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1 ‘ENOUGH WAR FOR EVERYBODY’
A general soothed the impatience of Lt. Don Snider on his passage to Vietnam, saying, ‘Son, there’s going to be enough war for everybody.’ Snider, born in 1940, hailed from an Ohio cattle-farming family. He had loved West Point, ‘because it represented the kind of values I had been raised with’, and in 1964 found himself training and advising Vietnamese special forces. All the Americans who served in those early days went by choice, found thrills and also frustrations. Snider made operational parachute descents near the junction of the Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian borders: ‘When I jumped out of the plane at night, I couldn’t have told you what country we were over.’ They landed atop triple-canopy jungle, then roped themselves to the ground. He loved some of his American comrades, especially a formidable NCO named Sgt. Zahky. ‘What an opportunity it was, to go to war with somebody like that!’ he said wonderingly. After days and nights of probing the enemy’s territory, the hard part was to make the rendezvous with extraction helicopters.
Snider never bonded effectively with his men, most of them Nungs – ethnic Chinese: ‘In three tours I never really got to know them, to work out whom to trust. They were mercenaries. They said, “If you pay me, I’ll fight.” Eventually, however, the pay wasn’t enough.’ Snider completed seven deep recon missions before transferring to the delta to train and lead local defence forces on the Cambodian border. They ran into some bad ambushes while searching for Lt. Nick Rowe, a Texan SF man held by the Vietcong for five years. Snider came out of one clash humping a wounded interpreter on his back, and with bulletholes in their radio: ‘There was no will among the Vietnamese people I was with. I thought: if this is the way we are going to fight this war, it is not going to be a successful proposition.’ By his tour’s end, ‘I didn’t want to do any more with special forces or with the Vietnamese. I wasn’t disillusioned with war – experience had just taught me that what I was doing wasn’t worth it.’
Snider came to believe that the only advisers who accomplished worthwhile things were those who, unlike himself, forged relationships with local people. Frank Scotton, soon after arriving in country, rode in a jeep with a sergeant who waved and smiled extravagantly at every civilian they passed. Scotton asked, why the big show? The driver replied, ‘If I get captured, I want the Vietnamese to remember me as a big, dumb, friendly American.’ Helicopter door-gunner Erik Dietrich loved his ARVN comrades, among whom he ferried many wounded back from battlefields – or maybe not: ‘They died quietly, sometimes even with what I took to be an apology for the inconvenience and mess they were causing.’ Dietrich nonetheless admitted embarrassment when a little paratrooper whom he befriended tried to hold hands. ‘His last letter wandered about the country for a time before finding me: “A month missing you. I couldn’t help remembering of our working days. I never forget … I wish you a good luck on your way of duty. And when we see each other again, I shall give you a good narration.”’ Dietrich reflected sadly later: ‘The “narration” never got told. Nguyen Chanh Su, Vo Van Co, Bong Ng-Huu. What became of you all? Pham Gia Cau, you dear brave man who fought at Dienbienphu and walked south at the partition, to whose capabilities I unhesitatingly entrusted my life, you are ever in my prayers …’
Yet some Americans were driven almost to despair. On 1 March 1964 foreign service officer Doug Ramsey wrote home to his parents: ‘The fabric of this government is rotten to the core, and from top to bottom. You pull a lever and find that there is no cable attached to it; and if you manage to get hold of a cable, there’s nothing on the far end of that, either … Unless we are willing to promote real revolutionary change, I’m afraid I must agree with those who say we have no business being here. If we cannot offer the people of Vietnam anything better than a protracted struggle … If we merely continue to … bolster a feudal regime that is doomed anyway … we cannot expect real support.’
Ramsey later became assistant to John Vann, out of the army and serving as regional pacification chief in the delta. He described the colonel starting with ‘the small, determined, reverse-slanting eyes, somewhat reminiscent of the movie star Lloyd Bridges, which transfixed you like blue-gray laser beams. His voice was slightly harsh, with a southern Virginia accent. He was fairly short, with blond hair thinning in front; and at forty-one, he was beginning to develop a slight paunch.’ Ramsey respected Vann’s ‘animal physical vitality’, which persisted through sixteen hours of every twenty-four, and the man’s competitiveness: ‘He wanted to know everything about everything and everybody. With his prodigious memory and eye for detail, he could have been an immensely successful administrator … save that he cherished a passion for action. He described himself as a Virginia redneck at heart, and maybe he was. His loyalty to friends and loathing for foes were absolutes. He was also a fabulous networker, cultivating ruthlessly and usually successfully the acquaintanceship of anyone who might fit his purposes.’ Superbly athletic, he could perform a somersault from a standing start and was a showy volleyball player.
Lt. Gen. Fred Weyand said, ‘He was one guy I would have trusted with my life.’ Ramsey described Vann as fanatically self-disciplined about everything save sex: ‘John’s idea of relaxation was to have two sisters on the same night, but I had no right to complain, because he offered to cut me in.’ He believed that for all Vann’s manic womanising, this muddled man retained a deep love for Mary-Jane, the former wife whom he had betrayed so often. Army captain and adviser Gordon Sullivan admired Vann’s grasp of Vietnamese realities, rather than games played to please Americans. ‘He’d say: “I’m not interested in the dog and pony show.” A lot of the opposition to him came from jealousy.’
Such thoughtful men as Doug Ramsey were alternately exasperated by failures of US policy and revolted by communist savagery – the latter’s atrocities took place daily: ‘shooting into school yards in the hope of getting three ARVN soldiers amidst fifty children, or killing dozens of civilians in restaurants or on the streets to chalk up two Americans; mortaring towns willy-nilly to terrorise; assassinating unarmed teachers and murdering disarmed PoWs; killing female friends of GVN officers, as well as the officers themselves’. Ramsey urged that a successful pacification programme must work through small local advisory groups, unashamedly modelled on communist cells.
He and Frank Scotton once arrived in a hamlet unannounced, and entered its chief’s courtyard to find a cluster of black-pyjamaed men, obviously NLF, conferring within. They scowled at the newcomers, but made no hostile move since both Americans were armed. The hamlet chief assured both groups that if everybody stuck to his own business, nothing unpleasant need happen. The communists eventually recognised the comedy of the situation and posed for photos. Nonetheless, when the Americans drove away, they were relieved there had been no High Noon. And sobered to witness the freedom with which the enemy transacted business in broad daylight, within an hour’s drive south-west of Saigon.
For all its difficulties and frustrations Ramsey, like Scotton and Vann, loved the life. While rejecting Lawrence of Indochina comparisons, he liked to see himself as Spartacus, ‘though look what happened to him’. He wrote: ‘At worst, being in Nam provided one with opportunities to pander to and magnify childhood macho self-images: the heroic swashbuckler, rifle in one hand and candy for the kids in the other, by day doing his thing for God, country, democracy and free enterprise, in an environment providing enough danger to keep the blood running fast, the stories flowing and building, the promotions coming through – and by night being able to sample all that Saigon had to offer. In the words of Tom Lehrer’s 1953 “Old Dope Peddler”: in Vietnam, while doing good you could also do very well indeed.’ More than Lehrer’s satirical ballad, however, Ramsey became increasingly obsessed with the music of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem.
The CIA’s Frank Snepp came to Vietnam later, but was cast in the same mould. He was the son of a fiercely establishment ex-Marine colonel and subsequent judge, with whom he had a troubled relationship. The most loving bond of his childhood in North Carolina was with his black nanny. His best claims to employment by the CIA on leaving Columbia’s School of International