Not a Dove, But no Longer a Hawk
Sheehan, Neil
not a Dove, but no longer a Hawk by NEIL SHEEHAN Neil Sheehan returned to the United States recently after covering the war in Vietnam for The New York Times for three years. He recorded his...
...Cement, roofing, steel bars, and other building materials destined for schools and refugee housing mysteriously end up on the open market or in private villas' and apartment buildings...
...There were many disappointments those first two years, but when I left Vietnam in 1964, I was still, to use the current parlance, a hawk...
...We are continually chagrined to discover that idealism and dedication are largely the prerogative of the enemy...
...The American soldier makes the lack of aggressiveness of the government forces the butt of unending gibes...
...This gives the government forces a distinctly mercenary cast that affects both their attitude toward the population and, except for a few elite units, their performance in combat...
...The presence of 317,000 American troops in the country has made a mockery of its sovereignty, and the military junta in Saigon would not last a week without American bayonets to protect it...
...I believed in what my country was doing in Vietnam...
...And I hope we will not, in the name of some anti-Communist crusade, do this again...
...In the final analysis, American strategy in Vietnam consists of creating a killing machine in the form of a highly equipped expeditionary corps and then turning this machine on the enemy in the hope that over the years enough killing will be done to force the enemy's collapse through exhaustion and despair...
...The course of, the conflict has made apparent that the Communists are able to arouse and to exploit the native Vietnamese qualities of hardihood and resilience, and to convince large numbers of their people that the cause of their government is just...
...There were 17,000 American servicemen in Vietnam at the time of my first departure and there are now 317,000 and I, while not a dove, am no longer a hawk...
...About eightyfive per cent of Saigon's armed forces are, consequently, volunteers who take up arms for pay...
...Louis Post·Dispatch "You Must Be Thrilled to Have Your Village Liberated" Rarely in any war has the name of the people been evoked more by both sides than in the Vietnam conflict...
...AMERICANS, because they are Ameri cans, arrive in Vietnam full of enthusiasm and with the best of intentions...
...Promises of land reform are solemnly reported in the American press and are apparently taken with some seriousness in official circles in Washington...
...Last November, I found one fishing village in Quangngai province, on the central coast north of Saigon, in which at least 180 persons-and possibly 600-had been killed during the previous two months by aircraft and Seventh Fleet destroyers...
...The United States acted with clear moral justification and Americans fought as they always like to think they fight-for human freedom and dignity...
...To gain their own ends, Asians frequently tell Americans what they think Americans want to hear...
...Since 1954, the United States has poured more than $3.2-billion of economic aid into South Vietnam, but no Saigon regime has ever undertaken a low-cost housing project of any size...
...aid the French and then to develop and support a non-Communist administration and army in the South...
...The war is, rather, a struggle between differing elements of the Vietnamese people as a whole...
...The opposing sides, in short, have never recognized the 17th Parallel as a permanent boundary and have violated the frontier whenever it suited them...
...Some American officials with long experience in Vietnam estimate that about twenty per cent of United States aid supplied for counter-insurgency projects in the countryside finds its way to the Vietcong and that another thirty to forty per cent is diverted by government officials...
...I have received the impression, however, on visits to accessible hamlets, that many of the peasants are so weary of the fighting they would accept any settlement that brought them peace...
...LOOK at the value when you give The Progressive for Christmas I know this is true in my own case and in the case of many Americans of my acquaintance who have lived for long periods in Vietnam...
...The statistics imply sound military progress until a visit to the countryside reveals that what is meant by an "enemy structure" is usually a peasant hut in a hamlet the Communists control, or which the American and South Vietnamese authorities suspect the Communists control...
...We can and should limit the violence and the suffering being inflicted on the civilians as much as possible, but for whatever reasons, successive Administrations in Washington have carried the commitment in Vietnam to the point where it would be very difficult to prevent any precipitate retreat from degenerating into a rout...
...I returned to Saigon in 1965 for another year...
