Our Year of War Read online

  A UH-1D Huey helicopter brings in a rifle squad in Vietnam. Spurred by pugnacious Major General Julian J. Ewell, 2-47th Infantry spent much of the summer of 1968 landing by helicopter right atop enemy positions. It was an effective tactic, but costly. (U.S. Department of Defense)

  Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Van Deusen commanded 2-47th Infantry during the busy summer of 1968. He was General William C. Westmoreland’s brother-in-law. On July 3, 1968, a Viet Cong guerrilla downed the commander’s helicopter, killing him and six others. Tom Hagel shot the enemy soldier who took down Van Deusen’s chopper. (U.S. Department of Defense)

  Chuck and Tom Hagel enjoyed their leave in Hawaii in the summer of 1968. The five days with their family went by way too fast. (U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel Archives, University of Nebraska at Omaha)

  Tom and Chuck Hagel relax with drinks at their place in North Omaha in the summer of 1969. Not long after this photo was taken, the brothers came to blows over Vietnam. (U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel Archives, University of Nebraska at Omaha)

  In the late summer of 1968, 2-47th Infantry occupied the firebase at Binh Phuoc. The M113 tracks parked in the northeast corner, at the upper right in this 1970 aerial photograph. Six howitzers from an artillery battery fired from the south end of the cramped compound. This is where both Chuck and Tom Hagel served their final weeks in country. (U.S. Department of Defense)

  Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel shares a joke with U.S. soldiers at the Kabul Military Training Center in Afghanistan on March 10, 2013. (U.S. Department of Defense)

  Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel walks through a U.S. military cemetery in Manila, the Philippines, on August 20, 2013. In Vietnam, he and brother Tom wondered who spoke up for the average rifleman. As a U.S. senator and then the secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel did so. (U.S. Department of Defense)

  Acknowledgments

  This book reflects the contributions and wisdom of many, most notably Chuck and Tom Hagel, the central figures of this narrative. They are American heroes. Both made available their time, interviews, photographs, papers, and related archives, to include fine collections at the Dr. C. C. and Mabel L. Criss Library of the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the U.S. Library of Congress. The Hagel brothers’ willingness to share their stories reflects a degree of moral courage equivalent to the bravery they showed time and time again under fire in Vietnam.

  Special thanks go to my very patient agent, E. J. McCarthy. This book was his idea, and it was a good one. I must also salute the great team at Da Capo. Robert Pigeon and his associates, especially Lissa Warren, all deserve gratitude. Gifted project editor Christine Marra and her able team skillfully sorted out my draft. My colleagues at North Carolina State University have also been immensely supportive. This book reflects their collective wise counsel.

  I must particularly recognize the late Keith Nolan, the dean of Vietnam combat historians. His many books covered all of the major operations of the war, drawing on extensive and thoughtful use of official sources, personal accounts, and a relentless quest for what the great British historian John Keegan once labeled the face of battle. Through Keith Nolan, readers learned what really happened in action after action that flared in the jungles and villages of South Vietnam. Had Keith lived, I am sure he would have done justice to the story of Chuck and Tom Hagel. I hope this book approaches what he would certainly have accomplished.

  There have been many able journalists and authors who have taken up portions of the stories of the Hagel brothers. Among these, Myra MacPherson stands foremost. Her wonderful, haunting Long Time Passing (1984), a definitive collection of voices of that era, introduced readers to the Hagels long before Tom became a professor of law or Chuck entered the U.S. Senate. Charlyne Berens in Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward (2006) offered a superb single-volume political biography of the senator, to include a brief consideration of his military service. And Chuck Hagel himself, with coauthor Peter Kaminsky, wrote America: Our Next Chapter (2008), a candid and useful look at his background and beliefs. There are many other fine articles available that address aspects of the Hagels’ history. These have been cited in the notes.

  In considering the brothers’ wartime service, I am grateful to both Chuck and Tom for all they have shared. The U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel Archives at the University of Nebraska at Omaha offer wonderful insights into the rich life of the Hagel family. The photo collection is especially impressive. In 1968, Mike Hagel carefully preserved the photos sent home by his brothers. We are all in his debt.

