Ready?

Ready.

Okay, tell us how you yourself define what the challenge was in Vietnam.

How I define the challenge. That's very hard to answer because I was in my twenties when I got to Vietnam. When I got there in the early summer of 1963, there were about ten thousand Americans in Vietnam. About forty or forty-five Americans had died. I thought those were enormous numbers.

But I was very young. I was just out of college. I had just entered the Foreign Service, and I didn't have any personal objectives. I believed in the US government and its objective as stated to me by people in Washington during my preparation.

And that had added up to the fact that we were going to Vietnam to help the Vietnamese help themselves, to defeat a low-level insurgency. The idea that it would escalate into a war involving over a half a million Americans, and then ultimately tear America apart domestically was incomprehensible.

And like most Americans arriving in Vietnam in those days, I didn't question the objectives of the United States government. They were consistent with the objectives of a liberal interventionist foreign policy. And it was a long time before it became clear to me that even if the objective was laudable, the strategy and the application of that strategy, the specific tactics, were not going to succeed.

As you, as you worked in Vietnam (cough), how did you, how did your concept of the objective affect what you actually did?

Well, I think, like many Americans, my view of the war went through different phases. I didn't question the objective for a long time. I think one started with the assessment of how we were doing.

When one spent time in Vietnam, on the ground, in the provinces, and I was assigned right away to be a provincial advisor in one of the large provinces in the lower Mekong Delta, one found rather rapidly that the facts on the ground in the province were at variance with the official understanding of the situation of that province, as understood in Washington and at higher headquarters in Saigon. In the province I was assigned, a province called the Ba Xuyen , there were - on the official list - there were three hundred and twenty-three completed strategic hamlets. This number is very important because it told us how many people were controlled by the government. And it was the basis on which on a mathematical formula, certain amount of American aid was given to that province. That aid had to go through me.

So I said I'd like to have a list of these hamlets, and where they were. I'd like to visit them. It took months for the Vietnamese to give me those lists. They were very reluctant. And finally I said, "Look, I'm not going to sign the papers unless you give me the lists." When I got the lists, it turned out that eighty of the three hundred and twenty-three hamlets were in fact just subdivisions of the two largest cities in the province: Soc Trang and Bac Lieu. And of the remaining two hundred and fifty or so, two hundred and forty five, two hundred and fifty hamlets in the province that were allegedly completed and under government, you couldn't get to about a hundred of them without government escort.

So, immediately I felt there was a sharp variance between what Washington and Saigon thought was going on and what was really going on in this one province, province of about six hundred thousand people. So with that as the, that as sort of the opening wedge of what later came to be called the "credibility gap," one began to realize that the basis of, on which people in Washington were making decisions of the war was false information. And the story I just told you could be repeated a thousand times, in a thousand different ways. It was a product of a system of reporting which emphasized progress, uh, at the price of accuracy.

One could spend years arguing assessments. That was essentially the initial argument between the American journalists of the time, people like Halberstam and Sheehan and others who came to Saigon regularly. And uh, and the government. That was the original argument. It wasn't over whether we should be in Vietnam. It was over how we were doing.

So I would call that phase one. You have a problem with the assessments. In phase two...

Excuse me a second; okay go ahead.

In phase two of one's progressive reevaluation of the war, one thought about the tactics. Now by tactics I mean specific tactical concepts used in Vietnam which one could legitimately question. A very obvious one was the so called "H and I": harassment and interdiction fire, where routinely to expend ammunition during the night, the Vietnamese and their American advisors would fire artillery rounds and randomly chosen cross points, or cross roads, places where paths met in the jungle. Free-fire zones where people would drop their unexpended ordnance before returning to base, and in a free-fire zone you could hit anything that moved.

It struck, it struck many people in Vietnam that these actions were inconsistent with the rhetoric of winning the hearts and minds of the people which was at the core of the American strategy at that time. So one could have arguments over tactics. One could also have arguments over how good the South Vietnamese army was. That was another level of concern. And then beyond that as one progressed one could get into basic strategic questions.

