SPECIAL REPORT — Fifty years ago this week, the long U.S. war in Vietnam came to an end. U.S. combat troops had left the country two years before, but on April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese forces captured the South Vietnamese capital Saigon. It was a profoundly difficult moment for the United States and its allies in Vietnam; the U.S.-backed government in the South collapsed, and the last American civilians and military personnel were evacuated, along with tens of thousands of South Vietnamese who had worked with the Americans and the government in the South. It would be the largest-scale helicopter evacuation in history, and it produced searing images of the evacuees being ferried from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.
Ever since, the long and failed war in Vietnam has provoked debate about the use and limits of American power, and policymakers and military commanders have drawn different lessons from the conflict. A half century later, The Cipher Brief turned to former U.S. officials and members of our network who were involved in the Vietnam war in different ways, and asked for their reflections, and the lessons they have drawn from their own experiences.
John McLaughlin was an intelligence officer in Vietnam who would serve for decades at the CIA, including as its acting director; John Negroponte was an officer in the U.S. Embassy in Saigon who later served as Ambassador to Iraq and the United Nations, among other posts, and as the first head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI); James Clapper commanded a signals intelligence detachment in Thailand and flew combat support missions as an Air Force Second Lieutenant – and he too would later lead the ODNI; Martin Petersen served in Vietnam, and his subsequent CIA career led to the post of Deputy Executive Director; and in 1969, Walter Pincus was on a sabbatical from journalism, on an investigative mission for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Pincus would later win the Pulitzer Prize among other honors during a 40-year career at The Washington Post.
McLaughlin: Most [of the Americans] didn't want to be there. Among the jobs I had, because I'd been trained in Vietnamese, was to interrogate some of the prisoners who were there, mostly 16- to 18-year-old kids to whom I would give a cup of tea and a Camel cigarette and we'd have a chat. And most of them were draftees in North Vietnam who didn't really want to be there either, and had come down along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
My sense in dealing with the South Vietnamese, which I did a fair amount of, was that they were a mixed bunch. Some were dedicated and hardworking and believed in their cause. Many were drafted into their army and were just seeking to survive. It taught me a lot about current debates, and when people, for example, talk about the “will to fight” in Afghanistan or in the Ukraine-Russia war, I don't think most people understand what that even means. I learned what it meant in Vietnam.
The will to fight was most intense on the North Vietnamese side. There are many lessons that come out of Vietnam, and one of them is that wars like that have to be won by the people who live there, or lost by the people who live there. You can't want a victory more than they do, and leadership is critically important. They have to respect their leaders who are going to ask them to risk their lives in some cause that the leader defines. This was true in Afghanistan. They did not respect their leaders in Afghanistan.
I don't think we ever really learned the lessons of Vietnam. Clarity of mission is so critical, and I think it was clear in the early days in Afghanistan, for example, that our initial mission was to defeat the Taliban and drive out and ultimately neutralize Al-Qaeda. So from roughly 2001 to roughly 2006, I think the mission was fairly clear in Afghanistan. And then it began to blur, once Afghan politics got more complicated, and once we had less fidelity from the Pakistanis and we got deeper and deeper into it. Again, the lesson I took from Vietnam was that it is the people who live there who have to win it or lose it, and who have to understand the mission. And I don't think the Afghan forces ever quite had the faith in their leadership or the clarity of mission to prevail as a group. I'm sure there were many exceptions to that.
In Iraq, the mission became blurred because an insurgency developed and it turned from a war of decapitation in the case of Saddam [Hussein] and his regime into a war of insurgency. And as a number of intelligence officers warned, a prolonged occupation will almost inevitably produce a recoil, a fight back, an insurgency of some sort. There are exceptions. But I wouldn't say we've learned that lesson real well.
That said, I think it's overlearning the lesson to say that we should pull back and avoid engagement – because there are successful engagements. Think of the 1990 war in which George H.W. Bush successfully liberated Kuwait. There was a case where the mission was clear. Clarity of mission is possible. It's more possible when you are in charge and initiating the activity as George H.W. Bush was in that case.
Another lesson: listen to your intelligence officers. You don't necessarily have to believe everything they tell you, but toward the end and around the time of Tet, which was the turning point in the war, people who went and looked closely came back and said, this is not going to work out. I actually talked to [Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger at one point about this and asked, What took you so long to end the war? And he said, Well, remember there were 400,000 Americans there when we arrived in office. And he said, We had never lost a war. So we wanted to find a way to end it honorably.
The point is, one lesson is don't underestimate the adversary just because they seem to be less powerful than you. They have the will to fight perhaps.
But also study your history. Most people thought that the Vietnamese would not attack on Tet because it was a religious holiday – but dig into the history. They had done exactly the same thing in 1789 when they were being occupied by the Chinese. They attacked on Tet.
