Getting Out: Learning from Past Exit Strategies

...But the cost was extremely high . U.S...

...Her 1972 study of Vietnam, Fire in the Lake: the Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Banetuft Prize, She also wrote Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, Works consulted for this article are Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History (VikingPress, 1983)and MarilynB...

...presidential election...

...Kissinger promised Thieu that if the other side violated the agree­ment, U.S...

...Later, regular North Vietnamese troops had joined the battle . How­ever, the three years of the American war had taken a toll on the NLF's guerrilla forces and driven much of the rural population that sup­ported them into the garrisoned cities and towns...

...military victory" The only strategy the military planners had figured out was the attrition of enemy forces, and the Tet offen­sive had convinced the American public that attrition wasn't working and that the only pros­pect was for more American casualties with no end in sight...

...Nixon judged that at some point both countries would develop priorities more important to them than the support of the Viet­namese revolution...

...The draft did not insist that Thieu step down in advance of an armi­stice...

...At the end of 1973, the Thieu government held a strong military position . With a million men under arms, its army controlled most of the country and most of the population . Its dif­ficulties were internal...

...military activities in Indochina...

...The ARVN units, finding themselves attacked by North Vietnamese ar­tillery and ground troops, began a retreat that soon turned into a disastrous rout-calling the whole Vietnamization program into question . -IXON HAD ALWAYSunderstood that U.S...

...To him, that meant that he had to sustain the anticommunist government in Saigon at least through his own term in office...

...But U.S...

...By 1969 there was no reason to be­lieve that it could be won...

...Frances FítzGerald: Vietnam IN THE WAKE of the Tet offensive, on March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson an­ nounced a partial halt to the bombing of North Vietnam, initiated peace talks with Hanoi, and declared he would not run for a second term . In that election year, Richard Nixon called for "peace with honor" and de­feated Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who could not attack Johnson for waging what had become a hugely unpopular war...

...troops had, di­rectly and indirectly, employed hundreds of thousands of people . With the Americans gone, unemployment soared and inflation rates climbed so high that ordinary soldiers could not afford to buy rice for their families...

...In the Tet offensive, the NLF suffered crippling casualties ; the North Vietnamese army was less affected, but it could not under­take a major new offensive soon . Nixon deter­mined to press the military advantage while slowly withdrawing the American troops . Under the rubric of "Vietnamization," Nixon launched a program of military aid to Saigon that permitted the junta, led by Gen­eral Nguyen Van Thieu, to draft a million men into its military forces and to acquire the fourth-largest air force in the world...

...But with the new bal­ance of forces in South Vietnam, both sides saw the outlines of an agreement...

...He had rejected Kissinger's pro­posal for a "mutual withdrawal," that is, a si­multaneous withdrawal of North Vietnamese from the South, and he had insisted on a con­dition that Nixon found unacceptable: the re­placement of the current Saigon regime with a coalition government...

...afterward, he said, an in­ternal political settlement could be worked out "by the Vietnamese themselves ." Conspicu­ously, he made no mention of a "mutual with­drawal," thereby removing a major obstacle for the North Vietnamese . After further talks be­tween Kissinger and Tho in Paris, the North Vietnamese, on October 8, issued a nine-point draft agreement that removed a major obstacle for the United States...

...In any case, the argument raises the question of whether Nixon's aid program would have been enough to save the Thieu regime...

...aid, but Thieu would not budge . Nixon was furious, but, deciding that he couldn't afford to scuttle the Saigon regime or to sign a separate peace, he backed down . Du­tifully, Kissinger cabled Hanoi and once again raised the issue of North Vietnamese troops in the South...

...Foreseeing a ma­jor offensive in 1972, U .S...

...With minor modifi­cations, he accepted the draft and made plans to fly to Hanoi in late October to initial the agreement...