  Particularly valuable insights can be found in the hours of unedited interview footage captured by Brad Penner for a half-hour Nebraska Educational Television documentary on the 1999 visit by Chuck and Tom Hagel to Vietnam. The brothers donated these recordings to the Library of Congress. This is a first-rate resource, amounting to a tour of the sites of key Vietnam engagements from 1968, with the brothers as guides. Chuck and Tom spoke with candor and conviction, and that shines through.

  This book is neither an authorized biography nor a comprehensive life and times of the Hagel brothers. Rather, it is an infantryman’s account of two infantry sergeants at war. There’s a broader story told because there’s always more to war than fighting. The heroism and achievements belong to Chuck and Tom Hagel and their fellow Vietnam veterans. Any errors are on me.

  Notes

  PROLOGUE. LIGHT

  1. Bernard Fall, Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (New York: Da Capo Press, 1966), 28. General Henri Eugène Navarre commanded the French forces during their disastrous defeat at the hands of the Viet Minh in the valley of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

  2. Thomas L. Hagel, telephone interview by Daniel P. Bolger, October 4, 2016.

  3. Charles T. Hagel, telephone interview by Daniel P. Bolger, September 12, 2016.

  4. General William C. Westmoreland, U.S. Army, “Progress Report on the War in Vietnam,” State Department Bulletin (Department of State: Washington, DC, December 11, 1967), 785.

  5. I know that handshake. I met General Westmoreland quite by accident in the summer of 1986 on the day my wife and I moved into our quarters at West Point. I was just another captain joining the faculty. Westmoreland was the guest of a colonel who lived nearby. As I walked out to meet the moving van, the general strode up to me, stuck out his hand, and said, “I’m General Westmoreland.” Indeed he was.

  6. Edward B. Furguson, Westmoreland: The Inevitable General (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968) and Lewis S. Sorley, Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).

  7. Sorley, Westmoreland, 18. Otto Kerner Jr. later served as the governor of Illinois (1961–68).

  8. This comes from a Bill Moyers account quoted in Sorley, Westmoreland, 69.

  9. Harry G. Summers Jr., On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, 1981), 55. Colonel Harry Summers served in Vietnam. His trenchant critique of the U.S. war effort pulled no punches.

  10. For Westmoreland’s early doubts about Rolling Thunder, see William C. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), 141. For an assessment of the bombing campaign in both North and South Vietnam, as well as Laos and Cambodia, see John Morocco, Rain of Fire, The Vietnam Experience (Boston: Boston Publishing, 1985), 177, 179. For comparisons to World War II bombing, see Micheal Clodfelter, Vietnam in Military Statistics (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1995), 225. Of 7,662,000 tons of bombs dropped in the Vietnam War, just over a million fell on North Vietnam. In World War II, the United States dropped 623,418 tons on Germany and 160,800 tons on Japan, including all the incendiary raids and the two atomic bombs.

  11. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 185. Westmoreland went on to add that “since the World War I battles of the Somme and Verdun, that has been a strategy in disrepute, one that to many appeared particularly unsuited for a war in Asia with Asia’s legendary hordes of manpower.” That sentence speaks for itself.

  The names Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army were American
terms. Viet Cong comes from Viet Nam Cong-san, “Vietnamese Communists,” a pejorative label applied by the Saigon authorities. The Hanoi government called these guerrillas the People’s Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam, the military arm of the National Liberation Front. The North Vietnamese Army called itself the People’s Army of Vietnam. As this is an American account, for clarity, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army will be used.

  12. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 172. The phrases in quotation marks are written in the same way in Westmoreland’s memoirs. It’s unclear what document or message the general is quoting.

  13. Ibid., 160–61, 171–72.

  14. Shelby L. Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle (Washington, DC: U.S. News Books, 1981), 333.

  15. Mao Zedong, Strategic Problems of China’s Revolution (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1954), 96.

  16. Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 188. A West Point graduate who completed his military service as a lieutenant colonel, Krepinevich earned his doctorate from Harvard and remains a well-known defense analyst. He later headed the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Krepinevich’s book is considered a key work in evaluating the U.S. Army’s inability to defeat the communist insurgency in Vietnam.