...Attempts to describe the current war as a geographically based struggle between North and South Vietnam breaks down almost immediately when it is recalled that Premier Ky and several other important members of his government are North Vietnamese by birth, who fled south after the French defeat, while Pham Van Dong, the Premier of North Vietnam, was born in the South...
...Desertions are greatest among conscripts, an indication that the average South Vietnamese feels little or no commitment to defend his own society...
...The Vietnamese people have become mere pawns in the struggle...
...Most refugees I have questioned told me that the Vietcong taxed them and made them work harder than usual, but that they could live with the Communists...
...The United States can no longer make any pretense of fighting to safeguard South Vietnam's independence...
...If resettled properly, the refugees could conceivably develop into an asset for the Saigon government...
...They left their homes, they said, because they could no longer bear American and South Vietnamese bombs and shells...
...Communist leadership of the anticolonial movement led to the involvement of Vietnam in the larger context of the cold war and brought the intervention of the United States, first to...
...What follows is a condensation which, we hope, captures the spirit and significance of Mr...
...Although civilians are being killed and wounded by both sides, my own investigations have indicated that the majority of civilian casualties result from American and South Vietnamese airstrikes and artillery and naval gunfire...
...In Vietnam this moral superiority has given way to the amorality of great power politics, specifically, to the problem of maintaining the United States as the paramount power in Southeast Asia...
...The local district chief confiscated the rice and sold it to the refugees at exorbitant prices...
...bars...
...After a prolonged period of residence, they leave with their enthusiasm a victim of the cynicism that pervades Vietnamese life and with their good intentions lost somewhere in a paddy field...
...In World War II and in Korea the aggression of one state against another was an established fact...
...We shall not be able to reform them and it is unlikely that we shall be able to find any other Vietnamese willing to cooperate with us...
...We shall have to continue to rely mainly on our military power, accept the odium attached to its use, and hope that some day this power will bring us to a favorable settlement...
...The men who lead the Party today, Ho Chi Minh and the other members of the Politburo in Hanoi, directed the struggle for independence from France and in the process captured much of the deeply felt nationalism of the Vietnamese people...
...not a Dove, but no longer a Hawk by NEIL SHEEHAN Neil Sheehan returned to the United States recently after covering the war in Vietnam for The New York Times for three years...
...Terror may drive a man to march toward the enemy's guns, but it will not make him fight valiantly...
...Last April, during one of his more candid moments, Premier Ky told a group of correspondents: "Never believe what any Vietnamese tells you, including me...
...The Singapore government, in contrast, is erecting thousands of low-cost housing units for its people...
...The number of refugees has now passed the million mark...
...The conditions of life in Vietnam will probably always make an accurate assessment of the peasants' attitudes toward the war impossible to obtain...
...For its own strategic and political ends, the United States is thus protecting a non-Communist Vietnamese social structure that cannot defend itself and that per haps does not deserve to be defended...
...Whatever desires they might possess have become incidental...
...From the contrast in behavior of the two sides, I can only conclude that Vietnamese will die more willingly for a regime which, though Communist, is at least genuinely Vietnamese and offers them some hope of improving their lives, than for one which is committed to the galling status quo and is the creation of Washington...
...Now I have left again, and much has -THE EDITORS changed...
...This seemed to me a worthy cause and something that needed to be done if other Southeast Asian peoples were to be allowed some freedom of choice in determining their course in history...
...Although I often disagreed with the implementation of American policy during my two years in Vietnam, I was in accord with its basic aims...
...December, 1966 Engelhardt in St...
...It is a world in which the THE PROGRESSIVE masses of the peasantry no longer live -they endure...
...Perhaps because of this, the Communists, despite their brutality and deceit, remain the only Vietnamese capable of rallying millions of their countrymen to sacrifice and hardship in the name of the nation and the only group not dependent on foreign bayonets for survival...
...He grows to hate "Charlie," the G.I...
...I wonder, when I look at the bombed-out peasant hamlets, the orphans begging and stealing on the streets of Saigon, and the women and children with napalm burns lying on the hospital cots, whether the United States or any nation has the right to inflict fhis suffering and degradation on another people for its own ends...