...Such a solution would have been more than acceptable to the southern revolutionaries, who had been almost wiped out, and it would have given the non­communist South Vietnamese alternate possi­bilities . Those who wanted to leave the country could have done so in an orderly fashion . Those who stayed could have organized politically-Buddhist and Catholic parties might have emerged-and made an accommodation with the communists, as many had in 1964-1965 . Reunification would have come eventually, but the South Vietnamese would have had a voice in determining the future of their country­and all this with far fewer casualties . FRANCES FITZGEØin is a journalist and author...

...The PRG kept calling for a ceasefire and a political settlement as speci­fied in the agreement...

...Tho refused and returned to Hanoi...

...ARVN morale plummeted...

...and ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) troops into Cambodia to find and destroy the enemy's cenDISSENT I Winter 2009 . 5 3 tral command base...

...rather, it proposed that the Republic of Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government (the governmental structure of the NLF) be recognized as "administrative en­tities" and that they should appoint a council of national reconciliation that would hold democratic elections for a new government . Reunification would take place at an indefinite date in the future through "peaceful means ." Meanwhile, military assistance to both sides would be limited to replacements . Kissinger was elated...

...But how to withdraw and maintain the Saigon government...

...Peace, he declared, was "at hand...

...Corrup­tion had always been pervasive, but in the de­clining economy it gave rise to protests against Thieu and his circle of generals, who were seen as the major war profiteers...

...This was hardly surprising, as Thieu's position had always included "Four Nos": no recogni­tion of the enemy in the South, no neutraliza­tion of the South, no coalition government, and no surrender of territory...

...On December 17, Nixon authorized a renewed bombing of the North, and for eleven days B-52s and other American aircraft flew three thousand sorties, mainly over the heavily populated corridor between Hanoi and Haiphong, attacking power plants, shipyards, and other installations that had been off the target list until then...

...troops to Vietnam in 1965 because it was disintegrating under political and military pres­sure from the southern revolutionaries, the National Liberation Front...

...Certainly, as the record shows, both he and Kissinger under­stood that without American troops and B-52s, a communist victory was at some point inevi­table...

...military aid to Thieu continued as before...

...objective: they had destroyed the NLF as an effective military force and given the Saigon government control of most of the population...

...For Nixon, there remained the problem of the North Vietnamese Army...

...In March 1972, the North Vietnamese launched a major three-pronged offensive, us­ing tanks and heavy artillery for the first time in the war...

...commanders in Saigon determined to thwart it by cutting the Ho Chi Minh trail, a network of roads and paths through the mountains of the Laotian panhandle that the North Vietnamese used as their logistical corridor to the south . A congres­sional amendment passed after the Cambodian incursion barred American forces from enter­ing Cambodia and Laos, but the ARVN were not so constrained, and on February 8, 1971, some thirty thousand ARVN troops attacked across the border with American air support . The operation was foolishly conceived (the Ho Chi Minh trail could be "cut" only for as long as the ARVN remained as a blocking force) and badly executed...

...The economy of the country was shattered, the southern cities filled with refu­gees and former soldiers...

...To the Soviets, he held out the promise of a strategic nuclear arms agree­ment and to the Chinese the promise of a rap­prochement with the United States . These initiatives had their own rewards-and they produced the astonishing spectacle of Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong smiling for the televi­sion cameras in Beijing-but they did not per­suade either power to abandon Hanoi...

...By June 1972, there were only 47,000 American troops left in Vietnam, and the time had come for a peace agreement . In secret talks with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Paris over the years, the North Vietnamese negotia­tor, Le Duc Tho, had consistently called for a complete withdrawal of American troops in exchange for a ceasefire and the return of pris­ 54 . DISSENT I Winter 2009 oners of war...

...combat units took devastating casualties, and morale among the GIs collapsed: drug use become common, racial tensions erupted, in­dividual units refused combat, and officers were murdered by their troops...

...some thirty American planes were lost, and the public reaction was negative...

...Under the threat of a renewed bombing of the North, they would have been willing to wait at least two years with a neutralist coali­tion government in the South...

...The North Vietnamese advanced so rapidly they outstripped their planning ; they hesitated, and B-52 raids pulverized their positions . Their advance was stopped, they took huge casual­ties, but their offensive permitted the south­ern revolutionaries to establish new bases and to lay the groundwork for a renewed political struggle...

