The Lao government, if a rackety clutch of local potentates and generals could be so dignified, sustained a precarious rule until in 1960 a civil war erupted between rival factions, and was fought out on the streets of Vientiane. On slender grounds, the Americans persuaded themselves that a communist takeover loomed. What was indisputable was that Reds were roaming the country, both indigenous Pathet Lao, who intermittently claimed a share in coalitions, and some North Vietnamese troops. Bill Lair achieved what was deemed a notable coup by making a deal with local Hmong chieftain Vang Pao. In return for cash and arms, this warlord launched a guerrilla campaign against the communists. The initial US investment in himself and his kind swelled from $5 million to $11 million in 1962, then to $500 million by the end of the decade, with Vang Pao claiming leadership of twenty thousand fighters and considerable battlefield success, as well as a fortune acquired through drug trafficking. Some seven hundred CIA personnel were deployed, most engaged in secret paramilitary activities, shifting food and weapons to the tribesmen and their families, leapfrogging hither and thither betwixt mountains in jeans and Pilatus Porter STOL aircraft, themselves occasionally joining a battle.
The tinpot country achieved a bizarre prominence on the agendas of both East and West. Mao Zedong asked Le Duan, ‘How big is Laos?’ The Vietnamese answered: almost eighty thousand square miles, with a population of two million. ‘My God,’ said Mao, ‘they have so much land and so few people. Yunnan is about the same size but has forty million. If we could send fifteen or twenty million over there to live, wouldn’t that be a good idea?’ The Poles and Indians on the ICC found it politic to avert their eyes from landings by Soviet transport aircraft at Hanoi’s Gia Lam airbase, delivering war materiel destined for Laos. The British Conservative government was pressed by Washington to support the American counter-commitment, and at a March 1961 summit with Kennedy, prime minister Harold Macmillan reluctantly promised some military gesture if the Vientiane government collapsed. When Pathet Lao troops moved near to the western border of Laos the following year, in response a squadron of RAF Hunters was deployed in neighbouring Thailand. It was the usual story: the British were desperate to avoid a new commitment, but obsequiously anxious to comply with American wishes.
As a West Point cadet, Mike Eiland found himself participating in exercises in a fictional country called Soal – Laos spelt backwards – and in Washington the JCS favoured committing ground troops. In May 1961, however, President Kennedy declared that he preferred to reinforce covert operations, for which he nursed a romantic enthusiasm. Better still would be for all the foreign powers to stop messing on Laos’s Plain of Jars. The erratic Prince Norodom Sihanouk, ruler of neighbouring Cambodia, proposed an international conference, bastard offspring of 1954, to ‘neutralise’ Laos. With varied degrees of reluctance, all the interested parties signed up. After more than a year of negotiations in which Averell Harriman was a prime mover, in July 1962 new Geneva Accords were signed by the US, Russia, China and both Vietnams, for the neutralisation of Laos.
Hanoi’s leadership treated this arrangement with contempt, as a mere figleaf thrust over its military operations by Moscow, requiring no more respect than Saigon had given to the 1954 settlement. North Vietnamese troops continued to move freely through Laos, though their presence was always denied. CIA cynics dubbed the Ho Chi Minh Trail ‘the Averell Harriman Memorial Highway’, because the veteran diplomat had secured no safeguards against the communists’ systematic violations of the Accords. For the purposes of this story, which is Vietnam’s, all that matters is that Prince Souvanna Phouma thereafter ruled in Vientiane, ever more deeply in thrall to the US. Elsewhere across his wild and woolly country, a desultory and unacknowledged war raged in which several hundred thousand people fell victim to the insistence of Hanoi upon using Laos as an estuarial network of protected supply routes into Cambodia and South Vietnam; and to the desire of the Americans to stop them doing so, without too conspicuously flouting Neutralisation.
Almost from inauguration day, MIT economist Professor Walt Rostow, a World War II bomb-target analyst now translated into Kennedy’s deputy special assistant for national security and within a few months director of policy planning at the State Department, urged the administration to shift focus from Laos to Vietnam. The president himself soon agreed that the latter looked a better place to face down the communists: in the face of intensifying guerrilla activity, more must be done to shore up Diem. Security in the Mekong delta had become so precarious that medical supplies could be distributed to civilian hospitals only by the CIA’s planes and helicopters, amongst abandoned villages and untilled rice fields. In May 1961 Vice-President Lyndon Johnson visited Vietnam, pledged America’s continuing backing and dubbed Diem ‘the Winston Churchill of Asia’. David Halberstam wrote later of this trip: ‘He had given our word. It not only committed the Kennedy Administration more deeply … attached Washington a little more firmly to the tar baby of Saigon, escalated the rhetoric, but it committed the person of Lyndon Johnson. To him, a man’s word was important.’
In October Ed Lansdale wrote to World War II Airborne commander Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Kennedy’s personal military adviser until appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the following year: ‘The Vietnamese are an able and energetic people. They don’t seem to be themselves today. They are going to lose their country if some spark doesn’t make them catch fire to go to work to win this war. The spark could well be to place the right Americans into the right areas of the Vietnamese government to provide operational guidance … Such work will require Americans of talent and compassion.’
Lansdale thus recommended that the answer to the problems of the Vietnamese was to send them more Americans, and over the thirty-four-month span of the Kennedy presidency, that is what was done. In May 1961, four hundred Green Berets were dispatched, followed a few months later by forty US Army helicopters, along with four hundred personnel to fly and maintain them, together with a steadily increasing corps of advisers, soon serving alongside the ARVN down to battalion level, and by mid-1962 totalling eight thousand. The 8 February 1962 creation of MACV – Military Assistance Command Vietnam – was correctly interpreted by Hanoi as signifying Kennedy’s intention to lift his stake. By November 1963 there would be sixteen thousand Americans on the ground: soldiers, sailors and airmen; technicians and pilots; electronic eavesdroppers and agriculturalists; academic social analysts and flamboyant special forces cowboys; spooks and geeks of every hue.
US aid was running at $400 million a year, with military equipment and vehicles shipped in unprecedented quantities. In April 1962 the Diem government embarked on a ‘strategic hamlets’ programme, a refinement of the earlier agrovilles, designed to separate peasants from guerrillas by relocation behind barbed wire – at the cost of displacement from the burial plots that meant so much to every family. A RAND Corporation report questioned the policy’s acceptability, but at the Pentagon Marine Maj. Gen. Victor ‘Brute’ Krulak pounded the table and asserted that his country would ‘force the peasants to do what’s necessary to make the program succeed’. The hamlets had significant tactical success, making life tougher for the Vietcong, but the social and political cost was high. Old Indochina hand Howard Simpson watched as a ‘sullen, bedraggled group of peasants’ was herded from their huts for resettlement. An old man with sores on his scalp protested vehemently, and in rapid French, to a TV crew filming the scene, ‘It isn’t just! They are making us move. We don’t want to move. Tell them. It is not just!’ As security men hustled the old peasant away he wailed disconsolately, ‘The Americans don’t understand. Tell the Americans we don’t want to leave!’
At a 23 July 1962 strategy conference in Honolulu, Gen. Paul Harkins told an audience of politicians and brass headed by defense secretary Robert McNamara: ‘During April, 434 ground operations were mounted … increased to 441 in May. Over 1,000 air sorties were flown in June … PRES DIEM has indicated that he plans his troops will get out into the field more often and stay out longer … There is no doubt that we are on the winning side.’ Asked about timings, Harkins said that he thought victory over the NLF could be attained by the end of 1963. McNamara entered a cautionary note, saying, ‘We must expect the worst and make