[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 2 (Wednesday, January 26, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: January 26, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
THE WAR WITHOUT END
Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, recently, Newsweek magazine had an
article by David H. Hackworth, who served this country in a leadership
position in the Vietnam War.
It is interesting, first of all, for his observation of a fighter who
returns to the scene of battle.
But much more significant are his conclusions, which suggest that our
policy of trying to isolate and ignore Vietnam really do not make
sense.
I concur completely in what he has to say.
We are serving the national passion rather than the national interest
with our present Vietnam policy.
Listen to his commentary: ``With Vietnam, we seem incapable of
burying the hatchet. Our collective pride won't allow the lifting of
the trade embargo, or diplomatic recognition. First our leaders said we
couldn't make peace because Hanoi violated the 1973 peace treaty. Our
next excuse was Vietnam's war with the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia,
and its subsequent occupation of that country. Vietnam withdrew its
forces from Cambodia, but by that time our policymakers had raised the
threshold still further with the emotion-laden issue of whether Hanoi
was still holding prisoners of war, or knew of other U.S. soldiers
missing in action.
``Of all these issues, the POW/MIA one packs the most political
wallop. But it's a bogus issue. Members of our recovery teams have
chased down every rumor. Most of them believe it highly unlikely that
any living POWs remain in Southeast Asia. The same goes for every
qualified military expert or jungle-wise American and Vietnamese
veteran I have interviewed. I have no doubt that POWs were held after
1973 and that some American officials knew this. I was told this
repeatedly by insiders who also said that some prisoners, were probably
transferred to the Soviet Union and China because they knew America's
nuclear capabilities.
``Only the obsessed, the profiteers and some of the unfortunate and
manipulated MIA families are convinced that POWs remain. It is doubtful
that Americans could survive decades of Asian-style imprisonment--
disease, malnutrition and insanity would have killed them long ago.
Besides, said Bay Cao, ever the practical soldier, `Why should we keep
POWs? We'd have to feed them.' He said that in 1970 he captured three
American reporters, but released them after a month: `One alone ate the
ration of 10 of my soldiers.'
``This issue should not block the path of peaceful relations with
Vietnam. Those who keep the war alive because of our missing warriors
should visit Vietnam. They should not go there only to sit in air-
conditioned conference rooms with American and Vietnamese bureaucrats
to hear their respective party lines. Rather, they should visit the
people in the villages and witness the punishing effect their
intransigence has on the impoverished Vietnamese majority, who suffered
the brunt of the war.''
I wish that every American policymaker would take the trouble to read
David Hackworth's story.
I ask to insert the entire story into the Record at this point.
The article follows:
[From Newsweek, Nov. 22, 1993]
The War Without End
vietnam: america's most decorated living veteran makes personal peace
(By David H. Hackworth)
It's been nearly a quarter of a century since I last saw
this muddy Mekong Delta field, but the horror came back as if
I'd never been away. March 25, 1969, was a day of death and
defeat. The men of Bravo Company of the 4/39th Infantry, U.S.
9th Division, had been caught near the village of My Hiep
without cover in a 300-meter paddy. A withering cross-fire
was chewing them up. The Viet Cong called this tactic
``hugging the belt''--fighting at close range to neutralize
American firepower. When I got to the paddy at noon, I saw
point scouts Tran Doi and Earl Hayes sprawled on their backs.
I knew they were dead; a wounded man's instinct is to lie
face down to protect his belly. Jim Fabrizio and Don Wallace
were pinned down within yards of the Viet Cong guns, unable
to move either forward or back. I felt like a fire chief
arriving at a burning building after the roof falls in.
Returning to the scene 24 years later, I could see the
explosions, hear the fallen men cry, ``Medic! Medic! Medic!''
I could smell the cordite from rockets, bombs and artillery
shells thundering down upon the Viet Cong fortifications.
Once again I watch enemy fire cut Lt. William Torpie down as
he tried to rally his trapped company. I heard the ammunition
chopper crash with its crew chief trapped inside the metal
inferno, and heard his screams until death ended his agony. I
watched medics Dan Evans and Rick Hudson drag troopers across
that bullet-swept field, inch by bloody inch. I saw a company
commander go literally mad; his babbling tied up the radio
until he was relieved. I threw everything I had at the
enemy--airstrikes, artillery, napalm, white phosphorus.