The most fundamental strategic problem that I had in Vietnam came a little bit later, and that was in the period '66-'67. And it came over the concept of the war of attrition. And here I believe the American military command of the highest levels in Vietnam made a mistake of truly profound and historic dimensions. The command believed, and briefed journalists, congressmen, and everyone who visited Vietnam that we were going to grind down the communists over time by - and I believe this is pretty close to a direct quote of General Westmoreland of the era - by killing or putting out of action more enemy than they could put into the south through a combination of recruitment of the south and infiltration from the north.

Now, the military in Vietnam had a problem. That is that ever since 1959, every few months when they took an intelligence order of battle, there was always more enemy each time you measured it. So General Westmoreland kept looking for the point at which we would kill the enemy faster than he could recruit and infiltrate replacements. That point would be called the crossover point. And when we reached it, the enemy, the graph of the enemy, on the intelligence shows, instead of going off and start coming down.

Well, this crossover point was terribly important to Westmoreland and to his command. The...he kept waiting for it. He kept looking for it. It had a profound influence over the battle over the size of the enemy or the well advertised, much-debated question of the enemy order of battle. But much more basic than that battle over intelligence, which I consider a minor and trivial issue, was the concept involved.

The North Vietnamese had fifteen million people in North Vietnam, plus a population base within which they could recruit in the south of three to eight million, depending on what time you're talking about. The idea that the United States and its South Vietnamese allies could somehow eliminate the communists by killing more of them than they could replace was on its merits absurd. The idea that we were ready to bleed, and shed our blood, at a greater rate than the communists was crazy.

Uh, Jean Sainteny had been told be Ho Chi Minh in 1946 at Fontainebleau that the Vietnam did not want to fight the French, but if they fought the French, the French would kill ten of them for every Frenchman they kill. But in the end, the Vietnamese would win. Oh, what Ho Chi Minh said to the Frenchmen in Fontainebleau in 1946 was just as true twenty years later with the Americans. And it was true. Certainly ten times as many communists died as Americans, South Vietnamese, and others died on non-communist side.

But the point that the American command failed to understand, the strategic mistake which I think was one of the most serious strategic conceptual blunders of the mid-sixties was that we could somehow attrit the enemy, and I use the word attrit deliberately. Now...

Excuse me sir, could you repeat that point one more time for just the focal point?

What point?

Uh, this issue, what was most fundamental...

And go all the way back?

No, no, no—just the last sentence. The most fundamental mistake was...

I can't remember what I just said.

The most fundamental mistake was...

You have to write it down and give me a cue card the second time around. (laughs) What do you want me to say now?

Just say it over again. The most fundamental mistake...

(laughs) The most, uh, how far back do you want me to go?

The most fundamental mistake was the belief that we could attrit...

Did I say that?

Yes.

That's pretty good. (breathes) The uh, the fundamental strategic mistake which was made was the idea somehow that the United States could bleed an Asian communist enemy into the point of fading away. That was just a basic and profound error. Now let me make one last point on this. In Washington, people did...

You should keep your eyes on Stan.

Let me make one additional point about this. In Washington, the leadership of the United States government did not, if my memory is correct, take this war of attrition concept...

All right, the question is how did you, from your perception, what did you think the Vietnamese were fighting about, and did that differ from your own...

I think the Vietnamese were just fighting to survive. I don't know if they ever thought they'd eliminate a communist insurgency which had existed in Vietnam for a generation in certain areas. But they thought that they could survive better, or at least some of them thought they could survive better with our help.

And how did that affect your relations, actually working relationship.

How did it affect our relationships with them. I don't know. I really don't know how our relationships were affected by that, the, some Vietnamese really truly believed in freeing their country from the pressures that a communist insurgency, like a cancer, was causing in South Vietnam. Others were very cynical, and just were in it for whatever they could get.

