Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975. Max Hastings

Porter in which he was crossing the Mekong delta took rounds in the wings from communist small arms, and the twenty-six-year-old exulted, murmuring to himself, ‘I love it! My God, I love it.’ He said later: ‘It was simply great. I fell in love with Vietnam and the Vietnamese … I believed that if the CIA generated the right intelligence and got it to the right people, we could really make a difference for the better.’

      Harry Williams started working as a wireless eavesdropper in April 1964, and embraced the assignment eagerly: ‘This was a good war, a wonderful war. We were cowboys. I loved the work, and felt I was making a real contribution. I felt assured of the rightness of our cause, and that we would win.’ He left his pregnant wife Peggy at home in the US, and rented a Saigon apartment. Because he could speak their language, Vietnamese neighbours branded him ‘the Frenchman’. He travelled extensively around the country chatting to local people in those days before wandering became prohibitively perilous. One day up near Danang, a village elder asked him in puzzlement, ‘Why did they kill Kennedy?’ Williams found that many Vietnamese grasped the notion that the president had been seeking to help them, and vaguely suspected that his death might have been linked to this. The American decided that the default political stance of most local people was indifference to both sides: ‘The average Joe on the street really couldn’t care less, except to stay alive.’

      The longer sensitive Americans stuck around, the more they lamented the change coming over Saigon. The tall plane trees on Tu Do were felled, and traffic doubled. Old hand Howard Simpson said: ‘The sleepy colonial capital had become a crowded, dirty wartime metropolis.’ Adviser Col. Sid Berry wrote: ‘Saigon has greatly changed … It has grown crowded, vulgar, glossy, commercial, grasping, greedy, dirty, tinny. Too many Americans. Far too many Americans. Who drive up prices, attract the cheap and gaudy and tasteless.’

      The tempo of the war rose steadily. Williams often dined at the Brasserie, a little restaurant behind the Rex cinema run by a French-Vietnamese woman named Helene. One night in August when he entered, she greeted him by saying seriously, ‘You should eat somewhere else.’ Sure enough, an hour later the place was bombed. That summer, Williams was assigned to a team monitoring North Vietnamese infiltration on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. They established a base at Khe Sanh, close to the western end of the DMZ, less than three miles from the border with Laos, where a special forces A Team was already ensconced. The key personnel were civilians from Syracuse University Research Corporation, a body created by the Office of Naval Intelligence. Their technology was dubbed POSSUM: Portable Signal Unscramble Monitoring System.

      The plan was to plant sensors on nearby Hill 1701. On 28 May an H-34 airlifted Marine Capt. Al Gray and three Vietnamese to clear the summit with defoliants. Gray was an austere, dedicated warrior who relished the drollery that his ARVN sergeant had once commanded a Vietminh machine-gun company: ‘He was a great warrior.’ On the mountain, matters went sour: within hours of their arrival rain and mist descended – and stayed down for thirty days, preventing the team’s extraction. They subsisted for a while on starvation rations, then decided they must walk out. The descent went without incident save the usual leeches and big animals, until they emerged from the jungle to confront a man bathing: VC. They shot him, then bolted towards Khe Sanh. For the last six miles Gray carried a wounded man, earning himself a Bronze Star. The electronic monitoring eventually got started.

      Many of that first crop of Americans were earnest men who feared God as well as honouring the flag. Sid Berry wrote to his wife Anne: ‘A good rest this weekend. Needed it. Now back to the fray. 101 sit-ups, 40 push-ups, 30 waistbands, two chapters of Romans, a shave, shower and now a letter to thee.’ Even some of those who spent fewer hours with their bibles than did the good colonel were less preoccupied with bargirls than legend suggests. A newly-arrived special forces NCO looked in awe at the filth coating Frank Scotton and his team after days in the hills and said, ‘Gee, after your experiences I bet you guys go wild with the ladies when you get into town.’ Scotton disabused him – their first priorities were always the same: a bath and decent sleep in a clean bed.

      A few Vietnamese managed to enjoy the war, including Nguyen Van Uc, who clocked six thousand hours as a helicopter pilot. ‘I loved flying,’ he said, ‘and got huge satisfaction from doing the job when it went right.’ Most of his countrymen, however, took a bleaker view. One morning in August 1964, Lt. Phan Nhat Nam of Saigon’s 7th Airborne approached a bunker entrance in an apparently deserted village. ‘Anyone down there?’ shouted one of his men, then turned to Nam. ‘Lieutenant, let me toss a grenade in.’ Nam, twenty-one years old and experiencing his first operation, told the soldier instead to fire a burst from his Thompson.

      This prompted an old man slowly to emerge, sobbing, carrying an old woman with a hideous head wound. He laid her on the ground before bowing solemnly in all four directions. Nam felt shocked by the spectacle, together with that of two dead teenage Vietcong in a nearby ditch, the first enemy corpses he had seen. This was a Catholic community, and in its church he found five more bodies – those of a husband and wife clutching three children to their breasts, all killed by blast, as had been a young girl he found nearby, her purple blouse flapping in the breeze. Nam wrote: ‘I felt stunned and found it hard to breathe, in a daze from my anger and sense of boundless grief.’

      Next day, as his battalion swept through an almost abandoned village amid occasional bursts of enemy fire, he found a young woman sitting silent on the brick floor of a wrecked house, holding a wicker basket: ‘her eyes looked straight ahead in a blank, stupefied stare’. She stood up as the soldiers entered and Hieu, the radio-operator, slipped past her into the ruined kitchen, to search for food. Nam asked why the girl lingered in the midst of a battlefield. When he gestured towards her with his pistol, ‘she remained silent, her stunned eyes emitting a flash of terror. Suddenly, as if performing a gymnastic exercise, she thrust out the basket towards me. It contained two sets of clothing, blouses and pants, a head-scarf and a small paper package tightly secured with a rubber band. When I opened it, I saw two gold-strand necklaces and a pair of earrings. Hieu muttered behind my back: “This bitch is crazy. She’s got so scared she’s insane.” Then he caught the glint of the necklaces. “Gold! It must be more than one tael