Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975. Max Hastings
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an American adviser who condemned the Southern showing on 2 January as ‘a miserable damn performance’, at a moment when Harkins was still insisting that Bac was a victory. Few people, including the general, doubted that the dismissive words came from John Vann, and he demanded the colonel’s head.
MACV finally decided that it would be more prudent to allow this galvanic but famously indiscreet officer to complete his tour in March as scheduled. Vann’s influence on the war would thereafter wax and wane until its dramatic termination almost a decade later, but in 1963 he played a critical role in providing authoritative briefings to Sheehan, Halberstam and others about the bungling and pusillanimity that characterised Southern operations, and the deceits practised to conceal these. The colonel warned Maj. Gen. Bruce Palmer that Harkins was allowing himself to be duped by Saigon’s officers, who routinely assaulted objectives they knew to be untenanted by the enemy. It was nonetheless the Harkins version that Maxwell Taylor and Robert McNamara chose to believe. Frances Fitzgerald later wrote in her influential history Fire in the Lake: ‘The United States had … made the Saigon government into a military machine whose sole raison d’être was to fight the Communists. The only difficulty was that the machine did not work.’ The ARVN was not an army ‘but a collection of individuals who happened to be carrying weapons’. This was an overstatement, but contained a core of truth.
The Ap Bac affair prompted extensive media comment. Arthur Krock wrote in his syndicated column on 9 January: ‘No amount of US military assistance can preserve independence for a people who are unwilling to die for it.’ Richard Hughes, a Hong Kong-based Australian veteran who wrote for the London Sunday Times, said that he saw clear parallels with US follies in China after World War II. The best the Americans were promising, he said, was a ten-year war to preserve a ‘reactionary, isolated, unpopular’ regime. The only way out, he suggested, was for the Saigon government to admit communists to a coalition.
Within Vietnam, word spread swiftly about the fiasco. A Vietnamese officer wrote that Ap Bac ‘greatly hurt ARVN morale’. Ly Tong Ba, who rose to become a general, later denounced Neil Sheehan, ‘who only wrote articles filled with malicious arguments and inaccuracies’. He also argued that his own adviser on the ground at Bac, Jim Scanlon, was as ‘terrified’ of Vann as of the Vietcong, which prompted him also to paint a false picture of events. The press coverage was seized upon by MACV officers, and by others who deplored ‘negative’ reporting, as highlighting the difficulties of fighting a war covered by a media which recognised no obligation to favour ‘our side’ – meaning the US and its South Vietnamese client – as had been the patriotic duty of every correspondent in World War II, when the press was additionally constrained by censorship.
It remains as difficult now as it was then to see virtue in Gen. Harkins’ attempts to deny the real state of affairs. The maxim obtains for all those who hold positions of authority, in war as in peace: lie to others if you must, but never to yourselves. MACV’s chief could make a case for talking nonsense to Halberstam and Arnett, but he was peddling the same fairy tales in top-secret cables to Washington. Nonetheless, a valid criticism persists of the media’s coverage throughout the war: the critics got bang to rights the shortcomings of the Diem regime and its successors, but gave nothing like the same attention to the blunders and horrors perpetrated by the communists. Halberstam, Sheehan and the rest conscientiously and sometimes brilliantly fulfilled their duty, to tell what they saw and heard; Saigon’s apologists, exemplified by Time magazine, destroyed their own credibility by denying unpalatable realities. The South was only half the rightful story, however. Much of the media showed itself ignorant of or blind to the tyranny prevailing in the North, which was inflicting worse hardships on its own people.
