Dragon's Jaw

CHAPTER 1

“WE WILL PAY ANY PRICE…”

Bridges are the tangible products of the advance of a civilization that urges people to pool their resources and join together to construct a permanent way over a watercourse or chasm not only for their use but also the use of those who will come after them. When war comes, as it often does, bridges become the focal point of military strategy to exploit, defend, or destroy.

Military history is full of bridges: Xerxes’ boat bridge across the Hellespont in 480 BC, Horatius at the Tiber bridge, Scottish hero William Wallace at Stirling in 1297, the Old North Bridge at Concord, Burnside’s Bridge at Antietam, “the bridge too far” across the lower Rhine at Arnhem, the Ludendorff Bridge across the Rhine at Remagen—to mention just a few. Battles for bridges have determined the outcomes of campaigns and the fate of empires.

French colonial administrators in what was then French Indochina in the late nineteenth century were determined to build a rail network in Vietnam to tie the country together, and bridges were a key part of that plan. The Long Bien Bridge in Hanoi was named after the French colonial administrator Paul Doumer (Du-MAY), under whose administration the work was begun. It was completed in 1902, and for a time its mile-long cantilever design was the longest span in Asia.

Eighty miles south of that the French built another bridge across the Ma River (Song Ma) that, from time immemorial, people and livestock had crossed in small boats, or sampans. French engineers decided that the best place to bridge the river was nine miles inland from the Tonkin Gulf, a site three miles northeast of the provincial capital of Thanh Hoa, where the river flowed between a jagged limestone ridge on its west side and a small hillock on the east. The river gorge was about fifty feet deep. The Vietnamese who lived nearby thought these geological features looked like bones on the sides of a dragon’s jaw, so that became the popular name for the location and where the French built their bridge. Completed in 1904, the Cau Ham Rong, or the Dragon’s Jaw Bridge, was a single span of 532 feet, a double-steel arch with vertical beams supporting the deck.

After France surrendered to Germany in World War II, a pro-Axis Vichy French regime took over in Indochina, one that cooperated with the Japanese. Japanese troops occupied the country, which they probably would have done regardless of whether the French cooperated.

In 1945 the Vietnamese resistance, the Viet Minh, looking for a way to interrupt Japanese-Vichy logistics, decided to destroy the bridge at Thanh Hoa. Popular legend has it that they hijacked two locomotives, loaded them with explosives, and set them racing to crash head-on in the center of the bridge. Whatever the truth may be, an explosion did indeed destroy the bridge.

After World War II a new French government sent administrators and troops to reclaim their lost colony, only to run into a whirlwind of Vietnamese partisans. The war dragged on until 1954, when the French army was massively defeated at Dien Bien Phu. In 1954 a multination Geneva Convention divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel of latitude. President Diem refused to recognize the division, claiming that fair elections were impossible in the Communist north, a claim that was indubitably true. An estimated one million Vietnamese moved south of the 17th parallel, and Hanoi began supporting Communist guerillas in the south.

The fact that the Vietnamese partisans in the north were avowed Communists, led by a longtime Communist named Ho Chi Minh and supported by the Communist governments of China and the Soviet Union, was political poison in the United States. Despite the fact that Vietnam, a tropical backwater of rice paddies and mosquitos with a subsistence economy, was literally on the other side of the world from the United States, the conventional wisdom in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations was that its fate was tied to all of Indochina and, ultimately, Indonesia and Australia. At the height of the Cold War no administration, Democrat or Republican, could afford to be called “soft on Communism.” The Eisenhower and then Kennedy administrations gave money and military assistance to the South Vietnamese government after the Geneva agreements of 1954.

In 1957, twelve years after World War II ended and three years after Vietnam’s partition into North and South, the Communist regime in Hanoi decided to rebuild the Thanh Hoa Bridge across the Ma River. The decision to rebuild the rail and road network along the coast that linked the nation—north or north-and-south combined—together was absolutely inevitable. The new structure was built in precisely the same location, the Dragon’s Jaw, as the old bridge destroyed by the Viet Minh in 1945. It was largely designed by Nguyen Dinh Doan, a structural engineer.