...In 1958 the late President Ngo Dinh Diem organized a Committee for the Liberation of North Vietnam, and since 1960 the Saigon government, with American connivance and aid, has been smuggling saboteurs and commando teams into the North in a so-far vain ef fort to instigate a guerrilla movement among the Northern Catholics and mountain tribesmen...
...While Vietnamese with influence prosper in the cities and towns, the war has created a different world in the countryside...
...Our responsibility for prolonging what is essentially a civil conflict may be one of the major reasons for the considerable amount of confusion, guilt, and soulsearching among Americans over the Vietnam war...
...He recorded his overall impressions in the Sunday Magazine of his paper October 9. We believe his report is one of the most significant and searching commentaries on Vietnam yet published...
...But I simply cannot help worrying that, in the process of waging this war, we are corrupting ourselves...
...Province and district chiefs' positions are frequently sold to the highest bidders by those responsible for making the appointments...
...If the United States \vere to disengage from Vietnam under adverse conditions, I believe that the resulting political and psychological shockwaves might undermine our entire position in Southeast Asia...
...slang name for the Vietcong guerrilla and the North Vietnamese regular, because "Charlie" kills his friends, but he soon learns to respect Communist bravery and cunning...
...Refugee slums have risen in the cities almost as fast as GJ...
...We shall, I am afraid, have to put up with our Vietnamese mandarin allies...
...The Vietnamese, possibly because of their greater experience with Americans, seem to have developed a particular talent for this...
...The flow of refugees from the countryside is the most eloquent evidence available of the gradual destruction of rural society under the impact of the war...
...Sheehan's brilliant report...
...Despite these misgivings, I do not see how we can do anything but continue to prosecute the war...
...Each afternoon, in the air-conditioned press-briefing room in Saigon, the United States Military Command releases a communique reporting that 300 or more "enemy structures" have been destroyed by American fighterbombers or by the guns of Seventh Fleet warships that day...
...In Vietnam, only the Communists represent revolution and social change, for better or worse according to a man's politics...
...The five hamlets that composed the village, once a pros~ perous community of 15,000 people, had been reduced to rubble...
...With military and economic aid and a few thousand pilots and Army advisers, the United States was attempting to help the non-Communist Vietnamese build a viable and independent nation-state and defeat a Communist guerrilla insurgency that would subject them to a dour tyranny...
...Yet the Vietnamese peasantry, who serve as cannon fodder for Communists and nonCommunists, remain curiously mutea hushed Greek chorus to their own tragedy...
...This strategy, although possibly the only feasible alternative open to a modern industrial power in such a situation, is of necessity brutal and heedless of many of its victims...
...When I first walked across the tarmac of Saigon's Tansonnhut Airport on a warm evening in April, 1962...
...The official assertion that the Communist soldier endures the appalling conditions of his daily life and behaves so commendably in combat out of terror of his superiors becomes patently ridiculous to anyone who has witnessed a battle...
...A U.S...
...What gets down to the poor son of a bitch in the paddy field," one official said, "is a trickle...
...I am no exception...
...It takes a great deal to make a Vietnamese peasant forsake his land and the graves of his ancestors...
...It is the tragedy of Vietnam that what began as a war of independence from France developed, as a result of its Communist leadership, into a civil conflict...
...The Saigon regime . . . has experienced great difficulty in increasing the strength of its armed forces because of a very high desertion rate...
...I have often wondered why, since the promises are never carried out and the speeches made today are practically identical in content and phrasing to those made four years ago by some other government leader...
...The Communist Party is the one truly national organization that permeates both North and South Vietnam...
...The incumbent is then expected both to recoup the cost of his job from corruption and to make payoffs to the higher officials who sold it to him...
...Yet, true to its usual behavior, the regime neglects them and the majority are left to shift for themselves...
...Army Special Forces captain once told me how he had arranged for rice to be flown in American planes to a camp of several thousand refugees in a remote area who were suffering from malnutrition...
Vol. 30 • December 1966 • No. 12