Nothing silenced the guns. By nightfall, the gallant but
shattered B Company had 5 dead and 18 wounded out of 60 men.
The battle of My Hiep was only one of the thousands of such
contacts in 1969, only one of the tens of thousands that had
occurred since 1955 in the tragedy called the Vietnam War. It
was not significant enough to call to the attention of Gen.
Creighton Abrams, then the commander of all U.S. forces in
Vietnam. My troopers were not fighting to take critical
ground. They were just rolling the dice, looking for
``Cong''--as were more than 100 other U.S. grunt battalions
that beat the bush in the flawed strategy called ``Search and
Destroy.'' By then, few grunts believed the war was winnable.
Their main concern was staying out of the body bags.
Today, the shell-scorched earth where Joe Holleman and
Dennis Richards died is rich with rice, and the bunker line
where Roger Keppel was shot in the chest is now a peaceful
banana grove. The mines, booby traps and fighting positions
are gone. The men of the Viet Cong have hung up their AKs,
and built a new hamlet over that field where more than 100
soldiers fell.
Recently, I became the fist American to visit My Hiep (it
was called Long Hiep under the Saigon regime) since the war.
I had gone to Vietnam to bury the past. The Vietnam War
scarred every soldier who served there, and I was no
exception. But I never hated the Vietnamese, and I saw no
point in continuing America's policy of official hostility to
Vietnam, symbolized by our ongoing trade embargo. So I
arrived in My Hiep hoping for a kind of reconciliation.
I found it. The village chief, Vo Van Dut, welcomed me with
open arms. He thought it was a good omen that the first
American to visit was the ``former enemy commander.'' Dut
assembled a dozen of the soldiers and commanders who had
fought against my battalion, and together we visited the rice
field and relived the battle.
The forces opposing the 4/39 that day were the Viet Cong's
261A Main Force Battalion under Col. Le Lam, and the 502d
Main Force Battalion commanded by Col. Dang Viet Mai. The
three of us swapped war stories as we traveled down the wide
canal to the scene of the battle. It was eerie riding down
canals in a sampan with men I had once hunted and who had
hunted me. These waterways were once scenes of ambush; I half
expected to hear the pop of Claymores and the chatter of M-
16s.
These tough fighters were all retired and in their late 60s
now, but still fighting trim. There seemed to be no
bitterness or rancor. Back then, we were soldiers following
the orders of politicians. Now we were just old soldiers out
for what seemed like a Sunday picnic, drinking coconut juice
and eating papaya. Throughout the day we discussed tactics
and operations like young lieutenants at infantry school.
When I gave village chief Dut a copy of the unit journal for
March 25, he said, ``But this is a secret paper'' (it was
marked CLASSIFIED, but contained only the driest recitation
of the battle). I replied, ``Hey, the war is over,
remember?'' He smiled. ``Yes, we now friends, good friends.''
We talked about the difference between our two sides. I
told Dut that the terrain and conditions in the delta--as in
most of Vietnam--had favored his side and that the Americans
there were like fish out of water. ``Yes, your army acted
like the British fish during your own war for independence,''
he said with a laugh. ``America lost here because its
commanders didn't understand the people's cause, the terrain
or the nature of the war.'' He was right. The U.S. military
fought an unconventional enemy with conventional tactics. We
pummeled our opponent with three times the bomb tonnage and
more artillery shells than we used against both Japan and
Germany in all of World War II. One general after another
believed firepower would prevail, that the strategy of
attrition would grind the opponent down. Instead the
insurgents played the tune, and the U.S. forces danced.
``We were a superpower,'' I said. ``How could you stand up
against a force that filled the sky with aircraft and could
fire more artillery rounds in one engagement than your side
used in one year?'' Mai responded: ``At first your
helicopters and aircraft [were] hard to fight. They go fast.
[So] Much rocket, bomb and artillery fire scared our
fighters. But we learned. We set ambushes. We knew you
[would] run out of aircraft and bombs before we ran out of
spirit.''
``Yes, we were weaker materially,'' Lam chimed in. `'But
our spirit and will were stronger than yours. Our war was
just; yours was not. Your brave soldiers knew this, as did
the American people.''
