The Spartans of Indochina

A curious demonstration took place one day in August 1969 at an American base camp near Saigon. A skinny, shockheaded North Vietnamese stripped to his undershorts, dropped to the ground and, quick and grace ful as a snake, crawled 25 yards to the camp's outer defensive perimeter. There were two rolls of concertina barbed wire--each about two and a half feet in diameter--laid side by side on the red earth and a third roll on top, forming a rough triangle. They were braced with single-strand barbed wire stretched horizontally and diagonally from steel posts and were laced with dozens of empty ration cans containing loose marbles that rattled an alarm at the slightest pressure.

When he reached the wire, the Vietnamese paused for a moment, quivering like a hunting animal. He carefully spread two strands, then two more. He inched forward, paused again; then, expanding, contracting, twisting, he seemed to flow through the wire as though he existed in a different dimension. In less than a minute he was inside the perimeter, his body untouched by the thousands of barbs, without having rattled a single can.

The North Vietnamese, once a member of a sapper unit--the "death volunteers" who chalk their names on their coffins before an attack--stood and gazed straight ahead, his face expressionless. His staring audience, 200 men, support troops, mostly, red-faced in the stifling heat, flat-footed and overweight, breathed a collective "Son of a bitch." They had seen a conjuror's trick, and even in broad daylight, standing a few feet away, they could not understand how it had been done.

In his silence, his mastery, his will focused like a burning glass, the sapper personified an army that did what no one thought possible: It continued to survive, to fight, even to attack, in the face of the greatest concentrations of firepower ever used in battle. And ultimately, it seems likely, to win. For under the cease-fire plan that is being discussed as this is being written in late November, North Vietnamese forces will remain in South Vietnam, masters of a field from which the American forces will have departed.

Strangest of all is the fact that in the nearly seven years since the first troops of the People's Army--matching the American build-up--began the long march to the south, so little has been learned about them. The Viet Cong, who were all southerners, were different. They were men and youths from the next hut, the next hamlet or the district beyond the river. Not many of them can have survived. But the North Vietnamese have remained cloaked in mystery, as though their secret weapon was a machine for clouding the mind of the West.

The record of wrong guessing is so complete, unbroken, final that it defies the odds: like being dealt 100 poker hands without a pair. "I personally...underestimated the persistence and tenacity of the North Vietnamese," said former Secretary of State Dean Rusk in an interview not long ago. That will do for a beginning. The Pentagon papers are an anthology of incomprehension. The beginning of wisdom came in January 1969, in National Security Study Memorandum Number One, prepared for the incoming President Nixon and made public recently by Jack Anderson. "As far as our knowledge of how Hanoi thinks and feels, we see through a glass darkly, if at all," was the consensus view of the military community. A praiseworthy admission of ignorance, but strange, too, when we possess spinning satellites, black-painted reconnaissance planes whose cameras shoot miles of high-resolution film, infrared lighting, thousands of sensor devices that can detect the ammonia in urine--a water buffalo hitting a flat rock will trigger a B-52 mission from Guam--communications intercepts, computers to untangle Vietnamese codes, jungle scouts, double agents, across-the-border penetration teams.

Yet as the technology has been refined, the errors have multiplied. The pivotal Tet offensive of 1968 was a convulsive surprise. In 1970, after a year of "Vietnamization," the South Vietnamese army went adventuring in Cambodia. One of its major objectives was COSVN, the Central Office for South Vietnam, the senior headquarters for the conduct of the war from the environs of Saigon to the tip of the Ca Mau Peninsula in the distant, haunted south of mangrove swamps, low-lying paddies and sodden jungle. The South Vietnamese found some ammunition, decaying tennis shoes, some sheds and rough bamboo furniture, but no sign of that underground city of arsenals, conference rooms and barracks--clearly a vision of hell itself--that President Nixon had conjured on television. Does COSVN exist? In a dimension inaccessible to us?

