Wayne Harmon enlisted in the Marines right out of Dominquez High School in Compton, California in 1966. He became one of the 60,000 American servicemen killed in action in Vietnam. Just 21 years-old, one of two children and the only son. He was also my neighbor. Wayne was a member of Company H, 2nd Battalion, 9thMarines. The Virtual Wall (VirtualWall.org) of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has this summary of the fierce battle that he took part in which resulted in his death on 15 May 1967:
“In the spring of 1967, NVA forces based in and supplied from the DMZ were conducting major operations from Khe Sanh in the west to the coast. On 24 April a major battle bagan at Khe Sanh, NVA forces repeatedly cut Highway 9 between Cam Lo and Khe Sanh, and initiated major mortar, rocket, and artillery attacks against Marine installations at Gio Linh, Camp Carroll, and Dong Ha. At 0300 on 08 May the NVA staged a major effort against the Marine observation post on Hill 158 at Con Thien, two miles south of the DMZ's southern border, with simultaneous diversionary attacks against Camp Carroll, Gio Linh, and Dong Ha. Although the elements of 1st Bn, 4th Marines, held out at Con Thien, they lost 44 men killed and 110 wounded. On 10 May a Marine A-4E (BuNo 151997) was hit by surface-to-air missiles fired from just north of the DMZ; the pilot, Major Robert L. Snyder, was killed in the incident.”
The Virtual Wall summary just described here lists all the Marine units involved and the casualties by unit. In my reading, I counted no less than 238 Marines KIA and 1,549 wounded. This was a serious and vicious battle. The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) amassed a large force, and a fierce battle began with high powered weapons. This, in a way, was a foreshadowing of what was to come in February of 1968 with the NVA’s Tet Offensive, an equally brutal battle. The American historian, Mark Bowden, in his book, Huè 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam describes this historic battle in detail. Both battles were won by US forces, but the price was huge in men killed and wounded, a Pyrrhic victory. US forces won all battles with the enemy, but this was not enough, for the enemy was never defeated. They lost all engagements, but their strategy was to endure and wear out the Americans; indeed, they did eventually. Time was on their side. Eventually Americans and politicians became weary; first they pulled out all US forces and then reneged on our promises from the Paris Peace Accords to resupply South Vietnamese forces. The end came quickly in 1975. This was something JFK’s Whiz Kids advisers did not foresee nor were they capable of understanding. We paid a heavy price: 60,000 killed in action and another 300,000 wounded; not to mention all the money spent on the war. It is estimated that the United States spent nearly one trillion dollars in 1960s money on the Vietnam war: the equivalent of eight trillion dollars in today’s money. A lot of falsehoods have endured about the Vietnam war. Here is a terrific five-minute video by Bruce Herschensohn explaining what really happened: Click here to view it.
How did we get involved in this war? Why? These are questions that are still asked. A new book written by Charles Trueheart, the son of the Assistant US Ambassador to Vietnam in 1961, Bill Trueheart, called “Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam War” is revealing. Trueheart was a 10-year-old when he accompanied his father to Saigon in 1961. This book gives a personal view of everyday happenings, the characters involved and the sheer madness of what the US administration of President Kennedy was up to. If you dislike politicians, you will absolutely despise these guys. They were green bureaucrats, uninformed, arrogant, full of themselves and mindless, with my apology to people with disabilities. The blind leading the blind. I would call them The Not Ready for Prime-time Players. JFK was no different. Led by Averell Harriman, Bobby Kennedy, Dean Rusk and the former Ford Motor Company executive, Robert McNamara, JFK’s Secretary of Defense. None had any experience in Southeast Asia, its culture or its people, nor any knowledge of world affairs for what they were about to, unknowingly, design. McNamara’s background was in economics and management. He resigned in 1967 and admitted his failures. Click here for a related story. It was too late to reverse the course of the war. McNamara’s son, Craig McNamara, wrote a book about his father’s role in Vietnam called “Because Our Fathers Lied: A memoir of Truth.” McNamara was a disaster as a defense secretary. Check out this article on the damage he did to the Strategic Air Command. Click here.
Of all the characters in this sad and tragic story, one person stands out: Averell Harriman. The ex-Governor of New York, Harriman was arrogant, self-deluded, abrasive and a generally nasty person. JFK idealized him. Harriman was also very wrong on everything he was involved with. Harriman badly wanted to be Secretary of State. Instead, JFK appointed him as Assistant Secretary of State for Far East Affairs. He probably did not know where the far east was unless he looked at a map. Trueheart tells the story of a cabinet meeting with the Ambassador of South Vietnam, Fritz Nolting. While Nolting was speaking, Harriman yells at him and tells him “Shut up, nobody wants to hear from you,” in front of the President and other cabinet members. JFK rebuked Harriman and said “I want to hear what he has to say. In a 1976 interview with Harriman’s biographer, Rudy Abramson, Nolting says this: “Nobody, in my opinion is as directly responsible for that disaster as Averell Harriman.” That disaster is referring to is Vietnam (p298).
