Peace With Honor? An American Reports on Vietnam 1973-75

by Stuart A. Herrington

A moving and revealing report of the reality of the “peace with honor” that supposedly came to Vietnam after the Paris Agreements.

As a military intelligence officer the author was assigned to the Defense Attaché Office in Saigon and then transferred to a Joint Military Team for investigation of the MIAs (Missing in Action).

In frustrating pursuit of his objectives, he found no peace and far more anger and corruption than honor. Under the cloak of the cease-fire, the North Vietnamese were rebuilding for their final victory - and the war went on.

Morale in South Vietnam plummeted with the American withdrawal, and each congressional denial of appropriations for help was another blow. The MIA investigation, built on a quid-pro-quo arrangement, was a runaround. Negotiations revolved around set propaganda speeches by the Communists, but produced no information and no bodies.

Danang fell. The attempts to evacuate the South Vietnamese who had been loyal to their government was a disaster. Herrington hoped that when the onslaught hit Saigon, better plans would be implemented.

They almost were-but communications with Washington, DC, were faulty, and the last group, waiting patiently, had to be left behind as the last helicopter was ordered to leave the Embassy rooftop.

The last chapter reviews the questions on the war and the demise of South Vietnam: would a Saigon victory have been possible in any case? How far can insurgencies be defeated by modern techniques and tactics? Did we throw away a possible victory at the Paris table? Can military victory be lost by politicians?

A moving, provocative and important book.

Genres: Military Fiction, History

264 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1983

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was an undiscovered treasure sitting on my shelf for ages. Written by an US Army captain who had served as an intel advisor with the territorial forces and comes back in 1973, eventually joining the team looking to account for all the POW/MIA cases. He provides some of the best accounts of life between the signing of the peace accords in Paris and the evacuation of the American Embassy in April 1975. Very well written, 5 Stars

Why the North and Vietcong reps stall efforts to account for and retrieve MIAs:

Typically, the United States would press for an answer to an earlier query on the fate of a pilot who repatriated. The Communist replies seldom varied. Week after week, the Hanoi delegate and his Vietcong ‘colleague’ subjected us to long-winded, student statements condemning the United States for initiating, waging, and prolonging the war. Over and over, they reminded us of our “crimes against the Vietnamese people” and our “sabotage of the Paris Agreement.” To support their position, they would often cite the views of “the progressive American people,” among whom they numbered Jane Fonda, 'Senators' Kennedy and Fulbright, and other doves in the US. Congress. As backup officer at these sessions, I took notes for use in our reporting requirements and supplied the Chief with an occasional hastily scrawled note if I picked up something unusual in the monotonous Communist diatribes. After several weeks of such exposure, I came to dread these charades.

But as repugnant as I found the repressive features of the Hanoi government, one could see how the North Vietnamese position would be compelling to the people of the north. Captain To, a member of the Hanoi delegation, departed from his government’s normal rhetoric one day as we conversed during a coffee break:

Of course we have information on many of your MIA personnel, and in some cases even the remains of your pilots we shot down. And you must know that we do not like to keep them. Their graves defile our ancestral soil and are ugly reminders of the horrors of the bombing of our country. So we want to give them back. But why should we give them to you for nothing? Your government has done so much damage to our people and our land that it must pay. That is your obligation, and even your president committed himself to this. So we will not give you what you want just because you ask for it or demand it.

Had I been a North Vietnamese, I would undoubtedly have agreed with Captain To. But, as I had seen during the war in Hau Nghia province, General Giap’s artillery had inflicted extensive damage in the name of “liberating the oppressed southerners,” most of whom wanted no part of Hanoi-style Communism. There were simply no blacks and whites to the situation by 1974, and all parties to that unfortunate conflict could assume a share of the blame. President Nixon had pledged to the American people that we would spare no effort to provide the fullest possible accounting of our missing servicemen. All of us who grappled daily with this responsibility did our utmost to fulfill this commitment. Unfortunately, it was beyond our power to compel the Communists to accept our view that the MIA question was a purely humanitarian matter that should not be linked to other political portions of the cease-fire agreement. The days when we could force the Communists to do anything had long since passed.

The North Vietnamese understand information warfare while the US is befuddled:

One of the most enlightening, yet sobering, features of duty in ceasefire Saigon was the opportunity to observe the never ending war of words from a box seat. At times, I felt that our crude attempts to match the North Vietnamese in the art of influencing world opinion resembled a kid from the neighborhood gym trying to stand up to the heavyweight champion of the world. No one had described Hanoi’s mastery of the manipulative art better than Tom Wolfe:

“If the United States was seriously trying to win the battle of world opinion-well, then, here you had a real bush-league Operation. The North Vietnamese were the uncontested aces . . . One of the most galling things a pilot had to endure in Vietnam was seeing the North Vietnamese pull propaganda coup after propaganda coup, often with the help, unwitting or otherwise, of Americans. . . . For example, the missions over . . . an important transportation center in the Iron Triangle area. For two days they softened the place up, working on the flak sites and SAM sites in the most methodical way. On the third day, they massed the bomb strike itself. They tore the place apart. They ripped open its gullet! They put it out of the transport business. It had been a model operation: But the North Vietnamese are now blessed with a weapon that no military device known to America could ever get a lock on. As if by magic…in Hanoi…appears…Harrison Salisbury! Harrison Salisbury-writing in the New York Times about the atrocious American bombing of the hardscrabble folk of North Vietnam in the Iron Triangle! If you had real sporting blood in you, you had to hand it to the North Vietnamese. They were champions of this sort of thing. It was beautiful to watch. To Americans who knew the air war in the north firsthand, it seemed as if the North Vietnamese were playing Mr Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times like an ocarina, as if they were blowing smoke up his pipe and the finger work was just right and the song was coming forth better than they could have played it themselves.”

