Wednesday, October 30, 2024
1917 British government gives final approval to the Balfour Declaration
1950 Pope Pius XII witnesses "The Miracle of the Sun" while at the Vatican
In bed by 9:30, awake at 4:05, up at 4:20 with sore shoulders and painful mid/upper back. I let Lilly out at some time and then again around 9 when I woke up from my first morning nap. It's another warm, windy day with the berry trees teeming with robins. A rd-winged blackbird has appeared on the tube feeder.
Prednisone, day 169, 5 mg., day 20/28. Prednisone at 5:05. Three slices of soda bread later. Morning meds at 9:10. It seems like my entire body is aching this morning, even my butt muscles. Is my inflamation up? I'll be interested in seeing the sed rate and CRP scores from yesterday's blood tests.
It is a sad experience to think back on those days in Vietnam and to re-read the ‘happy horseshit’ of the politicos. I remember quite clearly talking with other Marines about the futility of the war, sharing the judgment or intuition that no ultimate good was going to come from all the death and destruction. I talked about it in the middle of the night with my friend Bob Hilleary during those endless night watches in ‘the bubble.’ My tentmates and I groused about it while holed up under canvas during the endless monsoon rains. We talked about it over alcohol and blackjack hands at the officers’ club. Regarding the “happy horseshit” in the news reports on Armed Forces Radio and in Stars and Stripes and in hometown newspapers that were mailed to DaNang, I remember with surprising vividness my good friend, from Yuma and Iwakuni and DaNang, Warrant Officer Ron Kendall frequently quoting his high school football coach in Iowa who used to tell his team: “You can fool the spectators but you can’t fool the players.” The players, at least in my unit, didn’t believe the happy horseshit from Saigon and Washington, just as I haven’t believed the happy horseshit from Baghdad and Washington 40 years later. A nation does not ‘win the hearts and minds’ of another people by dispatching an invading army of highly trained killers to its shores, airfields, or landing zones. A nation cannot successfully use as ambassadors of good will Marines and soldiers who are always at least a lethal threat to kill locals and often a homicidal force. We do not ‘save villages’ by ‘destroying them,’ whether the village is a hamlet in the Mekong Delta or the city of Fallujah on the Euphrates. We do not preserve national honor by becoming an international pariah. My heart aches when I think of the price the Clausen family and millions of other families paid in foreign wars only to lead to policies of invasion, occupation, torture, kidnappings, detentions without legal process, and claims of almost boundless executive authority by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Gonzales. Did we learn nothing from Vietnam? Is there no limit to the amount of happy horseshit gullible Americans will willingly eat?
When I arrived in Vietnam on July 12, 1965, the conflict there was not yet a full-fledged American war. The mission of American combat forces was limited and essentially defensive. It all changed two weeks later when President Johnson made the decision to grant General Westmoreland’s request for a massive infusion of American forces in 1965 and more in 1966. He granted the request for the very reasons that should have caused him to deny it - because he knew that the South Vietnamese government was incapable of effectively governing the country and the South Vietnamese military was incapable of defending it. That decision on that date for those reasons turned the war into an American war. The whole world knew of the fecklessness and corruption of the Vietnamese government in Saigon and of the powerlessness of the South Vietnamese military and of the determination of the VC/NVA forces and we Marines knew it too. In Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect, he acknowledges the mistake of not pulling out of Vietnam early. He wrote:
By [the early or mid 1960s] it should have become apparent that the two condition underlying President Kennedy’s decision to send military advisors to South Vietnam were not being met and, indeed, could not be met: political stability did not exist and was unlikely ever to be achieved; and the South Vietnamese, even with our training assistance and logistical support, were incapable of defending themselves.
Given these facts – and they are facts – I believe we could and should have withdrawn from South Vietnam either in late 1963 amid the turmoil following Điem’s assassination or in late 1964 or early 1965 in the face of increasing political and military weakness in South Vietnam. And, as the table opposite suggests, there were at least three other occasions when withdrawal could have been justified.
Date of Withdrawal US Forces US Killed Basis for Withdrawal
Nov. 1963 16,300 advisors 78 Collapse of Điem regime and political instability
Late 1964 or
Early 1965 23,300advisors 225 Clear indication of SVN’s inability to defend itself, even with US traing and logistical support
July, 1965 81,400 troops 509 Further evidence of the above
December, 1965 184,300 troops 1,594 Evidence the US military tactics and training were inappropriate for guerrilla war being waged.