The next year, it was Laos. The South Vietnamese rode west on Highway Nine toward Tchepone, and right off the map. There were North Vietnamese in the trees and the roots, tunneled under the landing zones, waiting, waiting. One night an entire South Vietnamese headquarters staff disappeared. And at the end of it, the South Vietnamese infantry, desperate with the fear of ghosts, streamed back to Khe Sanh, clinging to the skids of helicopters, piled on tanks, or simply running, barefoot, their boots tied by the laces around their necks and bouncing on their chests.

Then, in April of last year, the biggest surprise of all. Ten divisions, or something like it, with tanks and armored personnel carriers at An Loc, at Kontum, and in the Demilitarized Zone. Unheard-of concentrations of artillery, tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition--all this weaponry deployed in secrecy. Only five weeks previously, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird had told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that no major enemy activity was anticipated, each inept word popping out of his tiny mouth like a bubble of swamp gas.

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Before last April, few had ever seen the North Vietnamese alive. From the tall watchtower at Gio Linh you could look through binoculars and see, (continued on page 116)Spartans of Indochina(Continued from page 81) occasionally, figures moving in the hamlets north of the Ben Hai River, just inside North Vietnam itself. Outside Khe Sanh in the winter of 1968, they were a presence, pushing their trenches a few feet closer to the perimeter each night. In the central highlands near Dak To, you could hear through the jungle screen the thud of their AK-47s, a heavier, more solid sound than the signature of the Americans' M-16s. At Hué they fought from behind the walls of the citadel for three weeks. Two French correspondents, having crossed the Perfume River under a white flag, drank tea with their commander, but one night the North Vietnamese slipped away and the South Vietnamese would not or could not stop them.

Even dead, they were a rarity. In those days the bodies were almost always dragged away and properly buried so they would not become homeless, wandering spirits. I recall seeing a couple of corpses north of Con Thien, an obscure place where a Marine patrol had been ambushed. Putrefaction had inflated their bellies inside their mustard-colored khaki uniforms until they looked like footballs. On the wire at Bu Dop, an outpost near the Cambodian border, the bodies seemed, on the other hand, to have been hollowed out--wisps of flesh, missing parts--covered by flapping rags, looking by the brilliant light of day like the fading recollections of a dream.

Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Herbert commanded a battalion of the 173rd Airborne Infantry Brigade in the Tiger Mountains and the An Lao Valley, head to head with the North Vietnamese. He respected them and eventually was hounded out of the Army for protesting the systematic torture of them and of Viet Cong prisoners to extract information. It was a curious exercise, since the information, by the time it was extracted, was almost always useless.

"I never saw an NVA soldier I wouldn't have been proud to have in my unit," Herbert told me. "Their discipline, their fire control, their spirit were all superb. There was...there was an aura about them. They looked military even if they were in black pajamas in some village trying to buy rice. In fact, it used to give them away."

That was an old story by then. Americans had been coming back from Vietnam for years saying that we were helping the wrong Vietnamese. It didn't take a genius to realize that there was something very wrong with the South Vietnamese army, but it was a fact that could not penetrate the lead-shielded walls of the Pentagon war room or the situation room in the basement of the White House.

We all knew why the South Vietnamese were so bad--corrupt officers, badly led and badly treated troops, no cause to fight for, the feeling of inferiority to the Americans, who treated them with generally undisguised contempt, and to the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, who had defeated the French and were, for good or bad, the masters of their own fate.

But no one was certain why the North Vietnamese were so good. Various generals have told me over the years that they were overrated--most recently, S. L. A. Marshall, the retired brigadier general and journalist who has been studying American troops in combat since the Second World War. At other times it would be suggested that the North Vietnamese had been able to overrun this outpost or ambush that convoy because they had been using narcotics, a sad irony, considering the way thousands of bored American troops chose to amuse themselves in the years ahead.

From time to time, the South Vietnamese command would trot out a defector. There have been only a few hundred of these all told, and only about 800 prisoners until the great spring battles began last year, and most of these were wounded or ill when taken. The defector would say that the Hanoi government was bitterly unpopular, that press gangs were taking 15-year-olds from the villages, and that the morale of the fighters was disintegrating. To believe such stories required a denial of reality that was a prelude to madness, or was madness itself.