With such spirit and determination, this light-infantry
force whipped three great military powers over 30 years of
war. First Japan, then France and finally the United States,
``To the Vietnamese people, nothing is more precious than our
freedom and independence,'' Lam said. ``It was worth dying
for.'' The Pentagon leaders didn't understand this until to
late. They were convinced the conflict was purely military,
that technological superiority could brake the will of men
like Lam and Mai. Nor did Washington see how corrupt and
spiritless our South Vietnamese allies were. The irony was
that those of us at the bottom in the trenches understood the
human factor: we hated the ARVN (Army of Vietnam). We had
watched them shuffle and sniffle through too many
operations while ``searching and avoiding'' the VC. Our
opponent we held in the highest esteem.
By now we were in the heart of Cai Be district, in the
center of the Mekong Delta, where half of Vietnam's food
supply is grown and 16 million people now work fertile land
criss-crossed with irrigation canals. The Cai Be area was the
birth-place of the revolution, a Vet Cong stronghold since
1955. I spent more than two years here as a U.S. commander or
as an adviser to the South Vietnamese Army. I had a firebase
here, named Danger to remind my warriors we were at dead
center of a hornet's nest. A booming gas station stands where
Danger's sandbagged entrance was. There are fishponds where
my bunkers and barbed wire used to be.
Retired Col. Le Ngoc Diep, the former commander of the
261B, a tough battalion my unit tangled with a number of
times, now lives not far from the site of my command post.
His house is well built, with a beautiful garden. The war
cost Diep all of his family. His last son, a Viet Cong
captain, died just before the fighting stopped. Diep is
neither angry nor resentful, but heartbroken: ``Look at me,
I'm an old man of 67, and all alone.'' He showed me a picture
of this handsome, fallen son. ``During the war we never hated
the American people,'' Diep said, eyes suddenly lit with
fire. ``But we hated the American government that brought us
such pain and suffering.'' Three million Vietnamese--1
million soldiers and 2 million civilians--died in the war;
4.4 million were wounded, and 300,000 human beings are
missing. Diep paid his portion of this great price. Now his
loss was my pain. Warriors seldom hate each other; they know
they're pawns in a killing game.
I met Pvt. Nguyen Van An at a roadside cafe across from
Danger. He had lost his leg during a fight with my battalion.
He said, without bitterness, ``Your soldiers [were] good
shots.'' After he recovered, he had slapped on a wooden leg
and ``proudly fought for five more years.'' I showed him the
scar where on March 25 one of his guys' bullets came a
millimeter away from putting me in the peg-leg set. He
laughed and said. ``Your doctors are better.''
The town of Cai Be and its district were savaged, but since
its fighters refused to give in, it remained at the
leading edge of the hurricane throughout the war. When the
war ended, in 1975, Cai Be's population was 75,000. It had
30,000 killed--26,000 of them civilians. My division
fought here, and the military imperative was body count.
The 9th Division's commanding general was called the Delta
Butcher. Civilians counted, along with soldiers.
Col. Bay Cao fought from 1945 to 1975, rising from
guerrilla soldier to vice commanding officer of Military
Region 8, a chunk of the delta that includes Cai Be. Cao
lives in a peasant's hut on the outskirts of My Tho. A modest
man, he is 74 with rotting teeth, but walks soldier-straight.
In 1969 he escaped death by minutes; he was in a sampan less
than 300 years from our ambush position when ``local people
warned me by beating on the water with paddles.''
I asked him about Gen. William Westmoreland's claim in 1967
that ``We will prevail.'' Bay Cao said that was a ``big
laugh.'' He recalled Operation Attleboro of late 1966, a
search-and-destroy campaign involving 22,000 U.S. troops,
aimed at flushing the VC into the open to be pounded from the
air. The U.S. military called it a great success. But it
convinced Bay Cao his side could actually win on the
battlefield. I agreed. Over and over during Attleboro, the VC
lured our troops into well-laid killing zones, and consumed
them at close range. Once again we had ignored a basic
principle of guerrilla warfare: if the guerrilla is not
losing, he is winning. I asked Bay Cao what he thought about
the former U.S. Army officers who now preach, ``We won all
the battles in Vietnam.'' He had a simple retort: ``If they
won all the battles, why did they always want to bring in
more troops?''