December, 1967 485,600 troops 15,979 CIA reports indicating bombing in the North would not force North Vietnam to desist is the face of our inability to turn back enemy forces in South Vietnam.
January, 1973 543,400 troops* 58,191 Signing of Paris Accords, marking end of US military involvement
* Highest commitment of American troops, April 1969
The information related above is contained in a table in my memoir. This blog I am writing in can't handle the MS Word table formatting from the memoir, , but all the information from the table is present.
It is against that background that I am reading again The Pentagon Papers and focusing on George W. Ball's advice to Lyndon Johnson. Here are some excerpts from Ball's memo to Johnson dated July 1, 1965.
(1) A Losing War: The South Vietnamese are losing the war to the VietCong. No one can assure you that we can beat the Viet Cong or even force them to the conference table on our terms, no matter how many hundred thousand white, foreign (U.S.) troops we deploy.
No one has demonstrated that a white ground force of whatever size can win a guerrilla war—which is at the same time a civil war between Asians—in jungle terrain in the midst of a population that refuses cooperation to the white forces (and the South Vietnamese) and thus provides a great intelligence advantage to the other side. . .
(2) The Question to Decide: Should we limit our liabilities in South Vietnam and try to find a way out with minimal long-term costs? The alternative—no matter what we may wish it to be—is almost certainly a protracted war involving an open-ended commitment of U.S. forces, mounting U.S. casualties, no assurance of a satisfactory solution, and a serious danger of escalation at the end of the road.
(3) Need for a Decision Now: So long as our forces are restricted to advising and assisting the South Vietnamese, the struggle will remain a civil war between Asian peoples. Once we deploy substantial numbers of troops in combat it will become a war between the U.S. and a large part of the population of South Vietnam, organized and directed from North Vietnam and backed by the resources of both Moscow and Peiping.The decision you face now, therefore, is crucial. Once large numbers of U.S. troops are commited to direct combat, they will begin to sustain high casualties in a war they are ill-equipped to fight in an uncooperative if not downright hostile contryside.
Once we suffer large casulaiteis, we will have started a well-nigh irreversible process. Our involvement will be so great that we cannot - without national humiliation - stop short of acheiving our complete objectives. . Of the two possiblities I think humiliation would be more likely than the achievement of our objectives, -- even after we have paid terrible costs.
It is painful to read this prescient and wise advice given to Lyndon Johnson before he decided to agaree to Gen. William Westmoreland's request for 44 additional combat battalions to tbe sent to South Vietnam. No one can say that LBJ - and Robert McNamara , Dean Rusk, and McGeorge Bundy - were not given accurate and sound advice before plunging the U.S. into the tragic invasion of Vietnam. On October 5, 1964, Ball had written a longer (67 pages) memo to Johnson, shared first with Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy, titled "How Valid Are the Assumptions Underlying Our Vietnam Policy", which also recommended getting out of South Vietnam: "Once on the tiger's back we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount." What a tragedy. The more I learn of it, the greater my embarassment and shame at playing even my miniscule role in it. 'Not a day but something is recalled, my conscience or my vanity appalled.'
FALLING THROUGH THE EARTH, ch. 14, Danielle Trussoni
. . . My father had recently read Robert McNamara’s book [IN RETROSPECT]. Dad was never much of a reader; although he was quick-witted and intelligent, he had a hard time staying with a book. That one, however, got his attention. I don’t know if he finished it or not, but the parts he had read were memorized. He would rattle off sentences between sips of his drink, quoting McNamara’s admission of his miscalculations in Vietnam. I tried to understand exactly what made Dad so angry, but after a while he went silent and would answer my questions tersely. Finally, he turned to me and said, “Do you know what this book means? Do you know what this guy is saying?”
I didn’t know anything about Robert McNamara back then. I had never even heard his name before. At that point in my life – before I studied the war, Vietnam was not a historical event. It was just something that happened to my family.
My father shook his head, disgusted. “McNamara’s saying they didn’t know what the hell they were doing over there. We were wrong from the goddamned beginning.
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