We took the heat because we were monitoring the situation on the ground in North Vietnam from the first Neutron attack. The last series of Neutron attacks on June 4–6 were directed at targets in the Hanoi-Haiphong area, the most heavily populated section of the country. When the reports began coming in about the roads north of Hanoi being choked with fleeing refugees, desperate to get to safety in China, Secretary Nixon was finally able to say out loud that the war was all but over. The North was swept by a sudden fear of radiation sickness and in the face of this, even the hardest Communist discipline crumbled.
With their nation falling apart internally, the North came crawling to the negotiating table; on June 13, they formally asked the French to mediate and delegations were requested to come to Paris. President Johnson immediately accepted this offer and named his old Washington crony, Clark Clifford, to represent the United States in the these negotiations; on the same day, as a gesture of our good intentions, the President grounded the B-52’s and halted all bombing of North Vietnam. I can state for a fact that Secretary Nixon was opposed to not only the appointment of Clifford, whom everybody in the Pentagon felt was there to represent the President’s political interests over the country’s, but also the bombing halt because it was letting up on the enemy right at the time when we should have been ratcheting up the pressure. The Secretary also felt that we should have pressed for even tougher terms, but the President insisted that Clifford stick to the three basics: an immediate cease-fire, withdrawal of all North Vietnamese forces from the South, and an end to all support for the Viet Cong. Overnight the Secretary’s elation over the success of his gamble with the Neutrons evaporated and was replaced with concern that the President would be so eager for the war to be over that he would sign any agreement. Overshadowing the Peace talks in Paris was the Six Day War in the Mid East and even more ominously, intelligence reports that Army units in southern China had been put on alert.
In the end our fears proved to be premature; on the afternoon of July 6, I was at the White House where I stood in a group that included most of the National Security Council and watched as President Johnson announced to the nation that a cease-fire agreement in Vietnam had been signed in Paris earlier that day and would go into effect at midnight local time on July 8. I must admit to a feeling of great satisfaction when I heard the President say “The struggle for freedom in South Vietnam has been won. All Americans should be proud of our brave boys who beat back the voracious beast of Communist aggression.” After the speech everybody retired to the East Room for an impromptu reception, where the President personally thanked us all for what we had done. He looked more relieved than triumphant; the war had aged him 10 years. The most exultant man in the room was the Secretary, “I showed those sons of bitches” he said to me at one point, “They wanted us to lose, they cheered for the Communists and spit on the flag, they said Nixon was finished. Well who’s finished now?” How right he was.
One thing I have never apologized for was our use of the Neutron Bomb in Vietnam despite all of the criticism it has generated over the years, I believe it was the right and honorable thing to do under the circumstances-it saved the lives of American servicemen and ended the conflict and if anyone wants to disagree, I’ll be glad to give them an argument. I categorically reject the contention that because we set the precedent of using battlefield nuclear weapons, we are therefore responsible for what happened during the Sino-Soviet War two years later.
Two weeks after the cease-fire Mao’s Red Army pushed across North Vietnam’s northern border and within a matter of days had reached Hanoi. The pretext for this move was to restore order and stem the tide of refugees fleeing into China’s southern provinces. The real reason was to settle scores with an ancient enemy and to make sure there would be no Soviet ally on China’s southern flank, Mao and Chou were clearly thinking ahead. The Chinese made a few cynical statements about protecting “their beloved Socialist brothers in Vietnam.” and promptly arrested most of the North Vietnamese leadership and put the country under martial law. I’ve always said that the real winner of the Vietnam War was Red China. It certainly wasn’t the Soviets, because one of their satellites had been brutally defeated by the hated American imperialists and then to add insult to injury, they had been stabbed in the back by their equally hated Communist rival; when the shakeup in the Kremlin came in January of ‘68, nobody should have been surprised when Stalinist hard-liners took over. It was one of the unanticipated consequences of our victory; and let me say, Yuri Andropov made us really long for Khrushchev.
Travis Smith: As the weeks went by and April became May, a real sense of despair come over us as the fighting drug on with no end in sight. Nobody had to tell us that another great plan by the desk top warriors in Washington had turned to shit and we were paying the price. From all the news we could pick up from the rest of the war, it looked as though the whole thing had degenerated into a bloody stalemate and it made no difference how many kids they drafted and sent over here or how many bombs and napalm they dropped on the North. Call it what they wanted-Battle Fatigue, Shell Shock-we had it and our effectiveness suffered a lot. If your mind has gone numb then you’re not much use to anybody, most of the time our lives depended on how fast we could dive for cover when Charlie opened fire, life or death was a matter of seconds.
It was sometime in early June, nearly six months after we had moved into Laos, when we got the first word of the Neutron bombings. Of course nobody in command down in Saigon had the sense to make a formal announcement or simply try to get the facts out to us poor son of a bitches way out in the boonies, some of which were down wind of ground zero. All we got was third hand radio reports that repeatedly used the word “nuclear,” that got everybody’s attention. The first thought I had was of mushroom clouds rising over Hanoi-a pleasant image. Right on the heel of the first reports the word came that we were less than 100 clicks from one of the bombing targets. Since no one had explained the difference between a Neutron and a thermo nuclear weapon, we were thinking in terms of megatons, fallout and all those “duck and cover” lessons from grade school. More than one guy in my unit was certain that we were all about to die of radiation sickness, it was especially bad when someone got a touch of malaria and suddenly had chills and fatigue, I felt sorry for Captain Elston because he didn’t have anything concrete to tell us and it would be just like those bastards in Saigon not to give a damn what happened to us. There was a rumor that one platoon, up next to the DMZ, panicked when they got the news and shot their Lieutenant along with one of their Sergeants and went over the hill and hid out for a month in Hue. Supposedly, the Army hushed the whole thing up.