Piecework

Diem and Nhu and the Dragon Lady are forgotten now, their faces blurred by time. Forgotten too is all the optimistic gush that rolled out of the typewriters of Saigon flacks, the nonsense about strategic hamlets, electronic fences, Special Forces A-Teams, the C.I.D.G., the winning of hearts and minds — all those lights at the end of all those tunnels. A billion words must have issued from the collective mouths of official spokesmen; the men in the black pajamas, however, kept coming down those trails to fight. Who now remembers the hundreds of thousands of words that dropped from the lips of Sir Robert Thompson, who periodically retailed his wisdom to the gullible Americans? He had had a part in the British victory over the Malayan insurgents; that made him an expert. So the Americans listened, while Thompson declared himself a clear-and-hold man rather than a search-and-destroy man, and none of it mattered, because neither strategy worked. In offices in Washington and Saigon, the slick charts looked persuasive; on the field of battle, the Communists were absorbing the most horrendous punishment, and winning.

Only a handful of Americans can remember when M.A.A.G. changed its name to M.A.C.V., or when Chase Manhattan opened its Saigon office, or how many tons of Coca-Cola were unloaded at Cam Ranh Bay. Such details exist in the dusty files of the outfits that managed the war, but they don’t, of course, matter anymore. Other details should. How many remember that the first American killed in Vietnam was Specialist Fourth Class James T. Davis, of Livingston, Tennessee? He died in an ambush on December 22, 1961, just outside Due Hoa, twelve miles from Saigon. The last to die were Marine Corporals Charles McMahon, Jr., twenty-two, of Woburn, Massachusetts, and Darwin Judge, nineteen, of Marshalltown, Iowa. They perished under a North Vietnamese artillery barrage that was laid upon Tan Son Nhut airport on April 29, 1975, the day before the war ended. Their bodies, forgotten in the panic of evacuation, were not brought home until the following March. Their families remember, but almost nobody else in America knows their names. They are as forgotten as the almost 2.5 million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians who died between 1961 and 1975.

Everybody who went to Vietnam carries his or her own version of the war. Only 10 percent engaged in combat; the American elephant, pursuing the Vietnamese grasshopper, was extraordinarily heavy with logistical support. Tours were for a single year, so a man who \ fought through the 1968 Tet offensive would remember one war, a man who was there in 1971 another. Some cooked eggs in mess halls; others waded through muck in the swamps.

All the reporters remember the Five O’Clock Follies, held downtown in the old Rex Theater under the auspices of JUSPAO (Joint United States Public Affairs Office). These daily briefings, held by the men who clerked the war, were usually a bizarre amalgam of kill ratios, body counts, incident counts, weapons recovered. The flacks were neat, clean, invariably crew-cut, and optimism was the order of the day. Occasionally a visiting politician or labor leader would be introduced, after seventy-two hours in the country, to serve up the official line. The message was understood: surely the richest country on earth, the world’s most powerful military machine, would eventually triumph over these badly equipped, badly fed little Orientals. We had technology. We had B-52S and patrol boats and electronic sensors and fighter planes and aircraft carriers and money, endless billions of dollars. Of course we would win. Above all, we would win because we were right. We would roll back the Communist tide.

Out in the field, the grunts who were fighting one of the best-motivated armies in history knew better. The grunts always knew better.