Wall Street Journal
Opinion Page
January 29, 2002
Back to Vietnam
By Francis J. West
In Afghanistan, American soldiers working with local tribes employed lasers
to guide bombs. But even when massive firepower is not used, we should not
underestimate the psychological effect of placing American soldiers among
local forces. I found that out when I recently returned to a village 400
miles north of Saigon, where decades ago I had patrolled with a Combined
Action Platoon -- local militia combined with a Marine squad.
As the saying goes, the village was "contested." During the day, the
Americans visited the market to eat peanuts and duck eggs. At dusk, the
village militia would nervously gather at the fort, where the Marines would
pair off with farmers and set out on patrol. Sooner or later, there would be
a scurrying noise or a burst of fire. The fights were by sound and flash,
and might last 10 or 15 minutes. In the midst of hundreds of thatch houses,
no artillery was called in, no gunships, no air strikes. So it went night
after night -- a flurry of fire, then silence.
Price of Knowledge
After six months, the Marines knew the village elders, where each militiaman
lived, which hamlets were most dangerous, how much to pay for a meal. The
price for that knowledge came high. Seven of the original 15 Marines were
killed. No American unit in Vietnam, Korea or World War II faced worse odds.
Before it ended, more Marines had died in those anonymous hamlets than in
Desert Storm.
In late 1967, after 17 months, the fighting ceased. The Viet Cong pulled
back to the mountains, the farmer militia took charge and the Marines left
to fight the North Vietnamese. In the decades since, I often wondered if
that American squad had made any difference. So did Charlie Benoit, who also
patrolled in the village and who speaks flawless Vietnamese. The two of us
went back to the village at Christmastime.
The winter rains had eroded all roads into the village, which lies south of
the abandoned Chulai airport. So we walked for several kilometers, sharing
mud trails with water buffalo and cows. Looking at all the people, trails,
alleys and ambush sites, I wondered if our military today would plunk down
one squad among thousands of villagers and issue the same order: Control the
area, day and night. Use rifles, not artillery or air strikes.
Based on preliminary inquiries, we were doubtful whether anyone would risk
acknowledging that Americans had lived there. But when we asked an old man,
he immediately pointed to a small yellow building. A crowd gathered as I
scuffed around the foundations of our old fort, now a kindergarten.
A farmer stepped forward. "Welcome back," he said in Vietnamese. Photos from
1966 were passed from hand to hand. English came creakily, a gate not opened
for many years.
"You know Mister Bill? . . . Marines number one . . . Where Larry? . . . You
know Monty? . . . Bob, he throw bomb. VC no get him . . . You now old, dai
uy."
Once a dai uy, or captain, I had returned as the Ancient Mariner. Most in
the crowd were born after I had left. Whatever they had heard about the
Marines had been passed down. Most were smiling, even with a Communist Party
cadre in the crowd. People tugged at our sleeves, inviting us to their
homes.
Some village history was filled in. The village chief, Trao, had drowned
while fishing. The village medic, Bac Si Khoi, had lost his wife and moved
away. Joe, the 10-year-old orphan who lived with the Marines, was shot dead
in 1975. Suong, the village military leader, had been killed the previous
year. It was his 12th year in combat. Professional military units stand down
between engagements. For Suong, the village militiaman, there was no
rotation, no surcease. He had completed roughly 2,000 patrols, 20 times more
than an American soldier. He died because the war went on too long. No man,
no matter how skilled, can survive continuous combat. Sooner or later, the
bell will toll.
From the fort we walked to the central market. Some old women stopped us,
giggling as they grasped Charlie by his shoulders and asked if he needed a
Vietnamese wife. Again we were invited to dinner. Here they were,
grandmothers, their grandchildren gawking as they flirted, taken back to
their youth when young Marines walked through the market, stopping to talk
and joke. They looked at the photos from long ago. A teenage boy, peeking
over their shoulders, was smacked on the ear. These weren't his memories.
The next day, Charlie and I went to My Lai, four miles to the east, where
American soldiers had massacred over 100 villagers. A place of pitiful
statues and gruesome pictures, My Lai is an official memorial to the
American presence. Throughout Vietnam there were instances of Americans,
terrified and ignorant, killing in the hamlets. Some soldiers with poor
leaders believed every villager was a Viet Cong, ready to throw a grenade.
Some Americans were filled with fear of the unknown. Others weren't.
"That Marines in that squad couldn't destroy their own village," Charlie
said. "What would they say? Sorry, we forgot we know you? Sorry, we forgot
we live here?" The Marines deployed 100 such squads in villages, but the
concept was not expanded countrywide. Misguided policy and a constipated
military strategy ignored innovative tactics.
Back in the village, we had lunch with a dispossessed landowner living in
four bare rooms with a dirt floor. His extended family clustered around as
we sat down to rice, green sprouts, pork, tea and bootleg rice wine, all
grown on his half acre. His father had been the village chief, until
assassinated. He had done two years' "service" after 1975. After lunch, he
walked ahead of us, joking that the Americans had taken him prisoner.
"I'm taking them to Quat and Suong," he said, referring to the Party chief
and to the widow of the man who fought fiercely for 14 years against the
Party. That sentence summed up the skein of village politics.
Marines had a saying: "If the VC were on our side, we'd wrap the war up in a
week." Nothing personal. The same basic, tough soldier was on both sides. As
in Korea, communism in Vietnam wasn't a better way of life; it was a better
military system because it insisted upon sacrifice without end.
Like everyone else, the Party chief lived in a small house; the old term was
"hootch." Polite and plain-spoken, he explained the village had grown from
6,000 when we were there to 12,000. Every child went to school, but after
that what? The land hadn't expanded and there were no jobs in the cities.
His family grew impatient with talk about infrastructure. "You know Bhill?"
asked his older sister. She was one of the women who had flirted with us at
the market.
"Phil," corrected the Party chief. "Ppp." His sister made a face. She was 18
when Cpl. Phillip Brannon was killed in the village; her brother had been
10. Guess who had spoken with Phil.
Before we left the village, I asked about a cement marker placed in front of
the old fort in remembrance of the Marines. The villagers said the
guerrillas had moved it. Why they didn't dump it or break it into pieces was
not explained. A stone's throw north of the marker is the village shrine
with its bright burgundy altar, where each year the villagers pray for good
crops. Behind the building is a well bearing a Vietnamese inscription to the
Marines who built the shrine in 1967.
The villagers led us to the marker between two palm trees, overlooking an
expanse of paddy as green as the world's finest golf course. It seemed
fitting for Cpl. Brannon and all the others who fell there. We looked out
over the deep green paddies as farmers half a world away from the United
States talked about Americans dead 35 years.
Praise
A few miles distant, there is another memorial to the Vietnamese who died at
My Lai. These two memorials symbolize the contrary faces of America in that
tragic war, the one fearful in white marble, the other resolute in
stone-strengthened cement.
W.H. Auden once wrote, teach the free man to praise. America has surely
praised the generation of World War II. But of their Vietnam progeny,
pictures and print have projected a face filled with fear, unworthy of
praise. It is left to others in unlikely places to remember the faces that
were stalwart.
Mr. West, an assistant secretary of defense in the first Reagan
administration, served in Marine infantry in Vietnam. He is author of "The
Village."
BELOW IS THE DUST JACKET FOR WEST'S BOOK, ''THE VILLAGE"