Some Vietnamese were very honest with us. Most, I think, treated us, uh, at arms length, even if they went out drinking with us, even if they were very friendly with us, they were, it was a very difficult thing to communicate with the Vietnamese. The gulf that separated us from the Vietnamese was enormous.

How did we actually deal with the Vietnamese...

Excuse me, Stanley. Before we leave that point, is there anything that you could think of in particular that would illustrate from your own experience that the gulf of dealing with the Vietnamese? Answer to Stanley.

Well, it's almost, it's eighteen years or seventeen years now since I was in the Mekong Delta, and it's very hard to reconstruct the exact mood that existed at that time between the American advisors and the Vietnamese whom we were advising.

But I look back on it with a sense of wonder that we were trying to give them advice, turning over our own personnel so rapidly. You know the average tour in Vietnam was less than a year-long. So the Vietnamese who had been living all their life with these problems were suddenly confronted with Americans who arrived on one day and within twenty-four hours, giving them advice. They had to take at least some of the advice, because the Americans along with the advice had goods, commodities, money, weapons, ammunition, and the Americans represented the greatest power on earth.

But there was a vast gulf of misunderstandings, many of the Americans didn't know what kind of a war they were fighting, or how to fight it, the training for the American advisors was very uneven. It wasn't even the best kind of assignment for the American military in terms of their own careers. So the best officers usually stayed away from the advisory effort.

And the Vietnamese for their part learned gradually that whether they liked an individual advisor or didn't like him, he would leave, he'd move on within six to twelve months. And so he had better just get along and keep going. It was a very delicate balance in that very complicated situation.

Could you describe, though, the Vietnamese recognizing that they needed the Americans for the sake of the things the Americans could give them, the money, the supplies and so forth. How did they accommodate flattery, dinners, girls, progress reports, and so forth that were just what the Americans wanted.

A whole variety of things were used by the Vietnamese in dealing with the Americans. Flattery, progress reports were a very important part of the equation. But it varied enormously from place to place and relationship to relationship. Sometimes relationships were very personally cordial; sometimes they were very cold. Sometimes they survived the twists and turns of subsequent history, sometimes they didn't.

It's very difficult to generalize, except for one generalization. It just seems to me that there was something inherently structurally fallacious about the whole advisory relationship. Its concepts and its motives were extremely good, but in execution, it didn't often work.

Now when you had an outstanding advisor, a legendary advisor like John Paul Vann, results could be very dramatic. But Vann's theory which was more John Vanns will win this war would only have been true if there were more John Paul Vanns. And, in fact as we all know, there were only a handful of people, uh, like John Vann.

As we get into the great big Americanization of the war now, late '65, how did we actually deal with the Vietnamese government after that stage? I mean, did we bypass them, were we doing, were we fighting the whole war? Could you describe a little bit this strange sort of conflict that we're calling on the sovereign government, when at the same time, we're really in fact, partly fighting the war for them?

All through 64, accelerating in 65 and 66, the Americans were building up at a fantastic rate an army and a parallel government of advisors. Not just the military. But on the civilian side. Hundreds of education advisors, hundreds of public safety advisors, hundreds of agricultural advisors dispensing millions and millions of dollars in goods, commodities, aid in kind.

The theory was "nation building". That was one of the cliché words of the mid-sixties. In fact, it seemed often to me that the more Americans you had, the more they became a crutch for the Vietnamese to depend on. Rather than stimulating the Vietnamese to greater self-reliance and only in self-reliance was there any even marginal hope of success, you were merely weakening the indigenous Vietnamese governmental and bureaucratic administrative structures. And given greater credence to the communist propaganda that the South Vietnamese were American puppets.

Could you be a little more precise, though, actually in '65, '66, '67 period, '65, '66... How did it actually function in Saigon, how did we plan with the Vietnamese? Did they know what kind of a war we were fighting? Did they, did we share our strategy with them, or how did it work?

Basically, the Americans made their own plans and then presented them to the Vietnamese. Although there was an ornate and very ritualized system of reaching joint agreements on how to proceed. But basically, it was done by the Americans.

