In Vietnam, War and the End of Illusions

With America captivated by news of the first U.S. astronaut shot into space, few Americans paid much attention to the possibility that U.S. troops would be dispatched to a hardly heard-of, former French Indochinese protectorate called Vietnam.

Our eyes were turned skyward as President John F. Kennedy made this military decision, not down into the quagmire awaiting us in Southeast Asia.

Having just returned to the United States after a 15-month tour of duty in Asia, and beginning the countdown of days before my discharge, I myself had no idea that the Army would soon order me to stash my military uniforms and begin masquerading as a civilian technician.

Within weeks of Kennedy’s comments, I was flying from Maryland’s Ft. Meade toward Laos, the first U.S. trouble spot in Southeast Asia. The pro-Western government of Laos was threatened by a Communist and neutralist military alliance.

The 1954 Geneva Accords on Indochina, which governed France’s surrender of North Vietnam to the Communist Viet Minh and declared cease-fires throughout Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, allowed the United States to replace, one-for-one, its 700 military advisors in South Vietnam as they completed their individual assignments.

But we were not supposed to have military advisors in Laos at all, and the official lies that would soon be told about Army advisors like myself--and a CIA-run outfit called Air America--foreshadowed the bigger campaign of deception soon to come in neighboring Vietnam.

That campaign sought to conceal from the American public, as well as from pesky foreigners demanding respect for the Geneva Accords, the deepening involvement of the U.S. military in Vietnam.

In high school and in college, Ernest Hemingway had been my literary hero, and my notions of the looming conflict in Southeast Asia had been formed by the romanticism of such novels as “A Farewell to Arms.”

Having finished my clandestine role in Laos as my military service was drawing to a close in late 1961, I arranged to get discharged in Asia. The storm clouds of the war to come were clear on the horizon. Soon I got a job with United Press International.

My first assignment was to return to Laos to chronicle the final days of the conflict there and write about the country’s attempts to create a neutral state.

The Laotians have an old saying: When the elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers. And Laos, like Cambodia, tried in vain to keep the elephants fighting only in Vietnam.

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Unfortunately, both countries ended up getting trampled. Communist forces used Laos and Cambodia as sanctuaries and supply depots for the Viet Cong guerrillas. So America decided to take its fight to those countries as well.

After the 1962 Geneva Accords on Laos brought hostilities to a temporary close, I would soon be reassigned to Vietnam.

When I flew to Saigon for the first time in 1962, the city was aptly known as the Paris of the Orient. There were broad, tree-lined boulevards, world-class restaurants and some of the most graceful women many of us Americans had ever seen.

At the time, there were only about 5,000 U.S. troops in the country and, supposedly, none in direct combat roles. For the next two years, that was the first big lie repeatedly told to the American public: Our troops in Vietnam were merely advisors, not fighters.

After U.S. Marines and an Army division landed in central Vietnam in 1965, there was no way to maintain that fiction. But Pentagon spokesmen could conceal the growing toll of U.S. casualties. No longer would official accounts of U.S. engagements include tallies of the dead, wounded and missing--only descriptions of U.S. casualties being “light, moderate or heavy.”

The biggest lies of all, of course, were the repeated assurances that America was winning the war and that the latest in an endless succession of Saigon governments was dedicated to establishing a true democracy and stamping out corruption.

The draft-age youths of America were the first to see through this web of deception, and demonstrations against the war would soon begin to erupt on college campuses across the nation. Ultimately, disillusionment with the war would seize their parents, too, and prompted Lyndon Johnson to abandon any thought of a second White House term.

Before I bade farewell to Vietnam in 1968, our commitment had grown from 700 to more than 500,000 troops, and the U.S. death toll had gone from fewer than 100 to nearly 20,000.

Before America said goodbye to South Vietnam, more than 58,000 U.S. servicemen would lose their lives.