Our Year of War Read online

  Copyright

  The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the United States government.

  Copyright © 2017 by Daniel P. Bolger

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  Da Capo Press

  Hachette Book Group

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  First Edition: October 2017

  Published by Da Capo Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  ISBN 978-0-306-90326-7 (hardcover); ISBN 978-0-306-90324-3 (ebook)

  LCCN: 2017953360

  E3-20171013-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  List of Maps

  Preface

  Prologue: Light

  1 The Hole in the Prairie

  2 This Man’s Army

  3 Widows Village

  4 The Butcher of the Delta

  5 Blast

  6 Killshots

  7 Heat

  8 The River Blindness

  9 Constant Pressure

  10 Children of Nyx

  11 Ashes

  Epilogue: The Old Sergeant

  Photos

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Maps

  Nebraskax

  Southeast Asia, 1968

  9th Infantry Division Area of Operations, 1968

  For the men and women on the Wall

  Ex virtute honos

  Preface

  I knew Chuck and Tom Hagel long before I met them. In the terrible year of 1968, young men like them lived in my suburban neighborhood west of Chicago. When their time came to serve, they went. We’d look for their faces when the camera scanned the crowd on the USO Bob Hope Christmas Special on television. Their fathers, like mine, fought in World War II or Korea. Their mothers showed us snapshots of bright-green jungles, thin foreign people in black pajamas, and loose-limbed young men in faded fatigues, smiling into the camera, Schlitz beer cans in hand. When they came home, they didn’t talk about it. They took jobs or went to college. They moved on. I never heard of PTSD. And I never met a draft dodger.

  You could make a powerful case, and many have, that the four most formative eras in American history were the Revolution and founding, slavery and the Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II, and the sixties and Vietnam. Of those, the last is surely the most discussed and least well understood. We’re probably too close to it to sort it out completely.

  Still, I think I owe it to Chuck and Tom, and to all the Vietnam veterans, most notably the officers and sergeants who led me when I joined the U.S. Army in the 1970s, to try to figure out what the hell we did to our enemies and ourselves in Vietnam and at home. This book is my attempt, through the story of Chuck and Tom Hagel, to explain the lasting significance of the tumultuous events of the Vietnam War and 1960s America. I’ve worked hard to get it right. Wartime sergeants, like the Hagels and my own father, measure officer types by one hard standard: Do they know the real deal? I think I do. The Hagels certainly do.

  Fifty years after Tet, Vietnam remains very much with us. I believe that many Americans, especially younger ones, do not realize the full import of this divisive war abroad and the contentious era at home, in particular the decisive events of 1968. We continue to repeat the same errors and miss the same opportunities. I know. I lived through just those bloody mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan. We see our past, but we don’t understand it, even when men like Chuck and Tom Hagel plead with us to do so. It’s past time to come to terms with Vietnam and the sixties. That’s why I wrote Our Year of War.

  Daniel P. Bolger

  Lieutenant General

  U.S. Army, Retired

  PROLOGUE

  Light

  A year ago, none of us could see victory. There wasn’t a prayer. Now we can see it clearly— like light at the end of a tunnel.

  GENERAL HENRI EUGÈNE NAVARRE

  September 28, 19531

  Tom Hagel hated walking point. He disliked going first, breaking bush, knocking aside wet branches, stepping over fallen logs, slipping around leaning, mossy tree trunks, and all the while watching, listening, feeling, smelling, even tasting, seeking an enemy who knew exactly how to blend into the rotting woodwork. The Vietnamese jungle was greener than green, a riotous, enveloping ocean of foliage, the ground layer thick and tangled from the brown loam floor to a swaying mat of vegetation twice as high as Tom’s angular, spare six-foot frame. It made for tough slogging. And that was before somebody took a shot at you.

  Tom’s head turned like a gun turret, slow and steady, listening and looking. He reached out, the long fingers on his left hand weaving through leaves and stems, just enough to push aside the abundant greenery. His right hand gripped the trigger region of his black M16 rifle. Eyes, ears, nose, and fingertips sought anything that did not belong there. An oddly broken branch. A Kalashnikov automatic rifle clicking from safe to fire. The sharp tang of human urine. A gleaming trip wire stretched like a garrote. Hagel had to stay alert for all of those telltale signs and dozens more. He had to do it despite the oppressive heat, the cloying humidity, and the pervading gloom. Not much sunshine filtered down through the soaring, thick tree canopy high above. In the fetid, tangled morass that choked the bottom of this rain forest, it was always dusk. Out there in the dim unending sea of vegetation, beyond sensing, lurked dangers past counting. Tom Hagel knew it only too well. There be monsters.

  Yes, Tom Hagel hated walking point. But he was good at it. No—he was great at it. He kept his rifle company alive. He made sure they won their fights, because those sharp clashes usually started with him. Woe to the thing that did not belong. With one squeeze of his M16’s trigger, Hagel would level it: rock and roll, full auto, punching out an entire magazine of twenty hot bullets as fast you could snap your fingers. And that would usually do it. The old sergeants, the ones who carried out this brutal business and lived to tell of it, said that he who shot first and in force gained the edge in a murderous jungle ambush. Tom Hagel was all about that edge.

