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 our plans accordingly,’ which the defense secretary interpreted as scheduling Vietcong defeat for year end 1965.
In those Kennedy years, many of the characters who would play roles throughout the American war, some prominent and others less so, gathered around the stage and set about learning their lines. In 1961 Duong Van Mai travelled from Saigon to Washington to study. She was fascinated by the US, but troubled by segregation in Southern states, feeling unsure whether she was expected to use a White or Coloured bathroom. Then she met David Elliott, who would become her husband and the other half of a remarkable partnership that committed most of two lifetimes to studying the Vietnamese people. A Bostonian, he had attended Yale before serving with the US Army’s radio interception unit at Tan Son Nhut. He then spent a year with MACV intelligence before joining RAND, for which he embarked on a protracted research programme in the delta. Why Vietnam? Elliott said: ‘This was where it was happening, the most intense front in the Cold War. I was offered a front seat to see history being made.’
Idealists and sensation-seekers alike plunged into the heady mudge created on Saigon’s streets by diesel fumes, spices, obsessive vehicle-horn abuse, breathless heat. Some of those strolling up Tu Do and gawking at the sights – or, more likely, at the girls – were bright young men eager to set the world to rights, who came to care passionately about the Vietnamese. Frank Scotton, born in 1938, grew up in Massachusetts, ‘where the revolutionary war against oppressive foreign occupiers is part of the culture’; his father had been killed at the Bulge in 1944. ‘I thought that I would perform some sort of service. In the past we had been good tinkerers abroad, getting in there and fixing things. We had the folk belief that we would always win, even after Korea sandpapered that ideal a little.’ Throughout Scotton’s long stint in Vietnam he remained powerfully conscious of his own heritage, his family’s record of physical courage: ‘I didn’t want them to feel that I wasn’t measuring up.’
He joined the US Information Agency rather than the Foreign Service, ‘because I’m a natural field man’. In Washington before flying, he met three young Vietnamese lieutenants who asked if he spoke their language. No, he said, but he had been told that French would do. They looked uncomfortable. One said, ‘That is the colonial language.’ When the American reached Vietnam in 1962, he quickly became aware of the handicap imposed on almost all his countrymen by the inability to converse: ‘They couldn’t even pronounce place names. I also became very conscious of the weight of history against which we were contending. Within a few weeks, I was a sufficiently wise guy to recognise that Diem was not “the Winston Churchill of Asia”.’
Scotton became an impassioned student of the country, travelling fearlessly and indeed recklessly through paddies and jungle, supervising a survey for the US ambassador about sentiment in remote hamlets. One of a small band of Americans who became committed to the cause, he said, ‘I was always looking for other people who felt the same way. There was a divide between those who really cared, and those who did not.’ Young Saigonese who met him soon began to say that Scotton was ky qua – strange or eccentric – and plenty of Americans would have agreed: embassy people called him ‘the maverick mongrel’. Vietnam cost him a marriage: his wife Katherine did her utmost to make a life at their house in Qui Nhon, organising English classes. After some months, however, she went home, they divorced, and thereafter he formed a series of passionate local relationships.
Doug Ramsey also arrived in 1962, fresh from language school, and was posted to spend his first months circulating USIA material from an office in Dalat: ‘I found it ironic to be distributing a paper entitled “Free World” in the interests of the Diem dictatorship.’ Local people proved wary of expressing opinions about anything to a foreigner unless or until they knew him well, but Ramsey quickly decided that Diem was not a credible or sustainable leader, and developed a matching enthusiasm for some elusive political ‘Third Force’. ‘I got interested in what Frank Scotton was doing – trying to build from the bottom.’ He came increasingly to believe that a decade or two of communist domination was preferable to ‘the imbecility of our policies’, an interminable war. Dominance of a given area by either side ‘in many places extended to no more than the lethal range of an AK-47 or an M-14’. Ramsey professed to be less dismayed by communist terror than by ‘indiscriminate artillery and air strikes by the US and Saigon regime’. Down in the Mekong delta, he caught an early glimpse of the limitations of government forces when the mere rumour of an impending attack caused the local ARVN unit to take flight.
Bob Destatte was one of sixteen children in a Catholic family of poor but fiercely hard-working Ohio factory workers. He abandoned a college teaching course in favour of the army: ‘I wanted to see something outside my small town.’ He volunteered for the Army Security Agency because a military friend told him this would ensure overseas postings, and he became a morse interceptor. In 1961 he was sent to Saigon. On the plane flying in, he expected something, he said, ‘like those people in Terry and the Pirates – sneaky folk hiding in the shadows’. But from the moment that from the back of a truck he glimpsed his first two girls in ao-dais, he thought differently: so differently, indeed, that within months and at the age of twenty-two he was married to Nguyet Thi Anh. He met her when a young Vietnamese boy who worked with their unit, in those days based in two vans at Tan Son Nhut airbase, invited him to a family dinner. He liked the mother from their first meeting, and the boy’s sister taught him to use chopsticks. ‘I guess it was love at first sight.’ They were joined in a civil ceremony, but in collusion with his officers the marriage was not made official until just before he rotated back to the US in 1963, because local weddings triggered instant repatriations.