...In later years, Kissinger maintained that the Watergate scandal spelled the end for the Saigon government...

...In the northern sec­tor, Hue fell almost without a fight, and Danang, full of panicked troops and civilians, fell five days later...

...The base, as it turned out, had been evacuated weeks before, but the U .S . campaign succeeded in disrupting North Viet­namese supply lines...

...The North Vietnamese spent much of 1973 and 1974 building an all-weather high­way network from the demilitarized zone to a base camp north of Saigon . Meanwhile, the leaders in Hanoi debated strategy and timing . In late 1974, it was decided that the command­ers in the South could launch attacks in 1975, but should not expect a final victory until 1976 or 1977 . A successful attack on a provincial capital in January accelerated the schedule . In early March, North Vietnamese regular divi­sions attacked across the demilitarized zone and through the central highlands, scattering the ARVN troops as they went...

...Faced with this crisis, all the American embassy and the White House could think of was to pressure the Congress for more aid to Thieu...

...Thieu, however, could not have survived in a political struggle, and the war continued, as Nixon and Kissinger as­sumed it would...

...Young'sThe Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 (HarperCollins, 1991...

...gains against the NLF were only tacti­ cal and temporary...

...Two hundred thousand soldiers deserted in 1974...

...More than twenty thousand American troops died, and upheavals in the United States tore the country apart, creating divisions that remain with us today...

...As president, Nixon never promised to win the war...

...The American troop presence had pumped billions of dollars into the civilian economy, and U.S...

...This time, however, Nixon told Thieu he would sign the agreement without him, and Thieu, reassured that Nixonwould bomb the North again if nec­essary, cooperated...

...Had they decided to end the war in 1969 or in any subsequent year, they could surely have prevailed upon the North Vietnamese to give them the "decent interval" between the withdrawal of American troops and a commu­nist victory that Kissinger thought necessary to preserve American credibility in the world 56 . DISSENT I Winter 2009 SYMPOSIUM : GETTING OUT and to uphold American honor, The North Vietnamese leaders might have seemed indif­ferent to the loss of lives and the destruction of their economy, but they were not...

...Since 1969, over a hundred thousand ARVN soldiers and half a million North Vietnamese and NLF troops had died in com­bat-along with uncounted numbers of civil­ians...

...Hundreds of thou­sands of former government officials, military officers, and members of the intelligentsia were sent to re-education camps, while millions of the metropolitan jobless were sent to "new eco­nomic zones" in the border areas to reclaim poor land with rudimentary tools...

...The formal signing was to take place the following week, just before the U.S...

...Distrustful of the southerners, even those who had worked for the revolution, the North Vietnamese ap­pointed their own officials and moved swiftly to reorganize the society and economy on the model of the North, paying no heed to local conditions and customs...

...In a speech on May 8, Nixon promised to pull out all Ameri­can troops following a ceasefire and the release of prisoners of war...

...they conducted major sweep-and­destroy operations in central Vietnam, entered the densely populated Mekong Delta for the first time, pursued local NLF units, and bombed the villages with B-52s . In support of these operations, Nixon authorized a secret bombing campaign against NLF and North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia . The raids, which went on for fourteen months, en­couraged the Cambodian prime minister, Lon Nol, to overthrow Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the monarch who had long tried to keep Cam­bodia out of the war...

...Created by the United States after the French withdrew in 1954, that government, the Republic of Vietnam, never gained political legitimacy Since the fall of Ngo Dinh Diem to a military junta in 1963, it had been merely an administration and an army held together by American aid, with no poli­tics except anticommunism . Johnson had sent U.S...

...True, as the scandals were progressively revealed, Congress gradually re­asserted its powers over foreign policy, and in August 1974, when Nixon resigned, rather than face impeachment, Congress reduced military aid to Saigon from the billion dollars that had been requested to $700 million . But the decrease might have come anyway, given the unpopularity of the war...

...At home, the antiwar movement grew, and huge demonstra­tions erupted in cities and on campuses across the country...

