On the 17th of April, I was part of the group that accompanied Secretary Nixon to the White House to take part in meetings to brief the President and the National Security Council on our troop proposal. This was my first meeting with President Johnson, the single most intimidating individual I ever encountered in my 30 years in the Army, and that includes every top Sergeant I knew. It was amazing to watch Secretary Nixon and the President interact, both of whom were master politicians, and I was never sure if they really trusted or even liked one another, but they both must have recognized that circumstances had compelled them to work together. The President had saved Mr. Nixon from political oblivion and Secretary Nixon would save the President’s Administration from disaster in South East Asia. What was also fascinating was the relations between Mr. Nixon and President Johnson’s other foreign policy advisors, most of whom-Rusk, Bundy, Rostow-had originally been appointed by President Kennedy. Despite their obvious differences, everybody took great pains to be on the same page when came to Vietnam.
I’m sure from the beginning that the President had already made up his mind to go to whatever lengths necessary to save South Vietnam, but it was another thing to have the dirty business of it laid out in black and white. Mr. Johnson’s face grew pretty grim as the Secretary explained the troop buildup that would be needed and the costs of implementing it. The thing that made most of the men in that room wince was the prospect of massively increasing draft calls and canceling some college deferments, things that would be very unpopular. There was much discussion about this, but the President ended it by saying “This is one hell of a Goddamn mess, but we’re gonna do what it takes to clean it up. I’m not gonna be the first President to lose a war.” “You follow this plan and you won’t be Mr. President.” was the Secretary’s answer.
I had just made a short presentation concerning manpower needs when the question of casualties came up, that prompted Adlai Stevenson, the U.N. Ambassador, to ask about the possibility of negotiation. Secretary Nixon quickly shot that down, “We must never appear weak; our enemies must never doubt that we mean business. This is the first opportunity to deal the Communists a military defeat since Korea. We negotiated with them there and as a result, a lot of brave men died to achieve nothing more than a stalemate. The brave men we’re sending to South Vietnam deserve better.” (On the way out of the White House, after the meeting, The Secretary remarked to me “We sure as hell knew what we were talking about when we called him Adlai the Appeaser.”) President Johnson concurred with this line of thinking and that was the last mention of negotiations. That was the only other option, other than the buildup, that was discussed in that meeting and I know there have been many so-called historians that will dispute that fact, but I will swear on a Bible or anything else that my recollection is true. As a result of the decisions made at that meeting, President Johnson went on TV two nights later and announced to the nation that we were committing ground troops to South Vietnam.
Now came the hard part. The plan was to introduce at least 150,000 personnel into South Vietnam in less than three months and then we learned that the country did not even begin to have the infrastructure to support that kind of force. The first problem was the lack of port facilities and air fields. The only places ocean going vessels could unload was Saigon and Cam Ranh Bay. Therefore, I spent a month in the Pacific helping to hire every contractor in Thailand, South Korea, Japan, and Australia who could have a crew in Vietnam before the end of June; because they were going into a battle zone, Uncle Sam had to pay some of them more than four times the going rate. A lot of money also went to employing every independent cargo ship in the Pacific in order to move 50,000,000 tons of supply and material to the Philippines, there to await disbursement to the battlefront. It was money well spent; by early October we were able to start moving several million tons annually through Cam Ranh and Da Nang and had a dozen new air bases, six of them capable of handling jets. Every professional soldier is taught that whoever masters the logistics, wins the war, but in time we were to find out that the North Vietnamese had learned the same lesson, and learned it very well.
We did catch a break that summer of ‘65 because the North Vietnamese offensive ran out of steam in late May. With the onset of the rainy season, they dug in and prepared to hold on to their gains, which at that point consisted of well over 50 % of all South Vietnamese territory. I believe that if they had kept up the pressure, we would have been looking at something like a Dunkirk in the South China Sea. Starting in mid-July, American troops began pouring into the South, and with their arrival came the first large scale engagements with the enemy, which in turn led to the first casualty lists. That meant coffins coming home to a lot of small towns and big city neighborhoods and every one of those coffins only raised the stakes higher. Nothing less than “victory” will redeem the supreme sacrifice and as MacArthur stated, there is no substitute for it. Simultaneous with the troop arrivals in Vietnam were the increase in monthly draft calls, which were more than doubled to 40,000 a month in July and then increased by an additional 7,000 in September.
This necessitated the canceling the deferments for all first year college students, the first of many politically unpopular decisions that had to be made. This of course created an atmosphere of resentment on many campuses that was used by opponents of our efforts to save South Vietnam among college faculties and the so-called intellectual elite. That individuals are still required to make sacrifices for their country was a notion alien to this ilk and I’m sorry to say they mislead many young people. That they would compare the American President to Hitler was particularly repellent to me. It is amazing how many rotten apples nearly ruined an entire generation.
In early November American forces in Vietnam went from a defensive posture to an offensive one and we had great success initially. The pressure was taken off Hue and Da Nang and shells were no longing falling on Saigon, but as they pushed into the Central Highlands and toward the Cambodian border the resistance stiffened considerably. The North Vietnamese proved to be skilled jungle fighters and I have to admit that our boys were pretty green and they paid a severe price for their inexperience. Entire Companies were ambushed and the losses were severe. Of course in warfare some things cannot be taught, they must be experienced, I saw the same thing in Korea. These unpleasant facts of war can be hard to explain to the public and this brought even more criticism of our policies, especially in the Congress. It was only a matter of time before our superior numbers and technology would wear the enemy down, but nobody seemed to have any patience.
I accompanied Secretary Nixon to Saigon in mid December for a progress report. There has been some controversy about the meetings there between the Secretary and Gen. Westmoreland. It has been purported that the Secretary of Defense compelled the General into committing himself to end the war by a fixed date and promising him a blank check on whatever additional men and material that would be needed to achieve it. I personally sat in on every meeting that occurred and can attest that no such discussion happened. If such a conversation occurred privately, then the Secretary never mentioned it to me or acknowledged it officially. The 75,000 men that arrived in January 1966 was part of the original troop commitment. As I had originally believed, our superior numbers, coupled with the lessons of real combat, began to pay off in the early months of the new year when the enemy began to yield ground in the Central Highlands, where most of the major towns and strategic real estate were recaptured.