Saturday, March 03, 2007
The butterfly effect: Did Bob Hope's cue cards lengthen the Vietnam war?
History can hinge on the strangest things.
Today's Islamic terrorism is so savage -- aimed as it is at civilians in cafes and markets -- the brutality of the undeniably brutal Viet Cong seems almost quaint. From Mark Moyar's excellent book on Vietnam, Triumph Forsaken
During the final days of this brouhaha, the anti-Communist cause suffered one more wound, in the form of another strong enemy provocation. On Christmas Eve [1964], two Viet Cong agents clothed in South Vietnamese Army uniforms drove into central Saigon with a 200-pound explosive charge in their trunk. They stopped at the Brink Hotel, a six-story, 193-room monstrosity that was now serving as an American bachelor officers' quarters. The two Communist agents convinced one of the South Vietnamese sentries that they were awaiting an officer who, according to Communist intelligence, would not be at the hotel at that hour. This officer was not, in fact, in the hotel at the moment, so the sentry allowed the two agents to park the car in the hotel's garage. Leaving the car in the garage, the two went to a nearby cafe, from where they would eventually make a safe getaway. At 5:45 p.m., the timer on the explosives went off, blowing away the entire ground floor of the hotel, save for the steel girders, and blasting gaping holes in the three floors above it. The gas tanks of trucks parked in the garage exploded in sequence, which shot flames and debris through the first three stories of the building, as in an extended fireworks display. At the time of the detonation, a large number of U.S. field grade officers were in their rooms getting ready for a party at the rooftop officers club, and two of them were killed, while 38 others were injured. Another 24 civilians suffered injuries, including several Vietnamese children. With this act of terrorism, the Viet Cong had been trying to kill comedian Bob Hope, who had just flown in to perform a Christmas show for the troops and was planning to stay at the Brink Hotel, but Hope had not yet reached the hotel because he had been delayed by the unloading of his cue cards at the airport.
Anyone born after, say, 1930, regarded Bob Hope's obvious reliance on cue cards as transportingly lame. Who knew they may have saved his life? Regardless, the Commies were lucky that they missed, for the Brink Hotel achieved a certain significance in the Vietnam war, and it might have come out differently had Hope been killed or severely injured.
At the time, the Brink Hotel attack seemed like just another VC provocation, but Moyar argues that America's failure to respond to it -- on the theory that we had only ourselves to blame -- condemned South Vietnam to invasion from the North and probably made the massive American escalation in the next year inevitable:
The Brink Hotel attach came on the heels of renewed pleading from Ambassador Taylor to unleash American air power on North Vietnam, and it seemed to offer the perfect justification for doing so. The Joint Chiefs joined Taylor in recommending retaliation, as did Admiral Sharp, who commented that force "is the language the VC understand." To discuss these recommendations, President Johnson summoned his advisors away from their Christmas celebrations to his Texas ranch. Rusk and McNamara both advised the President to reject Taylor's request and, once more, Johnson took their advice. As in the case of the Bien Hoa attack, the President sent Taylor a response containing almost every conceivabloe objection, some of them bordering on the absurd. The most important reason for refraining from action, Johnson stated, was the political turbulence in Saigon. He expressed doubts about the Viet Cong's culpability, despite the availability of compelling evidence that included National Liberation Front broadcasts claiming credit for the act. In an effort to shift some of the onus for inaction onto Taylor, Westmoreland, and other hawks in the military, Johnson sniped, "I also have real doubts about ordering reprisals in cases in which our own security seems, at first glance, to have been very weak... I do not want to be drawn into a large-scale military action againt North Vietnam simply because our own people are careless or imprudent." Taylor was told, in addition, that the war could not be won from the air and that Johnson would look more favorably on a request for U.S. ground forces than a request for air strikes -- although Johnson and other civilians were not actually convinced at this time that air power alone was incapable of deterring Hamoi. The most important reason may have been one not contained in Johnson's message, as had been the case with the message after Bien Hoa. One day later, General Wheeler informed General Westmoreland that administration officials believed that too much time had elapsed since the actual attack. The embassy had needed four days to determine that the Viet Cong had perpetrated the act, and Johnson and other civilian policymakers believed that reprivals had to take place within thirty-six hours of the depredation -- otherwise, according to their theories, the reprisals would constitute unprovoked escalation by the United States.