It's important to remember that the American mission in Vietnam, including the military and tall the disparate elements of the civilian side, AID, USIA, CIA, the Embassy, and so on, were themselves very poorly coordinated. They were not centrally managed, except for the Army. And even within the U.S. military, there were divisions between the Marines, Air Force, Navy and Army. But all of those elements in Saigon had direct channels of communication back to Washington, so whatever bureaucratic rivalries existed in Washington - and there were plenty of them - these were mirrored in Saigon.

And each American group worked with its own Vietnamese group. The Vietnamese tended to be relatively passive and accepting an American theory, provided by accepting the theory they got something tangible, goods, money, something in return.

There were areas, I want to stress, where they American efforts made a big difference. Economic stabilization program certainly staved off an economic collapse in Saigon which otherwise would have been quite serious and would have had an enormous inflation. The education effort did educate large numbers of Vietnamese children. The agricultural efforts did produce rising yields of miracle rice and other things. I don't want to leave you with the impression that these were hopeless, worthless, uh, projects.

The American input did result in a measurable output. But it was not necessarily related to success in the war. And sometimes, in a horribly ironic way, it could work against those objectives.

How?

You could create a dependency on the Americans. In certain areas of the country, uh, where I visited, the U.S. Marines had successfully taken villages, and built up a relationship with the villagers so that the village was prospering, secure, schools that had been closed for years were reopened, rice paddies that had lain fallow were being cultivated, fertilizers being used, the people were more prosperous. But the link was directly between the village and the unit.

I remember one very poignant trip where I visited in the Third Marine Amphibious Force area, south of Danang, and the, around Thanksgiving of 1965. And the marines had done a spectacular job in the village. It was really a happy village. And as I left, I spoke a little Vietnamese in those days, although I don't remember much of it today. And as I left, one of the Vietnamese children came up to me and said that they heard that this unit, which they knew by name, "First of the Ninth", First Battalion, Ninth Marine Regiment, this unit was going to leave the village soon. And they didn't want it to leave.

Well, of course, that story illustrated several things to me. First of all, how porous our intelligence effort was. It was true; they were going to leave. And here was some kid who knew it, which presumably meant the Viet Cong knew it. Secondly, the plan was that the First of the Ninth, this was a company of the First of the Ninth, was going to move on and be replaced by the Vietnamese. And they didn't want to be replaced by Vietnamese. The villagers did not want a Vietnamese unit to come and take over the combination of security and nation building. And these things, this was...

Out of film?

Well, the...

I'm sorry, I wasn't ready.

The villagers knew that the American unit was going to leave. They didn't want them to leave, they didn't want them to be replaced by Vietnamese unit. They didn't trust the Vietnamese unit. They felt safer under the protection of an American marine unit, for obvious reasons.

The only problem with the picture that one saw in this little village that I'm describing was that for the United States to protect the population of South Vietnam the way that marine company was protecting that village would have taken several million American troops. So you couldn't do it that way. So the very concept was fallacious.

The irony of it is how immensely moving it was to see these young marines doing their best in this village. Building schools, helping with irrigation, agricultural development, but how strategically wrong that concept was.

Remember to keep looking at Stan. Let's go back to one point about after the war becomes Americanized, what happens to all the American hopes for political reform, social reform, uh, I mean, did you believe that, at, at that stage, we're talking about late '65, '66 that you were bringing democracy, justice, so forth to Vietnam?

Did I believe, personally...

You, and others in the American nation. I mean what...

I think Americans were fighting in Vietnam for a multiplicity of reasons. Some idealists thought that they were going to build a modern nation in Vietnam. That was at one end of the extreme. Other people were in Vietnam simply to avoid a defeat. I think that you had every range of objectives mixed in.

And that is true even at the highest levels. Lyndon Johnson himself, I think was tormented by the contradiction of the different objectives. It isn't until you get to the Nixon era where the objective becomes much narrower and more clear-cut.