But the American strategy required that the North Vietnamese should be pounded until they broke. A member of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's staff, quoted in the Pentagon papers, called it the "ratchet effect," increasing the intensity of the pain--the bombing, the artillery, the village burning--a notch at a time, until it became insupportable.

Everyone was certain that Asians armed with rifles, machine guns and shoulder rockets, counting every precious cartridge, shivering with malaria, hungry more often than not, could not stand up indefinitely to tanks, heavy artillery, clouds of helicopters and fighter bombers and to the invisible avengers, the B-52s.

The scenario was simple enough: At some point, the North Vietnamese in the field would break up, rot. And the sickness would spread up the tenuous supply line. The replacements would no longer be willing to start the long march south to almost certain death. Without them, the Viet Cong, its villages put to the torch, paddies defoliated and families marched off to "refugee camps," would finally collapse and drift impotently into the hills and jungles.

It was a reasonable enough error to equate the North Vietnamese with the North Koreans, or the Communist Chinese troops who lined up with them, or the Japanese in the Second World War. Particularly when no one had any information to the contrary. But a few people were not so sure. I remember the late Bernard Fall, who had seen much of the First Indochina War, telling a story about Dien Bien Phu. On the day the fortress fell in May 1954, an officer of the Vietminh--as the Vietnamese liberation army was called--was leading into captivity a French officer. Beyond the perimeter, bodies of the troops who had died in the final human-wave assault were piled in windrows. Avoiding one body, the Frenchman inadvertently stepped on the outstretched hand of another. There was a moan and the French officer bent toward the badly wounded man. Without turning, the Vietminh officer said, "Leave him. His service to the fatherland is complete."

But there were few illustrative anecdotes and even less hard information. We knew the army's leader, General Vo Nguyen Giap, who had organized the first platoon of the liberation army in the caves along the Chinese border in December 1944, had led its first attack, which destroyed a French outpost on Christmas Eve that year, had commanded the Dien Bien Phu battle, was now the minister of defense. A lawyer and onetime teacher of history at a Hanoi lycée, Giap seemed an authentic military genius who had refined and enlarged Mao's theories of guerrilla warfare and practiced them successfully against a far tougher foe than the demoralized Chinese Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek. We knew its size, roughly. In 1971, according to the American intelligence community, the North Vietnamese army numbered 425,000--at least 85,000 in South Vietnam, 67,000 in Laos and 40,000 in Cambodia. This force included about 60 regiments of 2700 men each, 20 of them independent and 40 formed into 13 divisions. There were also six artillery regiments and support and rear-services units. But as to who commanded these divisions, how they operated, what their mission was, no one would say; and in the light of the April 1972 offensive, I think it was because no one knew.

Even what we know about the training of the North Vietnamese army is based on a series of guesses. A senior intelligence official told me he "thought" that men were drafted at the age of 18 on the basis of village quotas but that they were encouraged to volunteer for service; that basic training was 13 weeks, divided into roughly equal parts of physical training, military subjects and political indoctrination; that they were sent down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in replacement packets of perhaps 200 men; (continued on page 173)spartans of Indochina(continued from page 116) and that the estimated annual loss of 50,000 men killed or seriously wounded was more than made up by the 100,000 or so who turned 18 each year.

Not much to go on, is it? But then I came across a publication that answered most, it not all, of my questions. It was the most recent in a series of studies prepared since 1965 by the Rand Corporation for the Department of Defense's Division of International Security Affairs and the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Published in 1970, it is titled "Conversations with NVA and V. C. Soldiers: A Study of Enemy Motivation and Morale."

This study demolishes the argument of the hard-line hawks that, misled by chickenhearted journalists and politicians, we blew a clean-cut victory in Vietnam by not hitting hard enough, by lacking the courage to turn the ratchet a couple of more times. The study, based on in-depth interviews with prisoners of war, flatly contradicts this thesis. It paints a picture of troops who are almost too good to be true--men who believe in what they are fighting for, who are not afraid to die, who have absolute certainty of ultimate victory and who, far from being robots driven forward by fanatical officers, appear to have a good deal more to say about their unit's operations than does the American GI.