An Australian surgeon who served as a civilian volunteer down at Vung Tau wrote later: ‘It seems fair to say what is usually left unsaid, that if the economic aid to South Vietnam had not been prevented by the activities of the Vietcong, the people of the country which today is war-torn and unhappy would have been well-fed, in better health and better-educated.’ Frances Fitzgerald concluded her powerful 1972 account of America in Indochina with an expression of yearning for North Vietnamese victory, for a moment when ‘“individualism” and its attendant corruption give way to the discipline of the revolutionary community’. American officials, she wrote, might attribute this to the triumph of brainwashing by ‘hard-core Communists’. Not so, she asserted: ‘It will simply mean that the moment has arrived for the narrow flame of revolution to cleanse the lake of Vietnamese society.’ Here was a view of the war that seems as delusional at one end of the political spectrum as was that of Gen. Harkins and his kind at the other.
2 THE BUDDHISTS REVOLT
Throughout the spring of 1963, the credibility of the Diem government drained away as surely as Vietcong morale and strength rose, impelled by a surge of excitement after the victory at Ap Bac. In the 261st Battalion, its history records, ‘there was much singing’. COSVN broadcast a new slogan: ‘Emulate Bac!’ The battle provided an important boost to the ‘forward’ faction in Hanoi, which argued ever more insistently that the season for caution had passed; that in the South, the prize lay ripe for taking. Michael Burleigh has written of US policy-making: ‘Seldom has an imperial power put its prestige behind a more suicidal group of puppets than the Ngo Dinh clan.’ Even as the security situation deteriorated, in May the Saigon regime adopted an initiative that set its wagon careering downhill towards the final wreck. Vietnam’s Buddhist priesthood had always resented the favouritism shown by the Ngos towards their fellow-Catholics. On 8 May 1963, when worshippers assembled in Hue for the 2,527th birthday of the Buddha, a Catholic army officer sought to enforce an old decree banning them from displaying their flag. Several thousand Buddhists gathered outside the local radio station to hear a broadcast by prominent bonze Thich Tri Quang. The station director suddenly cancelled the transmission, saying that it had not been approved by the censors. He also telephoned the army, which dispatched to the scene a troop of armoured cars. When the Buddhists ignored an order to disperse, the soldiers opened fire. A woman and eight children died in the ensuing melee.
This gratuitous, murderous folly prompted weeks of anti-government demonstrations in many cities, Buddhists being joined by thousands of students. It was subsequently claimed that the protests were communist-orchestrated. Plainly they suited the NLF and Hanoi: cadres may have encouraged the bonzes. Beyond doubt, however, what took place represented a surge of spontaneous anger against the regime, which refused to apologise for the deaths in Hue, or to punish those responsible. Diem sat on his hands, ignoring warnings from Washington, while his brother Nhu embarked on a programme of repression.
Frank Scotton said: ‘Most of the bonzes were victims of their own wishful thinking about the possibility of representative government, but the Buddhist crisis was not just about politics. For Diem to have made a grand gesture of reconciliation, he would have had to go up against his own younger brother, and he couldn’t bring himself to do that.’ Reporter Marguerite Higgins described Quang, foremost among the rebellious monks. Far from being a passive, meditative figure, she said, ‘deep, burning eyes started out from a gigantic forehead. He had an air of massive intelligence, total self-possession and brooding suspicion.’ A Southern officer wrote: ‘The [Buddhist] crisis was like a great fire, uncontrollable and raging quickly. It had a strong negative effect on the morale of officers and enlisted men … I knew that it was impossible to maintain Diem’s government. My only hope was that power would fall into the hands of a new, competent and loyal leadership.’
When Duong Van Mai returned to Saigon from Washington that autumn, she found that her family, and especially her mother, had become bitterly hostile to the government because of its assault on the faith to which an overwhelming majority of Vietnamese professed adherence. On 10 June David Halberstam wrote: ‘The conflict between the South Vietnamese Government and Buddhist priests is sorely troubling American officials here … [who] are deeply embarrassed … and frustrated in the face of persistent questioning by individual Vietnamese, who ask: “Why does your Government allow this to go on?”’ Americans were perceived as literally calling the shots.
Next day, Western media organisations were alerted to attend a protest in Saigon. Few took heed, however, because its nature was unspecified. On the morning of the