Some Westerners considered the bridge overengineered and overbuilt; certainly it was up to the task. Two steel truss spans met in the middle of the river on a massive, oval-shaped, reinforced concrete pier measuring sixteen feet across at the narrowest point. The cantilever spans from both banks were affixed to concrete abutments anchored against the bridge’s limestone ridge on the west and the hillock on the opposite bank, and the “free ends” met on the concrete pier. These free ends were moveable due to the stresses and natural flexing of the structure. Fifty-six feet wide, the bridge supported a narrow-gauge railway track with concrete roadways on either side. The bottom of the structure measured about fifty feet above the surface of the river at normal flow. The French design had been elegant; the Vietnamese was practical and designed to carry more traffic. Like the French bridge, the structure was oriented east and west, a location dictated by the natural channel of the river. The railroad approaches on both ends were about two miles in length.¹

The North Vietnamese worked on the bridge for seven years, finishing it in 1964. Although the first train had crossed on May 15, the bridge was dedicated on President Ho Chi Minh’s seventy-fourth birthday, May 19. The Dragon’s Jaw Bridge represented North Vietnam’s emerging status in the region and was a source of national pride above the 17th parallel. Although President Ho was not there, the Vietnamese politburo was well represented at the dedication ceremonies. The luminaries included Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, Deputy Prime Minister Le Thanh Nghi, and other Communist officials, including the ministers of transportation and heavy and light industry and the first secretary of the youth central committee. Communist propaganda organs pulled out all the stops: newspapers all over the North trumpeted the brilliant work of engineers, factory workers, laborers, and, above all, the superb leadership of the Communist Party in bringing this grand national achievement to fruition.

The same month the Dragon’s Jaw was dedicated, the Americans began frequent reconnaissance flights over Laos, supporting the Laotian government in Vientiane, which was also under attack by Communist guerillas. Frequently the jets were fired upon, and in June Communist Pathet Lao shot down two US Navy planes. Both pilots were eventually recovered, but tensions between the United States and North Vietnam increased.

While the North Vietnamese were building a bridge on the Ma River, John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States.^* In his inaugural address on January 20, 1961, he said, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.” Fine rhetoric, but even the most optimistic must have wondered just how far Kennedy would push it.

Behind that rhetoric was a policy dilemma with which the Kennedy administration was soon grappling. The Eisenhower administration had relied heavily on nuclear deterrence to keep world peace and allowed America’s military conventional war capability to atrophy from lack of investment. The Korean War, which lasted three years and ended in a stalemate, revulsed the American public, which was thoroughly sick of wars. Was there a compromise, some way between these two extremes to militarily resist Communist aggression? The Bay of Pigs incident at the start of the Kennedy administration, followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis, made these policy choices the subject of great debate in Washington.

Kennedy brought into his administration highly educated young men from the northeastern US establishment, the New Frontiersmen. Robert S. McNamara, the new secretary of defense, had been president of Ford Motor Company for five weeks and was a disciple of quantitative analysis. He staffed the defense department with his “Whiz Kids,” young men who believed wholeheartedly in quantitative analysis and distrusted senior military officers, whom they regarded as intellectually inferior fossils who relied upon “military experience,” which these Whiz Kids distrusted instinctively. The Whiz Kids were arrogant, condescending, and inclined to ignore the advice of military professionals, if they asked for it at all.

Kennedy’s national security adviser was former Harvard dean McGeorge Bundy, another tweedy elitist with self-confidence oozing from every pore.

Kennedy and McNamara found an ally in retired General Maxwell Taylor, former Army chief of staff, and they brought him back to active duty and again installed him as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). Taylor had written a book—always a door opener with JFK—in which he argued that the policy of massive nuclear response to Communist aggression was obsolete and needed to be replaced with one of flexible response. Taylor reveled in the role of the administration’s military Richelieu.^* He gradually took over the function of the JCS and often failed or refused to pass the Chiefs’ policy positions to the White House, preferring instead to rely upon McNamara’s civilian staffers and his own infallible judgment.

