[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.''

                          ____________________