The rift between the press and the military:

Just as I had left Vietnam in 1972 convinced that the press corps was dedicated to discrediting our efforts in Vietnam, a regrettably large number of reporters likewise concluded from our defensive posture toward them that we had something to hide. If we were unfair in questioning the loyalty and professionalism of the press because reporters asked tough questions that often exposed our weaknesses, the press was equally unfair when it accused the military 0f pursuing a policy of deliberate deceit. To be sure, the Saigon command’s perpetual optimism invited suspicion; and, to make matters worse, some incidents of deliberate misstatements quite clearly occurred.

Why they (the NVA) fight…:

…Hanoi was the nerve center of a small, peasant country that had fielded an army of light infantry that had outlasted our country on the battlefield. True, Hanoi’s regulars had never decisively defeated the US. Army in a major battle, but, when the guns stilled and the decisions of the politicians were implemented, it was General Giap’s troops that clung to their positions in South Vietnam while the US. Army completed its withdrawal. During many frequent verbal sparring sessions with those North Vietnamese prisoners I had been intrigued by the success enjoyed by the Hanoi government in mobilizing its population to accept the horrendous sacrifices of the long struggle for national reunification. It was impossible to ignore the bravery of the North Vietnamese regulars we had fought in Hau Nghia province. Hanoi’s troops had seldom surrendered unless they were wounded or out of ammunition. During interrogation, most of them exhibited a firm belief in the justice of the war against what they had been told was foreign aggression. The initial interrogation was always difficult. Convinced that they were about to be tortured and executed, my sullen sources would invariably clam up and stoically await their fate. Conditioned to expect the worst, Hanoi’s men would only open up after I had undermined their defenses with humane treatment. When they begain to talk, they told of their deep admiration for Ho Chi Minh and their pride of country. Many of them had volunteered for the army because they believed it was their “solemn obligation” to liberate their southern cousins from American oppression. Raised from infancy to revere Bac Ho (Uncle Ho), pliable young North Vietnamese soldiers were easily convinced by their political officers that the South Vietnamese people were brutally enslaved by the barbaric and cruel Americans, the same Americans whose aircraft were bombing their villages in the north. As one North Vietnamese prisoner told me, “When the commandant of the training center asked us who would volunteer to go south and strike the Americans, we were all caught up by the emotion of the moment. We felt very patriotic and raised our hands to the man. Some men even went to the local tattoo parlors and had the words, Xuong Nam, Giet My (‘Go South and Kill the Americans’) inscribed on their chests.”

There was a real difference between the North and South Vietnamese:

Not that such intense feelings of regional pride were confined only to Hanoi’s soldiers. One could sense it 'among Vietnamese of all three regions-north, central, and south. And in the south, it was even evident among the native North Vietnamese who comprised a large proportion of the South Vietnamese officer corps. Deep pride in the customs, culture, and beauty of their northern homeland was a part of being North Vietnamese, even among those who had fled the north after the division of the country under the 1954 Geneva Accords rather than live under Ho’s Communism. My northern friends proudly explained to me that the north had always been the home of the educated elite of Vietnamese society. If I desired to speak correct Vietnamese, they admonished, I must learn the Hanoi dialect. Large numbers of the North Vietnamese who came south in 1954 were Catholic, and these families were tightly knit, thrifty, and hard-working. As one northern acquaintance patiently explained to me, “We never had any choice but to work hard in the north. The climate was cold, the soil less fertile, and the rivers less controllable than in the south. The aggressive, almost Western approach to life and its problems seen among us northerners derives from these realities. We had to be strong.”

Not surprisingly, the South Vietnamese saw their northern neighbors somewhat differently. My southern friends insisted that the North Vietnamese were arrogant, tightfisted, and untrustworthy. Northerners were infected with a superiority complex that made them pushy and uncompromising. If I were foolish enough to marry a northern girl, the southerners counseled, she would save all my money, but I would live on spinach and water lilies as she nagged and bullied me into an early grave. One joke popular among the South Vietnamese insisted that the North and Central Vietnamese ate Ca ro cay (a carved wooden fish), which, when dipped in fish sauce and licked, would last forever and precluded the need to buy fresh fish at the marketplace.

How terrible it must have been to be a Southerner and see the US leaving so ignominiously:

It was commonly understood that bribes for exit visas or seats on aircraft had a better chance of success when offered in hard currency. A headline in the Stars and Stripes announced “Embassy Burns Files-U.S. Accelerates Evacuation,” while AP and UPI dispatches reported that the majority and minority leaders of the Senate had come out against additional aid for South Vietnam. My press assistant, Terry, tossed these reports into my in-box and then broke into tears. “I hate you Americans for what you have done to my country,” she sobbed. “Why don’t you just kill us all quickly and be done with it? I won’t go and live in your country--I couldn’t stand it. I’d rather stay here and die.” I tried clumsily to comfort her, but she would have none of it. Until the day of the flight to Guam, I feared that she would make good her threat. Terry had a fiancé in Washington, and I couldn’t leave her to whatever fate the Communists had reserved for an outspoken anti-Communist who had traveled to Hanoi in the employ of the US. Government. At the time, I was so concerned for her fate that I even considered drugging her if necessary and evacuating her to Guam against her will.