There were civilian staffers who urged Kennedy to get more militarily involved in Vietnam—against the advice of the uniformed professionals. Army chief of staff General George H. Decker said bluntly that “we cannot win a conventional war in Southeast Asia,” so he was forced to retire after his first two-year term.

In his seminal work, Dereliction of Duty, H. R. McMaster wrote, “Already predisposed to distrust senior military officers he had inherited from the Eisenhower administration, the Bay of Pigs Cuban incident and the Laotian Crisis motivated the president to seek a changing of the guard at the Pentagon. After the Bay of Pigs, an unsatisfactory diplomatic settlement in Laos, confrontation with the Kremlin over a divided Berlin, and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s bullying rhetoric persuaded Kennedy that the United States needed to ‘make its power credible.’

“‘Vietnam,’ Kennedy concluded, ‘is the place.’”²

So more money and military assistance flowed to the South Vietnamese regime in Saigon.

Yet during the Kennedy administration the South Vietnamese, even with American help, were losing the war with the Viet Cong. The Diem regime was blatantly corrupt and militarily incapable. It was obvious to Washington decision-makers that unless something changed, the Viet Cong, backed by North Vietnam, would eventually conquer the South. That truth was not shared with the American public.

South Vietnam was not a modern nation in any sense of the word. There was no concept of a loyal opposition or open and free debate on public issues. The government was venal and corrupt. So-called sects—or armed gangs—existed by shaking down the population. Military units were tied to the area from which their personnel were recruited and could not be used for offensive thrusts elsewhere in the country. The generals in charge of the military could be compared to feudal warlords. South Vietnam in the 1960s resembled England in the fourteenth century.

Several months before he died, hoping for a more stable government in Saigon, Kennedy authorized the CIA to arrange a coup, one that resulted in the murder of President Diem and his brother by South Vietnamese army officers on November 1, 1963. The situation in Saigon got no better, and in the ensuing months seven coups followed, one after another.

The assassin’s bullet that killed Kennedy on November 22, 1963, a mere three weeks after Diem’s murder, dropped Vietnam into Lyndon B. Johnson’s lap.

Big, blustery, and quick-tempered, Lyndon Johnson’s political style tended toward intimidation more than leadership. Even his most ardent fans admit that Johnson had neither the intellectual capacity nor the executive experience to understand the consequences, intended and unintended, resulting from policy choices. Nor did he have the moral courage to be a war leader.

McMaster noted, “Both Lyndon Johnson’s self-doubt and his willingness to forego the truth would color his relationship with his principal military advisers and shape the way that the United States became more deeply involved in the Vietnam War.”³ Baldly, Johnson had a real propensity for lying for his own political benefit. In Robert S. McNamara he found a soul mate.

McNamara later stated that on his ascendency to the presidency,

McNamara, although nominally only secretary of defense, became President Johnson’s principal adviser on Vietnam. “McNamara would dominate the policy-making process because of three mutually reinforcing factors: the Chiefs’ ineffectiveness as an advisory group, Johnson’s profound insecurity, and the president’s related unwillingness to entertain divergent views on the subject of Vietnam. Above all President Johnson needed reassurance.… McNamara could sense the president’s desires and determined to do all he could to fulfill them. He would become Lyndon Johnson’s ‘oracle’ for Vietnam.”⁵ And he would not raise these basic policy questions with the president that he identified in his apologia, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.⁶

* It is not our purpose in this book to write a history of the Vietnam War but to illuminate Americans’ efforts to destroy and, to the extent we can, North Vietnamese efforts to defend just one bridge, the Dragon’s Jaw at Thanh Hoa. Still, to understand the battles over the bridge, we must see them in context, so a brief discussion of America’s involvement is in order.

* Cardinal Richelieu was the powerful minister of France who basically ran the country during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and drastically curtailed the power of the aristocracy. Taylor did the same to the JCS.