“Artillery ruined the rubber trees, which cost money. That the policy also cost lives, American lives, seemed to be a secondary concern.”

By Jeff Danziger

ANY VIETNAM vet will remember an instance – either hideous or embarrassing – when the character of the war and the American involvement became plain.

It happened for me in 1970 at a briefing for the press where the combat situation was described by a colonel who suffered from pretensions of literary scholarship. It was in the town of Xuan Loc where I was assigned to a particularly disorganized MACV office. The enemy – Viet Cong and NVA – also seemed to have offices in town; they came and went as it pleased them.

During the briefing, the colonel admonished the press not to report on the negative side of recent combats events, but instead to emphasize the hopeful elements.

Stressing the up side of the American role, he said that there were plenty of examples where things had gone right. He then when on to predict that we could look forward to steady improvement in the struggle against the enemy forces. In the meantime, he said, the press should keep things upbeat.

“Keep positive, gentlemen,” the colonel said. “With American help and arms, Vietnam is going rise like a Tucson from its ashes.”

The room fell into a baffled silence until someone at the back, an enlisted man with a degree in classics, called out: “Right state, colonel, wrong bird!”

From that moment on, I began to categorize and record, at least in my memory, the various mistakes and screw-ups I encountered. They ranged from mere oversights to disastrous misjudgments.

I list three here; the others you will find in my book Lieutenant Dangerous available, as we say, at better bookstores everywhere.

I currently live in Vermont – a town called Brattleboro. Down the road from my house is the Bunker farm, the home of the Bunker family, once headed by the late Ellsworth Bunker, a legendary American ambassador, and self-acknowledged ‘smarter-than-everybody-else’ type. Bunker and I have a few things in common. We were both born in Yonkers. Ellsworth died in 1984 in Brattleboro. One day I will, too.

Bunker was the American ambassador to South Vietnam during the military build-up and disastrous later years of the war. As such, he bears his share of responsibility for the clumsy and destructive relationship between the U.S. government and its puppet regime in Saigon.

The tales of stupidity and ignorant cruelty to the Vietnamese troops and the American conscripts could fill (and have) many books. These policies and near crimes were developed and supervised by Ellsworth Bunker and his counterparts in the South Vietnamese government. If he didn’t foster these ideas, he was at least in the room. And as I mentioned, he was the smartest man there.

Vietnam’s principle cash crop was rubber. The plantations stretched for literal miles – hundreds of thousands of rubber trees planted in perfectly straight rows. Between each row was a narrow road for the crews of rubber sap collectors, mostly women, who pulled a wagon with a tank on it. Each tree had a chevron scar or several scars from which the sap, a milky substance, oozed into small cups. The women collected the drippings and pulled the wagon to the processing plant. At the plant, ancient machinery heated and stirred the sap until the rubber solids, somewhat like cottage cheese, came to the top. This stuff was then either smoked or steamed, bound into a bundle, powdered with talc and stencilled with the name of the owner of the plantation and its fruits: Michelin.

The French were still there, or at least their colonial mercantile representatives were. The rubber went out to make tires, shoes and other goods. Cash came back. The war might interrupt lives and, in many cases, end them, but the business of rubber went on pretty much interrupted. The Vietnamese, at least the upper classes, were all francophiles, ignoring the history of French colonial excess, including the provision of truck-mounted guillotines for use against captured rebels. What Ellsworth Bunker might have mentioned to the various American administrations he served was that the Vietnamese didn’t give a goddam about communism; they just wanted to be Vietnamese.

The U.S. Army, in the personage of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, was given the mission of securing the rubber plantation. It was a particularly fraught job since, among other strictures, no artillery could be fired into the rubber plantations. The safest and preferred way of using American troops to fight the Cong and the NVA was to have our platoons conduct search patrols, and then when they found some enemy, pull back and call in artillery.

American artillery was one thing the North Vietnamese respected. It wasn’t all that accurate, but there was a lot of it. During a barrage, hundreds of shells could fall from the sky, bracketing an enemy position, wrecking everything. But not in the rubber plantations; they were off limits to American batteries.

Whether Bunker himself approved this policy I can’t attest, but it was a rule to avoid firing into the plantations. Once the enemy had figured this out, the way was clear. Even if you’re not as smart as say, Ellsworth Bunker, or the local North Vietnamese commander, you decided to set up shop in the rubber plantation, digging in headquarters, hospitals and barracks. And posting guards to warn when the poor benighted 11th ACR came through.

The GIs would ride in aboard armoured personnel carriers, dismount and then dart from tree to tree, hoping for a clear shot at the enemy who was shooting at them.

But artillery ruined the rubber trees, which cost money. That the policy also cost lives, American lives, seemed to be a secondary concern. The South Vietnamese economy, already glowing from corruption, would suffer. Our allies, the Army of Vietnam (ARVN), hated his kind of fighting. You may recall that the U.S. was supposedly in Vietnam to advise the ARVN, giving them expert guidance in weapons and tactics. But this section of our advice, fighting nearly hand-to-hand when there was a job the artillery could do much faster and safer, was plainly stupid. And providing enemy a safe place to hide, to make sure the Michelin Tire Company didn’t suffer any losses, was advice from hell.

I don’t know what difference all this recollection makes at this late date, but it does prove that the war was as much about money as about anything else. Michelin is still in Vietnam plying its trade; the Vietnamese Maoists are a faded memory. I buy underwear made in Vietnam (probably Danang), and there is now Vietnamese vodka made from tapioca. I can still order phở bắc in a Vietnamese restaurant, even though few Vietnamese-Americans probably do. But I will not buy Michelin tires.

Jeff Danziger is the author of Lieutenant Dangerous: A Vietnam War Memoir from Penguin Random House. One of the most widely recognized political cartoonists of his generation, Danziger’s work is syndicated by the Washington Post News Service. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. Danziger served involuntarily in the U.S. Army from 1967 to 71 and was awarded the Bronze Star and Air Medal for his service as an intelligence officer and linguist in Vietnam in 1970.