Bay Cao and I lit incense to honor the Viet Cong dead at
the Trung An Military Cemetery near where the 9th Division
base camp was. Thirteen thousand soldiers are buried there. I
felt the tears well up, and I relived the wrenching
experience I'd had at the black wall of the Vietnam Memorial
in Washington: all these dead, all this waste, and to what
end?
The war is long over, but peace and prosperity have not
come to Vietnam. The bungling of the communist government in
Hanoi has seen to that--with help from the United States. We
have withheld reconciliation with the Vietnamese government
even though in other wars we have been quick to make peace
with former enemies. We turned the Japanese and Germans into
allies almost before the cannons grew cold, and we offered
our help to the republics of the former Soviet Union soon
after the Berlin wall started to crumble. But then, it was
easy for us to be good sports. We won, they lost.
With Vietnam, we seem incapable of burying the hatchet. Our
collective pride won't allow the lifting of the trade
embargo, or diplomatic recognition. First our leaders said we
couldn't make peace because Hanoi violated the 1973 peace
treaty. Our next excuse was Vietnam's war with the Khmer
Rouge regime in Cambodia, and its subsequent occupation of
that country. Vietnam withdrew its forces from Cambodia, but
by that time our policymakers had raised the threshold still
further with the emotion-laden issue of whether Hanoi was
still holding prisoners of war, or knew of other U.S.
soldiers missing in action.
Of all these issues, the POW/MIA one packs the most
political wallop. But it's a bogus issue. Members of our
recovery teams have chased down every rumor. Most of them
believe it highly unlikely that any living POWs remain in
Southeast Asia. The same goes for very qualified military
expert or jungle-wise American and Vietnamese veteran I have
interviewed. I have no doubt that POWs were held after 1973
and that some American officials knew this. I was told this
repeatedly by insiders who also said that some prisoners,
such as B-52 crewmen and electronic warfare specialists, were
probably transferred to the Soviet Union and China because
they knew America's nuclear capabilities.
Only the obsessed, the profiteers and some of the
unfortunate and manipulated MIA families are convinced that
POWs remain. It is doubtful that Americans could survive
decades of Asian-style imprisonment--disease, malnutrition
and insanity would have killed them long ago. Besides, said
Bay Cao, ever the practical soldier, ``Why should we keep
POWs? We'd have to feed them.'' He said that in 1970 he
captured three American reporters, but released them after a
month: ``One alone ate the ration of 10 of my soldiers.''
This issue should not block the path of peaceful relations
with Vietnam. Those who keep the war alive because of our
missing warriors should visit Vietnam. They should not go
there only to sit in air-conditioned conference rooms with
American and Vietnamese bureaucrats to hear their respective
party lines. Rather, they should visit the people in the
villages and witness the punishing effect their intransigence
has on the impoverished Vietnamese majority, who suffered the
brunt of the war.
For us, too, Vietnam remains an open wound. After the war,
U.S. military leadership, humiliated by defeat, simply buried
the experience. For almost two decades, service schools
avoided teaching the lessons of Vietnam and trained primarily
for the pleasantly familiar ``big battle war'' on plains of
Europe. To this day, there has not been a real postmortem on
the tactical and strategic mistakes of that misadventure.
Instead of searching for the truth, which could still save
lives in the Balkans and Somalia, there has been a full-blown
campaign to rewrite the history of the war. The basic idea--
embodied in the 1981 book ``On Strategy,'' by retired Col.
Harry Summers Jr.--is that America won the war tactically. We
just happened to lose it strategically. But to close the
books on Vietnam, we must understand that America lost on the
battlefield not because of peace protests at Berkeley or
failures of nerve in the Congress, but because our military
leadership thought bombs could beat a people's hunger for
independence. The price for that lack of moral courage to
tell the politicians that it was a bad war fought with a
flawed strategy was death for thousands of young Americans.
On my return to Vietnam. I found a Zippo cigarette lighter
in a tiny Saigon store. It must have belonged to some
American soldier, long since dead or departed. On it is an
inscription--words by which to remember this war, and finally
to overcome it: ``Vietnam--1968. When the power of love
overcomes the love of power, Vietnam will know
peace.''
____________________