  17. Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History 1946–1975 (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1988), 364. Davidson retired as a U.S. Army lieutenant general. He served in MACV in 1967–69 as the intelligence chief for General William C. Westmoreland and then General Creighton B. Abrams.

  18. Ibid. Page 360 has the VC/NVA number. For the U.S. casualties, see U.S. National Archives, “DCAS Vietnam Conflict Extract File Record Counts by ncident or Death Date (Year) as of April 29, 2008” in Military Records at http://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-statistics.html, accessed May 4, 2016.

  19. For the crossover point, see Davidson, Vietnam at War, 390. As the MACV intelligence chief, Davidson kept the books on assessed enemy losses. For counting enemy forces, see Davidson, Vietnam at War, 360–61. See also Sorley, Westmoreland, 163.

  20. Sorley, Westmoreland, 154. General Fred Weyand admitted he was the source after both Apple and Westmoreland were dead.

  21. Clark Dougan and Stephen Weiss, Nineteen Sixty-Eight, The Vietnam Experience (Boston: Boston Publishing, 1983), 69.

  22. Samuel Zaffiri, Westmoreland (New York: William Morrow, 1994), 5.

  23. Westmoreland, “Progress Report on the War in Vietnam,” 785–88.

  CHAPTER 1. THE HOLE IN THE PRAIRIE

  1. Unforgiven, directed by Clint Eastwood, Warner Brothers Studios, 1992. Sheriff Little Bill Daggett, portrayed by Gene Hackman, was the cruel antagonist in this classic western. Hackman served as a U.S. marine in China in the late 1940s, during the concluding years of that country’s long civil war. Director Clint Eastwood, who played protagonist Will Munny, served as a draftee in the U.S. Army at Fort Ord, California, from 1951 to 1953.

  2. For the origin of the name Sioux, see Evan S. Connell, Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Big Horn (New York: North Point Press, 1984), 87. For Nebraska, see John E. Koontz, “Etymology,” Siouan Languages at http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz/faq/etymology.htm, accessed May 7, 2016. Borrowing from the Indians, early French explorers and fur traders named the major waterway Rivière Plate (Flat River), anglicized as the Platte River. In addition, zoologists remind us that the well-known American buffalo is, in fact, a bison, not to be confused with the true African and Asian variants. The more common designation “buffalo” was used by both the Indians and the European peoples who displaced them, and remains the common name today.

  3. U.S. Congress, An Act to Secure Homesteads to Actual Settlers on the Public Domain, 37th Congress, 2d Session, May 20, 1862.

  4. Robert Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1890 (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 3, 99, 100.

  5. For the number of engagements, see Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 267. For the details on reported losses, see Utley, Frontier Regulars, note 19, 423. Utley compiled these numbers from U.S. Army adjutant general casualty records. Of 948 U.S. Army soldiers killed in the 1865–1891 Indian campaigns, 258 (27 percent) of them died at the Little Big Horn on June 25–26, 1876.

  6. Don Russell, “How Many Indians Were Killed?,” American West (July 1973), 43–44. The U.S. Census of 1890 recorded 248,253 Indians. The 1910 census reported 265,683.

  7. Utley, Frontier Regulars, note 20, 423.

  8. Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 13.

  9. Nebraska includes all or part of six Indian reservations. Four are wholly in Nebraska: the Omaha (established 1854), the Ponca (est. 1858), the Winnebago (est. 1863), and the Santee Sioux/Dakota (est. 1863). Parts of two other reservations also extend from Kansas into Nebraska: the Ioway (1861) and the Sac/Fox (1836). All predate the Plains Indian campaigns after the Civil War, and all six were there before Nebraska became a state. The estimated Indian population of Nebraska as of 2015 is 26,547 (1.4 percent) of 1,896,190 total population. See https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/31, accessed May 14, 2016. For the connection between Vietnam and the Indian conflicts, see Davidson, Vietnam at War, 319. Davidson noted that defeating the Indians required “grinding attrition” in a military sense, but more so in the economic and demographic spheres.

  10. L. Douglas Keeney, 15 Minutes: General Curtis LeMay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011), 49.

  11. U.S. Department of the Interior geological survey, Geographical Centers of the United States (Washington, DC: Department of the Interior, 1964), 2.

