The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [207]
While bombing resumed and the war grew harsher, the search for settlement continued. Talks in Warsaw with Polish intermediaries in mid-1966 seemed to be making progress until, at a delicate point, American air strikes, directed for the first time at targets in and around Hanoi, caused North Vietnam to cancel the contacts. The episode showed that neither side basically wanted negotiations to succeed. In his unsparing way, McNaughton stated the dilemma for the United States: aiming for victory could end in compromise but aiming for compromise could end only in defeat, because to reveal “a lowering of sights from victory to compromise … will give the DRV [North Vietnam] the smell of blood.”
The war was turning nasty with napalm-burned bodies, defoliated and devastated croplands, tortured prisoners and rising body counts. It was also becoming expensive, now costing $2 billion a month. Progressive escalation bringing troop strength to 245,000 in April 1966 required a request to Congress for $12 billion in supplemental war costs. In the field, the entry of American combat forces had stopped the Viet-Cong in its progress toward gaining control. The insurgents were reportedly losing their sanctuaries, forced to keep moving, finding it harder to re-group, with consequent demoralization and desertions. Their casualties and those of North Vietnamese units, according to American counts, were satisfactorily rising; prisoners’ interrogation was said to show loss of morale; success of the American aim seemed within reach.
The price was a confirmation of the French view of a “rotten war.” In pursuit of attrition, Westmoreland deployed combat units as lures to provoke attack so that American artillery and air force could close in for a kill and a gratifying body count. “Search and destroy” missions using tanks, artillery strafing and defoliation from the air left ruined villages and ruined crops and destitute refugees living in festering camps along the coast in growing resentment of the Americans. Bombing strategy too was directed toward attrition by famine through the destruction of dikes, irrigation ditches and the means of agriculture. Defoliation missions could destroy 300 acres of rice within three to five days and strip an equal area of jungle within five to six weeks. Napalm amounted to official terrorism, corrupting the users, who needed only to press the firing button to watch “huts go up in a boil of orange flame.” Reports of American fighting methods written by correspondents in chronic antagonism to the military were reaching home. Americans who had never before seen war now saw the wounded and homeless and the melted flesh of burned children afflicted thus by their own countrymen. When even the Ladies Home Journal published an account with pictures of napalm victims, McNaughton’s hope of emerging “without taint” vanished.
Reciprocal violence added to the spiral. Viet-Cong terrorism by means of rockets, shelling of villages, booby traps, kidnappings and massacres was indiscriminate and deliberate, designed to instill insecurity and demonstrate the lack of protection by the Saigon authorities. While American armed intervention had prevented the insurgents’ victory, it had not brought closer their defeat.