I still think that America went in with a noble purpose, which was to ensure that freedom would prevail on that peninsula. But you have to also put it in the context of the Cold War. This was the high Cold War and the fact that the Russians and the Chinese were to one degree or another supporting the North Vietnamese had a powerful impact on American policymakers. It's very hard to judge everything knowing what we know today. Back then, America and many allies viewed the world through the prism of competition with the Soviet Union and less so with China. To a degree the purpose was noble. But in retrospect, unrealistic. I don't think it was ultimately winnable.
Lt. Gen. Clapper: I served in Vietnam early — in 1965 and 1966. It was the worst year of my life, both personally and professionally. Once I was there, I quickly grew to hate the war, and I found what the war was doing to our military very disturbing. I quickly realized that the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese had a cause—they wanted to be free from colonial domination—whether that meant by the French, or by the continuation of the French—in other words, the Americans.
In contrast, the South Vietnamese, having been ruled by a succession of dictators, didn’t really have a cause which they believed in, and they were not going to succeed no matter how much blood and treasure we poured into the conflict.
We also failed to gauge the will to fight. We profoundly underestimated the will to fight of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese as a whole, and we profoundly over-estimated the will to fight of the South Vietnamese. I almost got out of the Air Force after my year there, intending to go to the National Security Agency as a GS-12. Fate intervened, but that’s another story.
The lesson: the U.S. must avoid getting into conflicts where there is no clear end game. We must coldly analyze the sides in a conflict. And then: Don’t get into wars that don’t enjoy the support of the American people. It is incumbent on U.S. military senior leadership to speak truth to power, and to tell policy-makers – particularly policy-maker number one – what he or she needs to hear, and not what he or she wants to hear. Fifty years later, I am not sure we remember these lessons as well as we should.
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Amb. Negroponte: I spent more than a decade on the Vietnam issue in various places – Paris, Washington, Saigon. My first tour was as a provincial reporter in South Vietnam; they had 42 provinces and I covered six or seven of those, and I went out, usually a week at a time, and covered security, economic, political, military developments in that particular province. And then I'd come back to Saigon and write up my reports. We had yellow legal pads, no telephones really.
Later I was recruited to the delegation for the peace talks in Paris. [Richard] Holbrooke pulled me in as a so-called Vietnamese language officer. I spoke fairly fluent Vietnamese – no way that I could be an interpreter – but I ended up being a liaison officer with the North Vietnamese delegation.
We signed the so-called Peace Agreement in January of 1973. And I told Henry Kissinger that the agreement was flawed and that it would be very unwelcome in Vietnam, and that it could well lead to the unraveling of the whole situation.
I was in Ecuador when Saigon fell. And it insulated me from what happened. I had sort of switched career emphasis and career tracks, and I guess I was relieved that I was not responsible for dealing with this mess that frankly, Dr. Kissinger created. And so I was very disappointed for Vietnam, but I wasn't surprised. I knew how flawed the peace agreement was and the way we jammed it down the South Vietnamese throats.
I think it was due to a loss of political will. The objective conditions on the ground when we signed the Paris Peace Accords were probably about as good as they'd been in many years. And the Viet Cong had spent themselves with the Tet Offensive in 1968. The key point, I think, is that when I left Vietnam in January of ‘68, we had 520,000 combat troops in South Vietnam. By the time we negotiated the so-called peace agreement, we were down to about 50,000 troops. We were hardly taking any casualties, and we were playing only support functions. We were no longer involved very much in combat operations on the ground. We'd really reduced that exposure, so the costs for us going forward, let's say maintaining a residual presence in South Vietnam, would not have been very high. There was of course the issue of prisoners of war, and the North Vietnamese had that as leverage on us; they held 2,200 American POWs, and they weren't going to give them back until we agreed to withdraw. So ultimately, that's what we did.
For me, lesson number one involves how the war was fought. It's not only the policy that can be debated, it's the execution. And I think a lot of us who had firsthand experience with Vietnam thought that it was fought badly. And mistake number one, far ahead of all others, was that we started the Vietnamization program, the intense training and equipping of the South Vietnamese Army, much too late. [Gen. William] Westmoreland did not have a particular interest in doing that. He wanted the Americans to do all the fighting, and I think they felt that the South Vietnamese just couldn't handle it. [Gen.] Creighton Abrams was a very different person, and when he replaced Westmoreland, he put much more emphasis on Vietnamization. But that wasn't until 1969, a year or so after the Tet Offensive, and we'd already been involved for years and years.
I would say that's lesson number one. And I found that it applied to Iraq, it applied to Afghanistan. First thing I did when I went to Iraq, we had a $17 billion reconstruction program for Iraq. And none of the money in those reconstruction funds was for improving the Iraqi Security Forces. And I did a report in my first weeks in Iraq back to [Secretary of State] Colin Powell, recommending that we reprogram $2 billion from those reconstruction funds to train and equip the Iraqi Army, and the White House bought it, and so did Congress.