Another excellent book on this subject dealing with the early years prior to, and the early stages of the war, is “The Lost Mandate of Heaven, The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem President of Vietnam.” By Geoffrey Shaw. I have another blog post based on this book: Click here to read it. This book deals with the same mistakes described here. Shaw describes in detail the role that the media played and how they were so influential on US politicians and public opinion about the war. David Halberstam, the influential New York Times reporter and Walter Cronkite, the stately professorial looking CBS News Anchorman had a lot of influence on the rest of the media as well as public opinion. Halberstam was a green 27-year-old journalist with an eye on shaping the narrative about Vietnam; a narrative that the NY Times promoted. Most of it was negative. As it turned out, they were right. Trueheart tells the story of French journalist François Sully who was once asked by the US Ambassador why he always looked at the hole in the donut in his reporting about happenings in Vietnam? Sully responded: Because, Mr. Ambassador, there is a hole in the donut.
There is no doubt that the Kennedy Administration, his advisors and functionaries colored the reality on the ground, and in some ways disguised the truth, i.e., lied. I recall that the administration promoted the body count; the number of enemy killed, as a way of showing the progress of the war. Journalists were, in some cases, expelled for unfavorable reporting of the reality on the ground, such as François Sully, the French reporter and the NY Times reporter who preceded David Halberstam.
The Spanish/American philosopher George Santayana coined the phrase: “Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it.” The Vietnam war was one excellent example of this famous saying. We learned nothing from history. We thought we were better than the others; we were arrogant, self-delusional and outright stupid when it came to what the US did in Vietnam prior to the explosion of all-out war. I am a US Army Vietnam Veteran. I was in Vietnam in 1968-69, the hottest year of the war and a time when we had 550,000 troops there: the highest number in the war.
As soon as the French pulled out of Vietnam after their defeat in the famous battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the United States, basically became the new colonial overlords and started what they could not finish, except they were too arrogant and self-deluded to know it; thinking that they could do it better than the French. This they did not apologize for. They decided what they believed was needed to be done and then it was the US Ambassador’s job to get Diem to agree to it and do it. Do what we say or else was their attitude. Diem and his brother Nhu were murdered November 3, 1963, in a coup with the support of JFK, the CIA and the Kennedy administration. Without US support the Vietnamese generals would have never done a coup, this is crystal clear.
Another of the craziest idea the Americans came up with was the Strategic Hamlet Program by which people would be relocated from their villages, their homes torched, and new people would be put there to defend against the Viet Cong. The Vietnamese were incredulous; they knew this would not work, and, in fact, it never worked. But “father knows best;” just do what we say, after all, we’re Americans and we know better.
I was a huge JFK fan as a youth. The more I learn about his failures, however, the more I believe he was incompetent and way out of his league. In 1963 JFK worried more about being re-elected in 1964 than doing the right thing in Vietnam. He sensed that Vietnam was going to end badly for the US and considered ending the US involvement, but he wanted to wait until he was re-elected in 1964 to do it. The murder of Diem and his brother opened Pandora’s Box and South Vietnam spiraled out of control. It was the American war now. Every replacement for Diem was an utter failure. From 1963 to 1975 there were 12 different leaders of South Vietnam: all total failures. Within a month of the coup, the ruling junta was itself overthrown. The North Vietnamese were shrewd; they knew how to measure US resolve; they knew that time was on their side; it was. They always pushed the right button on public opinion. One example was the Buddhist monk’s self-immolation during the Diem regime in 1963. They figured this would galvanize public opinion against the war: It did.
Trueheart tells the story about how Saigon was being inundated with American politicians. In December 1962 the senior US Foreign Service Officer, U. Alexis Johnson wired Washington warning them of the many Congressional delegations arriving in Saigon; they called them “codels,” exasperating the local officials. When the administration’s leading hawks, like General Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Walt Rostow, JFK’s deputy national security advisor went to Vietnam to assess the situation in 1961, they advised JFK that he needed about 8,000 US combat troops there to support the South Vietnamese forces. When Kennedy heard this, he had to figure out how he could pull this off since the 1954 Geneva Agreement after the French withdrawal was that no more than about 600 US troops could be stationed in Vietnam. This was never taken seriously by the US. The troops were sent, and the American casualties started. During the Kennedy Administration the number of US KIA was 120; it increased exponentially year after year.
In less than three years of the Kennedy Administration two spectacular failures occurred: The Bay of Pigs in Cuba and the start of the Vietnam War.
Concluding Thoughts
What were they thinking? We had just finished World War II and Korea. The French were defeated by 1954. The colonial period was at an end. Why get involved in another war that could not possibly be won? Where were the clear-thinking men? Could they not relate with the failure of the French? We make the same mistakes, over and over. Some examples: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. When will they learn?