Let's go back a moment, that's getting into commentary. You're in the mission in Saigon, it's 1965, '66, what do you think, I mean as all these Americans come pouring in, what do you think's going on in there. Or what are we doing here? You.

I didn't...I don't know what I thought we were doing in those days. And I was a very junior officer, watching a buildup taking place which I could hardly understand. And month by month, the American role in Vietnam changing. I had no historical perspective on it.

All I knew was the people pouring into the country full of energy, enthusiasm, sincerity, and firepower, did not seem to always know where they were. And the tremendous argument was going on continually over strategy and tactics. For example, there was an argument over whether the Americans should guard enclaves or go out and kill Viet Cong in the central highlands. These were not debates to which I could, as a junior officer, contribute much.

But, uh, I watched them, and I was lucky enough, or unlucky enough, as the case may be, to have been in a position to see a lot of these debates. And, uh, to watch some of the most extraordinarily fallacious concepts imaginable being put forth, particularly this concept of the crossover point that we could somehow kill more enemy than they could replace through infiltration from the north and recruitment from the south.

Westmoreland believed that when we reached that point, the crossover point, we would be on the way to winning what he termed a "war of attrition", those were his exact words. That concept was completely wrong. It did not take into account that the North Vietnamese were at all times prepared to pay whatever price necessary in terms of human blood, in order to achieve their objectives. The ruthlessness of the North Vietnamese was, and the determination was constantly underestimated.

Were there different perceptions within the American mission in Saigon between the military...Were they fighting the same war? How...Did they look at it differently?

There were tremendous disputes in the mission in Saigon over almost every aspect of the war. There were jurisdictional disputes with different agencies seeking control over overlapping programs. There was a tremendous battle between the military, the CIA and USIA over who would control the cadre program involving General Westmoreland, and some of the civilians.

There were arguments over strategy and concepts at every level. All the time. But, you know, in the long run, in the final analysis, these were unimportant debates. None of them focused on larger strategic issues posed by problem.

What were the differences between the war as you saw it being conducted in Vietnam and as you saw it when you came back to Washington?

There was a true and astonishing lack of understanding in Washington as to what the war was really like. There was a deep ingrained view on the part of so many Americans in the US government, including the congress that we were just so powerful as a nation that we couldn't lose. How could we lose when we'd never lost a war in our history, when had atomic weapons, when we had just faced the Russians down in the Cuban missile crisis less than three years earlier.

The missile crisis, it must be remembered, it was the most immediate prior event in our history, and the most determining one for people. Even the intervention in the Dominican Republic in April of '65, which although controversial, had apparently succeeded in keeping Santa Domingo from going communist, had contributed to this incredible believe in America's destiny. I also believe in America's destiny, but when I came back to Washington in the summer of 1966, I came gradually to realize that people in Washington had somehow believed that we could do things at the furthest reaches of our supply lines at the other end of the globe on, in a remote part of the Asian land mass, which exceeded our capability and our understanding.

There was a tremendous gap between the understanding there and the understanding in the field. I, when I had lived in the provinces in the Delta, I had thought that Saigon didn't understand this in the provinces. When I got back to Washington, when I got to Saigon, I thought of cour—let me do that again. When I had, um, let me start again. When I...

Look at me.

When I had lived in the provinces in the early '60s, I had thought that people in Saigon didn't understand the real problems of the Delta, of the, of the field. When I got to Saigon a year-and-a-half later, I thought the people in Washington didn't understand the real problems in Vietnam. When I got back to Washington, I realized that whatever was true in the field, the understanding in Washington was really extraordinarily limited. And yet, decisions of the most enormous import were being made.

The leadership of our country in the mid '60s, from, President Johnson's senior advisors spent hundreds of hours, personally selecting bombing targets over North Vietnam. They didn't spend a fraction of that time educating themselves as to what the war was really like.