And I think that's the main thing. If you go into a country, one of the first things you’ve got to ask yourself is, what are the local capabilities here? And if they're deficient, how can they be improved at a reasonable cost? I would say that is lesson number one.
Then, between helping a country improve its security and helping it with all these other aspects of nation-building like agriculture, medical, I think that's secondary. Economic development is important, but it's not the critical variable really in these kinds of situations. It's security. It's the ability to provide security, because without security, you really can't get much else done. If we get involved in other situations like this, that needs to be the top most priority.
Petersen: Fifty years later, I see three lessons from the U.S. experience in Vietnam: one that I fear is still unlearned; one that I hope has been learned; and one that has indeed been taken to heart.
The first is as simple as it is difficult: Do not get into something unless you have a very clear idea how you are going to get out of it. Recognize as well that the past is not necessarily a guide to the future, and that you had better understand the war as the enemy understands it. There are more than echoes of Vietnam in our experience in the 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom, and in the long post-9/11 war in Afghanistan.
The second lesson is that preserving the peace after an initial victory also requires a detailed understanding of the history and culture of the other side – as well as the military situation. And that comprehensive planning for the aftermath of victory before the onset of hostilities is essential, if the fruits of victory are to be kept from becoming the bitter detritus of long-term defeat. I hope that the Iraq and Afghanistan experiences have taught us this.
As a Vietnam veteran myself, the third lesson is perhaps the most important one: respect the soldier, sailor, marine, and airman who served. You can hate the war without hating the warfighter. Vietnam was bad, and the experience of coming home for many only made it worse. I believe this lesson is one that the nation has taken to heart.
Pincus: The closest I got to the Vietnam War was in 1969, when I was in a single-engine U.S. Forward Air Controller (FAC) airplane flying over Laos, looking for signs of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and North Vietnamese fighters infiltrating into South Vietnam.
At the time I was working as chief of staff for a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that had been established by the Committee Chairman, Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-Ark), to investigate military involvement in U.S. foreign policy. This was my second 18-month sabbatical from journalism to run an investigation for Sen. Fulbright. The first had been seven years earlier, when the focus was the workings of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
For Sen. Fulbright, the investigations had three parts. The first six months you investigated to discover what was not working. Then you put together a report to him and other committee members that disclosed what you had discovered, contained proposed legislation to fix problems, and included a schedule of hearings and witnesses to get your proposed legislation passed.
When I was flying over Laos in the fall of 1969, we were in the investigative phase. As in the FARA inquiry, a lawyer and I were the entire subcommittee investigative staff, along with a secretary back on Capitol Hill. The lawyer was not on the flight since the FAC plane was a two-seater.
We had first gone to the Philippines and South Korea, where we learned about U.S. salary payments to their soldiers that were needed to get those two countries to send troop units to Vietnam. In Thailand, we first learned details about the un-acknowledged and therefore undeclared war the U.S. was fighting inside supposedly-neutral Laos.
As investigators from the Senate Committee, in Laos we had interviews with the U.S. Ambassador, G. McMurtrie Godley, at the Embassy in Vientiane, along with separate sessions with the USAID representative, the Air Force attaché, and the CIA Station Chief. All were cooperative.
From the Air Force Attache we learned about the U.S. Air Force pilots who were flying FAC missions over the Ho Chi Minh Trail so they could direct Laotian fighter-bombers to potential bombing sites. From the Station Chief we learned about the CIA-trained Hmong fighters at Long Tieng and their leader, Gen. Vang Pao.
Since the U.S. role in the Laos fighting was secret back in Washington, I decided to request to go up on a FAC mission myself, so I could personally observe what our pilots were doing.
After some hesitancy, the Embassy’s Air Attache arranged it, but before we took off from a Vientiane airport, both the pilot and I had to leave all identification on the ground. That was in case some mishap brought our plane down – that we’d not be identified as Americans involved in this element of the war.
For our closed hearings in Washington, we brought the Air Attache back from Vientiane, who testified honestly about what was going on. At a closed Senate floor debate, the first in decades, the Senate in late December 1969 passed an amendment to a defense bill, later approved by the House, that barred the introduction of U.S. ground troops into Laos or Thailand.
That set a precedent for the debate in 1970 for Congress to pull U.S. troops out of Cambodia, later votes (though they were not successful) to withdraw U.S. troops from South Vietnam, well before President Nixon announced their removal.
I write about this experience as my most vivid Vietnam War memory because it taught me about the power Congress can exert through oversight with strong leadership – something that in my view has faded over the past several years.
Today, when bipartisanship is most needed, Congressional oversight seems to be primarily used, by Democrats and Republicans alike, for partisan rather than good-government purposes.
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