  Yet Tom Hagel hated doing it. He detested the war with all his heart. It wasn’t just the dull ache of all combat soldiers in all wars, heartily sick of losing their friends, shaken by taking lives of strangers better left alone, and bone-tired from endless draining hours of hunting and being hunted. Tom Hagel’s disgust went beyond that. He considered the Vietnam War an abomination, an awful deviant strain far removed from America’s best instincts, a pointless bloody scrum on behalf of an utterly corrupt local ally. “It was wrong,” he said later, with characteristic bluntness.2 Still Tom Hagel walked point, and did it well.

  He did it not for the flag, nor for the cause, such as
it was, but for the other American soldiers who counted on him. It fell to this nineteen-year-old to balance the urgent pressure from his captain to move steadily onward and his own hard-earned wisdom to take care with each step. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. That paradoxical phrase made no sense except to a battle-wary rifleman. Tom Hagel was one. The lives he saved would include his own, as well as those of his mates.

  Those favored others started with the man right behind him. The green-clad, helmeted form stepped slowly, head down, checking his compass azimuth and consulting a folded, sweat-stained map sheet. That navigator wasn’t just keeping the long file of riflemen on track. He was also guiding Tom Hagel. Well he should. It was his older brother, Chuck. Sometimes Chuck went first and Tom plotted the course. They formed a really effective point team. Two brothers in the same rifle platoon, trading off at the most exposed post of peril—if Hollywood showed it in a movie, cynical audiences would snort and object, certain that such a thing didn’t happen anymore in modern warfare. The U.S. Army wouldn’t allow it. America’s mothers wouldn’t accept it. There were policies and procedures and safeguards to prevent some poor family from losing two sons in a single flashing grenade blast. It could never occur. Except it did for almost a year, the bloodiest stretch of the war, the awful year 1968. Out front, brothers Tom and Chuck Hagel just kept trudging along.

  Chuck didn’t hate the war. He volunteered for it. He asked for the infantry, the most difficult, most dangerous, and most thankless of duties. Like Tom, Chuck grieved for lost comrades and found no pleasure in pulling the trigger. But he did it. “We had a job to do in Vietnam,” he said later.3 Chuck understood only too clearly that his brother had turned on the war effort. For his part, Tom knew Chuck still believed. Walking point together was their truce, their armistice, their way to set it aside day after day and night after night. Trying to stay alive rightly consumed their full attention.

  Behind the intent brothers shuffled an extended conga line of sweating, stinking American soldiers. These dull-eyed, exhausted men had long ago learned to trust Tom and Chuck Hagel. They didn’t care which one supported the war or which one did not. They just hoped that those two guys out front kept the rifle company on the right route, avoided the booby traps, and got the drop on the bad guys. It would have been nice to see the sun now and then. But as the American infantrymen picked their way through the dim bottom reaches of the Vietnam jungle, the veterans had long since given up on that. In the depths of this endless tunnel of smothering vines, twisted tendrils, and rain-slick fronds, only a few rookies still expected to see the light.

  IN AN INSTANT the bulbs snapped on, brilliantly white, dazzling, bathing him. General William Childs Westmoreland had seen that kind of intense light on the tank ranges, when the massive armored brutes snapped on their big xenon beams and pinned their targets in pure, whiter than white illumination. Now it was all around him. The smothering luminous blaze seemed almost tangible, more than the warmth of the intense lamps, but almost a breath, a whisper in his face. Wasn’t there something to that, the actual force of light? Perhaps it called up a random impression from some half-forgotten physics session from three decades ago, back at West Point. Maybe so.

  The curtain of vibrant luminosity cut him off from the great room. It marked a boundary between him and them, those out there. Although the hall was well lit beyond the phalanx of television klieg lights, the crowd had receded into relative darkness. He could hear them though, a lot of them, their presence signaled by steady, vigorous clapping. That certainly had a physical pressure; a swelling wave approached him and then washed over him. It held for a bit, and that said something, too, something positive. In such a place, in such a time, he could be forgiven if for a moment he felt like the pope on the Vatican balcony, Lou Gehrig in his final bow at Yankee Stadium, or Caesar up there along the Rubicon River, addressing the XIII Legion.

  But these were not loyal soldiers in the house. No, in the great gulp beyond the light barrier slouched the rough beast of the American press. The auditorium at the National Press Club brimmed with reporters, editors, and columnists, and even some of those aggressive television news people. More than a few thought ill of him. He knew that. In later years, his successors might hear vulgar catcalls or rude chants, but not yet, not in the America of November 21, 1967, when men still wore coats and ties to lunch, and applauded with customary respect when a famous general came to speak.