(clears throat) Now I want to stress something: I do not believe and I have never believed that there was anything morally wrong with our leadership in that period. I totally reject the idea that the Americans prosecuting the war were war criminals or morally culpable, or that their motives were bad. What has upset me, then, and still upsets me today, is the fact that with the most sacred and heavy responsibilities put on them by our nation, either our elected officials or appointed civilian and military officials, they didn't take the time to learn what the war was really about.

Many of the problems that arose between the government and journalists stem from the simplest fact that even a average journalist could go out in the field and learn more in a few days than might be evident to senior officials in Washington who would never spent that much time in the field. How the journalists themselves were guilty of vast exaggerations and misrepresentations, but they had on their side of the argument the fact that they had actually seen more of the war than the people who had made the American strategic and policy decisions. (loud cough in background) Men like Stan Karnow, for example, they knew much more about the war than David Halberstam...

Let's look back for a moment. What do you think we learned from...?

Karnow, of course, was particularly good, I want to say that (soft laughter)

Looking back, what did we really learn in Vietnam? What did you learn? I mean, you go on to higher things in the Carter administration.

I, I learnt that Stan Karnow really (more laughter)...What did I learn? I'm wasting film!

What are the lessons of Vietnam? C'mon, we want to get this for the film.

What are the lessons of Vietnam? There are many lessons in Vietnam in simple operational terms. For me, I hope that I learned that one should try to learn as much about a problem as possible before making decisions about it; that the smartest man in the room may not always be right; that you've got to listen to the person who comes into a meeting and says, "Hey, wait a minute; it isn't quite that way."

I saw brilliant men, some of the best and the brightest man of the '60s, mislead themselves through careful analysis of statistics and fail to listen to less intelligent, less articulate Americans who happened, for whatever reasons, to have been in Vietnam and seen the actual...

You know, the smartest person...You know, the smartest person in the room wasn't always right, and sometimes the best and brightest of the '60s, brilliant as they were, got carried into very serious errors which might have been avoided, had they listened more carefully to slower speaking, less brilliant people who happened to spend part of their lives in the rice paddies or jungles of Southeast Asia.

Beyond that, the lessons of Vietnam at the largest level are probably fairly obvious. You have to decide what your national strategic interests are. If it's important, you've got to be prepared to put whatever resources are necessary into the effort to succeed. You can't make a halfway measure.

And in this sense, Robert MacNamara's probably the symbol of everything that was most wrong in the war. He wanted to achieve his objectives at the cheapest possible cost. If the objectives are so important, he shouldn't have been so parsimonious with the resources. If the objectives were only worth limited resources, then the objectives were too limited to be worth going for.

Time and time again, in the 1980s, as you go around the country and talk to people, particularly people who fought in Vietnam, when you ask them to look back, they say the same thing: They're angry, and what they're angry about is not a simple hawk or dove position, but more complicated. We either should not have been there or we should have won. They know in their, in their guts, that we fought with one hand tied behind their backs, but they're not reaching the judgment that we shouldn't have been there, i.e., the dove position, or that we should have used nuclear weapons.

They're not taking sides, they're just saying don't, they're saying, "Our leaders should not put us in positions like this." Uh, we have to decide what our national strategic interests are, and then, if it's important we should be ready to pay the price. If it's not that important, we should limit our commitment at the outset and position ourselves so that we can survive outcomes of events we can't control.

It's very, it's very, very important, as we construct a foreign policy for the future, that we not misread the lessons of Vietnam. Some of the military would have you believe that Vietnam was lost because the American press and Congress lost heart and undercut them. They are trying, in my view, to deny their own responsibility for complete misconceptions strategically and tactically.

Other people would have you believe that because Vietnam was a disaster, we should never involved in overseas, uh, commitments again. That, I think, denies the interrelated nature of global politics. And the fact that our national interests and our national security are indeed affected by things that can happen in very remote places. Vietnam does not give you an equation that you can plug in El Salvador or Lebanon or Namibia and give you the right answer, but it does give you a set of very clear warning lights on how not to proceed.

Now I'd like to saw a few words about Stan Karnow.

Is there any more?