"The enemy's picture of the world, his country, his mission and our [the U. S.] role in his country is remarkable by its simplicity, clarity and internal consistency," the Rand report says. "And the tenor of his responses is remarkable for the control of his passion and by his matter-of-factness and clarity. Finally, the responses are impressive by their straightforwardness. Unlike interviews with prisoners or defectors of World War Two, the Korean War, or refugees from behind the Iron Curtain, these interviews reveal few attempts of the Vietnamese prisoners to ingratiate themselves with the interviewer.... Analysis ... indicates that neither our military actions nor our political or psywar efforts seem to have made an appreciable dent in the enemy's over-all motivation and moral structure. [This passage is italicized in the original report.]

"The men emerge as the opposite of certain totalitarian types who 'parrot' one half of a line' but either do not accept or cannot remember or yield under pressure the other half.... The men do not simply 'mouth' what they have been told but seem to have fully absorbed and assimilated it, rendering it in their own terms, illustrating it with their own examples and experiences. Thus, what may have begun as indoctrination has become sincere conviction, opinion and emotion, and may. therefore, be regarded as virtually impossible to dislodge.... They can perhaps be killed, but they probably cannot be dissuaded either by words or by hardship."

Men who have lived through North Vietnamese assaults say that there is something unearthly about the resoluteness with which they obey their officers, even when going to what must seem like certain death. During the offensive that began in April, the fact that infantry troops could keep their cohesion and continue to attack despite the heaviest aerial bombardments the world has ever known constitutes a military miracle.

So the conclusion the Rand interviewers came to on the subject of death is perhaps not so extraordinary, after all. "We [the U.S.] feel that the soldier should perform even if he is plagued by fear of death," the report says. "The enemy seems to feel that fear of death itself can and must be overcome. In fact. in captured documents, we sometimes found enemy soldiers admitting, under the rubric of self-criticism, that 'I still experienced a fear of death.'"

A North Vietnamese cadre told the interviewers, "I was almost killed right in my first battle. Of course, everybody prefers to stay alive. However, when I went south, I knew that I would either be killed or captured. I accepted my fate.... The point is, sometimes one should accept death so that the younger generation will grow. One feels better when he knows about this fact of life."

But it is not the quick-and-clean death, the Hollywood-fantasy death on the ramparts of the Foreign Legion outpost, inside the circle of covered wagons, at the controls of a crippled Sop-with Camel. This is everyman's death--exhausted, sick, hungry--blasted into nothingness by B-52 carpet bombing from over 25,000 feet, ripped apart by the miniguns of a Cobra helicopter gunship, incinerated by napalm and white phosphorus spinning from under the wings of a neat-looking F-4 Phantom.

How to keep men functioning under these conditions? The Rand report goes into the question in detail, and there are several parts to the answer: the three-man cell; the kiem thao, or self-criticism session; the political officer; and the mutual confidence that flows back and forth through the squad, platoon and company.

The three-man cells, in the words of the Rand report, "live, work and fight together, encourage and supervise one another and are duty-bound to help each other in combat, to help their wounded buddies to the rear or to remove their dead bodies." The cell also provides a means of continuous checking for signs of flagging morale. The system is accepted, Rand says, "without any bitterness or anger." Many came to depend on it. A North Vietnamese soldier: "During the infiltration to the south, the other men in my cell had given me a lot of assistance, such as carrying my gun and ammunition when I was tired or sick. That attitude of the other men in the cell was so encouraging that I was even more determined to endure the hardships in order to arrive in the south."

The purpose of the self-criticism meetings "is to assist the individual as well as the collective group ... to improve performance by improving relations between man and man, man and cadre and cadre and cadre, by analyzing and thereby correcting past mistakes in battle and lay relieving individual anxieties and hostilities before they can expand and corrode individual or collective morale."

A North Vietnamese master sergeant: "I was pleased when the company cadres criticized me for my mistakes, because, thanks to them, I could make corrections and they were not known to the troops, who might lose confidence in me."