  As the applause died away, he calmly touched the pages of his speech. This was his time, with the brilliant light shining on him like that of Valhalla. And so to work. “I would like to give you today,” he began confidently, “a short progress report on some aspects of the war in Vietnam…”4

  HE LOOKED THE PART. God knows he sure did. Tall, upright, shoulders squared, jaw thrust forward, he radiated purpose. The army called it bearing, and he had it. There wasn’t an extra ounce on him. His handsome face was chiseled, his crew-cut hair still dark at the top, graying on the sides, and barely white at the temples. Bright brown eyes—regulation olive drab, even—glittered beneath dark, bushy eyebrows. When he looked at you, those eyes locked on like lasers. His handshake was so firm, so strong, so decisive, it sent a jolt up your forearm, like you’d grabbed a live electric cable.5 If on some old movie lot David O. Selznick had dialed up central casting and barked, “Send over a general,” this was the guy who would have shown up.

  And that was a good thing. Westmoreland was America’s top field commander, the four-star general at the top of U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, MACV in print, Mack-vee when spoken. Westmoreland was COMUSMACV to his multitudinous staff, Childs to his family back in South Carolina, Westy to his military peers (he had a few), the general to his troops, and the Man personified to those who opposed the war. By the autumn of 1967, many Americans did. But for the majority who still supported the ongoing war in Vietnam, Westmoreland was their general. He was the one leading our boys out there on the far side of the world. And he was up to it. Just look at him!

  Many did, then and since. In 1968, biographer Ernest B. Furguson called his book Westmoreland: The Inevitable General. By 2011, West Point graduate, army officer, and Vietnam veteran Lewis S. Sorley went with Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam. Both titles rang true.6 And both books left you with the feeling that this striking, impressive figure must have something missing on the inside, some “it” that good generals have and he lacked, all appearances aside. Between those two books stood the tragic American failure in Vietnam.

  Westmoreland’s record before Vietnam was a succession of achievements: Eagle Scout, First Captain—top cadet—at West Point, brilliant commander of the 34th Field Artillery Battalion and then hard-charging chief of staff of the 9th Infantry Division in World War II, dashing commander of the elite 187th Airborne Infantry Regimental Combat Team in Korea, a brigadier general by age thirty-eight, and then two, three, and four stars in quick succession, always in the spotlight. Major Otto Kerner, Westmoreland’s immediate deputy in World War II, remembered the troops calling his commander “Superman,” a reference to his tireless work ethic and “his deeds and capacity for deeds.”7

  Now came Vietnam. In Washington, President Lyndon Baines Johnson expected results from Westmoreland and his Americans. “I want ’em to get off their butts,” urged LBJ, “and get out in those jungles and whip hell out of some Communists.”8 It wasn’t exactly the approved format for a mission statement. But it sufficed.

  Vietnam was Westmoreland’s war. Ideally, he’d go north and smash the foe there, taking the enemy capital, Hanoi. That option never got serious consideration.9 President Johnson and his inner circle feared Chinese intervention, like the surprise mass offensive that wrecked the attempt to unify the Korean peninsula in 1950. Only U.S. airpower would go north, and the bizarre on-again, off-again targeting directives from the White House ensured America’s aerial offensive, although punishing, proved indecisive.10 There’d be no victory from the skies. So be it. Sooner or later, Westmo
reland knew, the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) must come south and the VC (Viet Cong) guerrillas were already there. Fine—good enough. Fight ’em where they were. Westmoreland believed he could win this war in South Vietnam.

  The general executed with his customary energy and dedication. “The U.S. military strategy,” he wrote later, “dictated by politicians, was essentially that of a war of attrition.”11 His job was to kill VC and NVA, a difference with little practical distinction, as each passing month found more northerners in the south as both regulars and guerrillas. Regardless, Westmoreland intended for his troops to find the hostiles and kill them.

  Starting in 1965, Westmoreland brought in large numbers of U.S. troops to do the job. He explained his approach in his memoirs:

  Phase One: Commit those American and Allied [Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand] forces necessary “to halt the losing trend” by the end of 1965.

  Phase Two: “During the first half of 1966,” take the offensive with American and Allied forces in “high priority areas” to destroy enemy forces and reinstitute pacification programs.

  Phase Three: If the enemy persisted, he might be defeated and his forces and base areas destroyed during a period of a year to a year and a half following Phase II.12

  Along with the 23,000 or so advisers and support units already in country, Westmoreland estimated it would take 175,000 more U.S. troops to get started, and then at least 100,000 more. But he warned that based on what the VC and NVA did, additional forces might be required. Notably, the strategy didn’t count much on the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the South Vietnamese). They would handle that pacification stuff, sweeping up the wreckage, restoring order in South Vietnamese villages after the United States ran off the enemy battalions. In fact, when some asked if he wanted to command South Vietnamese forces, as the Americans did in Korea, Westmoreland demurred.13 Behind his rationalizations, the truth was obvious. He didn’t think the ARVN were up to the job. The Americans would do it.