...The U.S...

...On the other hand, the Vietnamese communists, north and south, who had fought a nationalist and a revo­lutionary struggle against the Japanese, the French, and the Americans since the Second World War, would not abandon their cause . During the 1968 campaign, Nixon ruled out a U.S...

...The reason for this was simple: Nixon, as he said, had no intention of becoming "the first president of the United States to lose a war...

...Thieu called for a retreat and ordered the highland divisions back to defend Saigon, but their commander fled, and a rout ensued...

...Hanoi responded by publishing the text of the agreement and a history of the se­cret talks...

...On January 8, Kissinger and Tho resumed their meetings, and on January 27 the Paris Peace Agreement was signed . Nixon and Kissinger claimed that Hanoi had been bombed back to the negotiating table, but the text of the agree­ment was essentially the same as the draft Hanoi had published in October...

...But, though the peace talks had begun, fighting in Vietnam continued for another seven years . In those years, Nixon gradually withdrew American troops from Vietnam but expanded the war to Cambodia and Laos, and with extensive bombing campaigns wreaked more destruction on the Indochinese than had been visited upon them in all the preceding years of war...

...An intense U.S...

...Once American troops had been withdrawn and prisoners of war exchanged, Thieu launched operations against the zones of en­emy control in the Delta and along the Cam­bodian border...

...In Saigon, however, he found Nguyen Van Thieu adamantly opposed...

...The "Christmas bomb­ing" was the most concentrated air offensive of the war...

...colleges and universities shut down, and an Ohio Na­tional Guard unit, ordered onto the campus of Kent State University, fired on a group of pro­testing students, killing four of them . Cambo­dia fell into anarchy, from which the murderous Khmer Rouge emerged...

...T HE WAR WAS over, but not the suffering...

...By 1971, these military operations and the Vietnamization program had achieved one im­portant U.S...

...Returning to Paris on No­vember 19, Kissinger demanded that Tho re­open a number of the major issues and threatened "savage" bombing of the North if he wouldn't...

...His hope was that he could convince Hanoi to back down by threatening to bomb North Vietnam into ex­tinction-and the bombing of Cambodia was meant to signal his resolve . He also hoped to persuade the major communist powers to bring the North Vietnamese to heel . Since 1965, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China had furnished Hanoi with significant quantities of military aid and with rice to feed its population . Disputes between the two powers had complicated these aid programs...

...They des­perately wanted American troops out of Viet­nam...

...It was not...

...Not all of them were peaceful, and, sensing a reaction, Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, called upon "the silent majority" for support against the media and academic "elite" that they blamed for the demonstrations . Passions flared on both sides . After the inva­sion of Cambodia, over a third of U.S...

...bombing campaign against the North failed to halt their support for that struggle...

...troops from Vietnam had thus become a political necessity...

...DISSENT I Winter 2009 . 57...

...retaliation would be swift and se­vere, and went so far as to threaten him with a cutoff of U.S...

...Once again, the North Viet­namese forces could not keep up with the col­lapse of the ARVN, but this time they did not hesitate ; they moved swiftly on Saigon . On April 29, their lead units entered the city, and the last American helicopter lifted off the roof of the American embassy...

...A million South Vietnamese fled the country on what­ever vessels they could find, and many of them spent years in refugee camps in neighboring countries...

...iv n PRESS conference on October 26, Kissinger acknowledged that the text was essentially correct and said that while cer­tain technical issues remained, the problems were not very great...

...On April 30, 1970, Nixon announced he had ordered U.S...

...Many Amen­cans assumed that peace would come in short order...

...A withdrawal of U.S...

...In addi­tion, he initiated the Phoenix program in an effort to eliminate the NLF's civilian political cadre through enlarging and centralizing the government's secret police forces . Then, in 1969-1970, the American forces went on the offensive...

...Congress rebelled against Nixon's promise to re-intervene if the communists violated the truce and passed bills DISSENT I Winter 2009 . 5 5 blocking funds for any U .S...

...In all three sectors, the ARVN, though similarly equipped, fled before them...