  12. For the naming of Offutt Air Force Base see A. I. Hansen, OAFBP 210-2: The History of Fort Crook (1888)/Offutt Air Force Base (1976) (Offutt Air Force Base, NE: 3902nd Air Base Wing, 1981), 1. The base was originally the U.S. Army’s Fort Crook, named for Indian-fighting Major General George Crook.

  13. U.S. Department of the Interior, Historic American Engineering Record: Offutt Air Force Base, Glenn L. Martin-Nebraska Bomber Plant (Washington, DC: Department of the Interior, 2002), 37–38, 40–41. The United States produced 3,760 B-29s in World War II.

  14. Keeney, 15 Minutes, 174, addresses nuclear bombs and targets, and page 118 includes the quote regarding the planned destruction of the USSR. For bomber numbers, see Phillip S. Meilinger, Bomber: The Formation and Early Years of Strategic Air Command (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 2012), 339.

  15. Keeney, 15 Minutes, 250.

  16. Omaha reported a population of 251,117 in 1950. See http://www.biggestus cities.com/1950, accessed May 13, 2016.

  17. The KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, Committee of State Security) was the Soviet Union’s national foreign intelligence service, and also carried out a major role in providing domestic surveillance and repression. The GRU (Glavnoe Razvedyvatelnoe Upravlenie, “Main Intelligence Directorate”) was the military intelligence organization of the Soviet Armed Forces. During the Cold War, the KGB’s American counterparts were the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, foreign intelligence) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI, internal security), although the KGB employed much more ruthless measures abroad and at home. For KGB and GRU surveillance in and around Offutt Air Force Base, see Loch K. Johnson, ed., Strategic Intelligence: Understanding the Hidden Side of Government (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007), 3; and Scott D. Sagan, “SIOP 62: Nuclear War Plan Briefing to President Kennedy,” International Security (Summer 1987), 31.

  18. Walter Kozak, LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2009), 280.

  19. James Carroll, House of War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 17–21. Carroll knew General Curtis LeMay. His father, Lieutenant General Joseph F. Carroll, U.S. Air Force, served under LeMay.

  20. Ibid., 19–20.

  21. Eric Larrabee, Commander in
Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants, and Their War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 597, 592–93.

  22. Ibid., 599. For LeMay’s words, see Carroll, House of War, 19.

  23. Kozak, LeMay, 197.

  24. Larrabee, Commander in Chief, 617.

  25. Ibid., 619–20.

  26. Ibid., 620.

  27. Marshall is quoted in Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 164. The Seven Years’ War of 1756–1763 pitted Great Britain and Prussia against France, Austria, and (for most of the war) Russia. The American phase was called the French and Indian War (1754–63). Battles also occurred in India and the Caribbean Sea.

  28. Carroll, House of War, 94–95. Carroll’s prose is sobering.

  29. Chuck Hagel with Peter Kaminsky, America: Our Next Chapter (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 3–4, 218.

  30. U.S., Headquarters, 42nd Bombardment Squadron, History of the 42nd Bombardment Squadron (Heavy) (Fort Shafter, HI: 42nd Bombardment Squadron, April 1944), 3–4. For an account of the attack on Hickam Field on December 7, 1941, by a soldier of the 42nd Bombardment Squadron, see Barbara Belt, interviewer, and Evelyn Kriek, transcriber, Oral History Interview Attilio F. Caporiccio, Douglas County Libraries, Denver, CO, September 14, 2004, 28–31. Charles Dean Hagel arrived in Hawaii after the Pearl Harbor attack.

  31. Ibid., 7–11.

  32. U.S., Headquarters, Army Air Forces, AAF Manual 50-12: Pilot Training Manual for the Liberator (Washington, DC: Headquarters, Army Air Forces, May 1, 1945), 4, 7, 20. The B-24 featured a unique double bomb bay, each segment covered by two metal tambour-panel doors. These panels looked like the cover of a roll-top desk. When opened, the four doors rolled up into the aircraft. This design reduced aerodynamic drag and thus permitted more speed during a bombing run.