Matters that might call for a court-martial in the American Army are dealt with by kiem thao. A cadre recalled that he had been criticized for fleeing from a battle although he was only slightly wounded. "I did not feel depressed or discouraged, because I admitted I was too scared and ran away, although the wound on my hand was not serious," he told the interviewer.

A North Vietnamese private: "I would compare criticism sessions to a mirror with which I could look at my lace. If my face had a stain, I could see it through the mirror in order to clean it up."

The political officer's main task, according to Rand, is "to mobilize the spirit" of the men, like a sort of lay chaplain, "listening to their troubles, consoling them and rebuilding their morale if it is adversely affected by the death of some comrades, by failure in battle, by nostalgia for family or by other factors. In contrast to the combat leaders, who are on the whole very tough, the political officers are generally described as 'gentle, affable, friendly.' From past interviews they emerged as universally liked and respected men."

But a certain amount of boredom and cynicism about the political officers seeps into the interview. "We all obeyed his orders," a private said, "but I don't think the men liked him very much. He used to talk too much, especially during the night meeting, when we were all tired.... He said we should go on trying harder and harder, doing this and avoiding that, which we all knew about already. Young fighters do not enjoy listening to lengthy speeches."

The Rand study also focuses on the fact that, to a remarkable degree, company and platoon commanders take their men into their confidence in discussing military operations and are open to suggestions for changes. This is not always possible, and in such cases, the North Vietnamese, like other soldiers, must obey orders first and argue afterward.

"For example," said a North Vietnamese private, "once we stopped and stayed the night in a jungle. There were plenty of trenches and foxholes around us, but the company commander insisted that each fighter had to dig a new hole. We were very tired ... and we felt that this order was unreasonable. Actually, some fighters dug their holes without enthusiasm. During the next day, in the criticism session, we criticized the company commander for wasting our labor. He explained that he expected more troops would be coming to our camping site. They might need more holes just in case of enemy attack. We agreed with his explanation, and the ones who did not dig new holes admitted their shortcomings."

Not an army for Western man, perhaps, but what a painful contrast to our uniformed cover-up artists, buck passers and careerists! We have created, or had created for us, a military machine without a soul, without even a functioning brain, modeled on the most incompetent of modern corporations--Lockheed, or General Dynamics. That's what the military-industrial complex means: one big happy bunch of guys peddling the world's costliest and most profitable activity, war.

If the generals are the executives in this model, the enlisted men are the assembly-line workers: drafted, trained--more or less--anonymously shuttled into their low-skilled jobs by an individual replacement system, spending a disagreeable year or less, then departing, either on foot or in a box, as unnoticed as they arrived.

Troops must be a terrible nuisance to the Pentagon. Using dope, letting their hair grow, visiting coffeehouses, publishing subversive broadsides, deserting, refusing to obey orders. There hasn't been a militarily reliable unit in Vietnam for a long time--that is, one certain to carry out its orders to the best of its ability. It's doubtful whether such a unit exists even in peaceful backwaters like West Germany and South Korea.

No wonder the generals and admirals talk so much about "the electronic battlefield," laser-guided "smart" bombs--for dumb pilots, presumably--and an all-volunteer Army that will fight anywhere, without opinions, for the old American inducement of a fat pay check.

The North Vietnamese get a dollar or two a month, with no place to spend it. Why, then, do they fight so bravely? For love of comrades, country, communism? For fear of their commanders and political officers? To smash a foreign, and white, invader? Because fighting and living and dying have all become part of an endless present? I don't know, but I think I can hear those harsh, earnest, singsong voices, carried on the Pacific wind, arguing about digging bunkers. I see them writing in their diaries, crawling to the wire, shriveling to ash under a splash of napalm. How many are still alive? How many have joined the numberless army of their dead since Giap organized that first platoon 28 years ago? I pay them and the Viet Cong the supreme compliment of not feeling the same pity for them that I do for the 45,000 Americans who died in Vietnam, the 180,000 South Vietnamese troops--poor peasants mostly--and the countless civilians North and South. For the North Vietnamese, there was something like glory in their going.