessarily have had to approach right past my observation post. I never learned what happened to my replacement. 

I have one small bone to pick with Burns and Novick about the landing. They show footage of troops embarking Stateside, purported to be Marines headed for Danang in March 1965. In point of fact, those of us landing in Danang were from the 3rd Marine Division based in Okinawa.  The 9th MEB mounted out on troop ships in August ’64, the day after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and steamed around in circles off Cape St. Jacques for 6 months before President Johnson finally decided to send us in. We had very little to do while afloat, so I put the time to good use reading the entire “History of the English-Speaking Peoples” by Winston Churchill, and a good many other books besides. One of the officers I got to know aboard the troop ship was a young Marine lieutenant, Phil Caputo, who in 1977 wrote “A Rumor of War” describing his experiences in Vietnam, and who is featured prominently in the documentary. 
Excerpt from my book: The Predicament -- How did it happen? How Bad Is it? The Case for Radical Change now." On May 6, 1965, I was ordered to take a helicopter with my team to Chu Lai, 57 miles southeast of Danang. We were sent to provide naval gunfire support, if needed, for the landing to take place the next day – the largest since Inchon, we were told. The area previously swept by the South Vietnamese army (ARVN), posed little danger of a Viet Cong attack. The landing would be unopposed and naval gunfire support would not be needed. The U.S. Army advisors to the ARVN jerked the Marines’ chain, setting up a sign welcoming them: “Ahoy, Marines. Welcome aboard. Area secured courtesy Ly Tim District Army Advisors.”        The evening before the landing we hung out with the Army guys in the ARVN base camp, skinny-dipped in the South China Sea, cooked our C-rations over a bonfire and settled in for the night in the tall grass a few yards beyond the high-water mark, after setting up a sentry watch rotation. The next morning we awoke before dawn, established radio contact with the destroyers offshore, cooked a C-rations breakfast and sat back to watch the landing, sipping hot cocoa. I started chronicling the landing with my camera, doubtlessly the most complete photographic record of the landing in existence (locked away in a trunk in the attic somewhere).        It all went by the book. Dawn breaks. The amphibious ships form a line two miles offshore. The order comes: “Land the landing force.” The Marines clamber down nets to the papa boats, which then circle, waiting for the order to cross the line of departure. The loaded AmTracs slide into the water. H-hour at 8 am, the first wave of AmTracs and papa boats head for the beach with helicopters flying overhead. The helos land on the beach, disgorging . . . Wha. . . ?  Press photographers! The photographers fan out across the beach as the AmTracs clank ashore, disgorging Marines charging up the beach at high port, yelling. The yells die out as they are greeted not only by photographers but also garland-bearing flower girls and top brass. Not your father’s amphibious landing. A platoon of Marines runs up to our position, locked and loaded, breathless, eyes darting, startled to see us lounging casually, drinking hot cocoa. “Where are the gooks?” they demand to know. (I suppose by then our generation had moved on to movies about Korea.) “There aren’t any. The ARVN already swept the beach,” I reply.“We were told there were 3,000 gooks waiting for us,” the platoon leader insists. “How about some cocoa?”It was that kind of war – at least in the beginning.  An inescapable message of the documentary reminds us of how out-of-place American troops were in Vietnam, whose people, culture, language and landscape were completely alien to us as we were to the Vietnamese. Phil Caputo captured this incongruity perfectly, describing how he was struck by the beauty of the place with its “endless acres of jade-green rice paddies, and these lovely villages inside groves of palm trees and way off in the distance these wooded, jungle mountains. It looked like Shangri-La. And I remember seeing this line of Vietnamese women, schoolgirls I think they were, they actually looked like angels come to earth, something like that. So it was really quite striking, but a little unsettling because how could a place like this, so enchanting, so beautiful, be at war?” The juxtaposition of these idyllic images and images of terrified Vietnamese villagers and bloody corpses confound the mind and embitter one’s emotions. 

More to the point, at all levels we were ignorant of the enemy, the terrain and the situation, intervening in a far-off civil war we had no business getting involved with in the first place, yet did, nonetheless, driven initially to inculcate our ideology and values within a population to which these were alien, later persisting “70% to avoid a humiliating US defeat, 20% to keep SVN (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands and only 10% to permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.” Think of it: 57,000 American and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives were lost and many more wounded and traumatized because American politicians and military brass wanted to save face and keep their jobs! Surely war profiteering by the military-industrial complex lurked in the background as well. In Vietnam, an innocent generation of Americans, raised on John Wayne movies and 4th of July parades, learned what generations before us learned the hard way: “Truth is the first casualty of war.”  

The bottom line, for me at least, is how misguided, deceitful and destructive American leaders have been in their vain attempts, long past and recent, to impose their ideologies by force on distant peoples about whom we care little and understand even less, and for whom such ideologies are both alien and unsuitable. In view of the inequality of wealth, economic/financial instability and hardships produced by American capitalism, and the clownish, inept and dangerous leaders elevated by American democracy, the lesson of Vietnam and, more recently Afghanistan and Iraq, suggest that our efforts toward “saving” others would be better directed toward ourselves. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”