When Johnson refused to retaliate for the Brink Hotel attack, he missed what was probably his last opportunity to prevent the North Vietnamese from undertaking an offensive that the Saigon government, gravely weakened as it was by disunity and
Buddhist conniving, would be unable to stop. Massive U.S. air or ground attacks in North Vietnam or Laos at a subsequent date might still have caused Hanoi to abort its offensive, but Johnson had no inclination to go that far, as he had unwisely made apparent to the enemy on multiple occasions. North Vietnam's remaining worries about U.S. intervention melted away after the bombing of the Brink Hotel. [Moyar cites internal North Vietnamese documents for this last proposition. - ed]
A few months later, when the Communists were assembling their forces for what they expected to be the decisive offensive, Johnson would figure out that his inaction and his public statements in the last months of 1964 had emboldened the enemy. He would rue the days when he had rejected the military's proposals for hard action in Laos and North Vietnam, when he had sided with smart civilians who had embraced specious academic theories, misinterpreted enemy intensions, and undervalued the men and arms infiltrated from the North into the South.
Commentary
Apart from obvious lessons -- that one must never make important decisions regarding war and peace at a ranch in Texas -- what may be said of this? For starters, that attacks and counterattacks are a form of communication, even if they are not perfectly understood by either side. Johnson's famous advisors, the rump of the "best and the brightest," were students of Thomas Schelling's "idiom of military action," which is a broadly powerful framework for thinking about the negotiation embedded in attacks and reprisals. Schelling (Arms and Influence
, at 142-143):War is always a bargaining process, one in which threats and proposals, counterproposals and counterthreats, offers and assurances, concessions and demonstrations, take the form of actions rather than words, or actions accompanied by words. It is in the wars that we have come to call "limited wars" that the bargaining appears most vividly and is conducted most consciously. The critical targets in such a war are in the mind of the enemy as much as on the battlefield; the state of the enemy's expectations is as important as the state of his troops; the threat of violence in reserve is more important than the commitment of force in the field.
From this perspective, the attack on the Brink Hotel was significant not for the damage that it did, but because it forced the United States to produce information that was useful to the Communists: did, or did not, the United States have the will to retaliate for a direct attack on American military advisors? Learning that the United States would not, we now know that North Vietnam was emboldened to invade the South. Unfortunately, Johnson's civilian advisors thought that they were producing information of an entirely different sort: that they would not escalate the war against North Vietnam, which implicit promise was meant to assure Hanoi that it did not have to fear for the survival of Communism in the North.
Adversaries in a negotiation often misunderstand each other, but it is particularly likely when the idiom is military action (or terrorism). The important thing to remember is that all responses to an attack, including the complete failure to retaliate, generates information valuable to the attacker.
Now, back to Bob Hope's ridiculous cue cards. Had Hope been a decent stand-up comedian he would not have carried cue cards and would not then have been late to the Brink Hotel. What if the titanic Hope had been killed or cippled in the attack? Would Lyndon Johnson still have decided against retaliation? I think not. In saving Bob Hope's life, those cue cards may have changed the course of the Vietnam war. Such is the influence of incompetent comedy.
(Oh yeah. The "butterly effect".)
18 Comments:
By 
Purple Avenger, at
Sun Mar 04, 09:01:00 AM:
Its pretty clear how worldwide the jihadis will interpret democrat actions.
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Sun Mar 04, 09:53:00 AM:
TH: "...the brutality of the undeniably brutal Viet Cong seems almost quaint."
Almost quaint? One tactic of the Viet Cong was to chop off both of the hands of little children to punish their parents or grandparents.
Another tactic was to tie a man to a tree and pull out his intestines in front of his eyes. Then the Viet Cong would cut off the victim's penis and stuff it in his mouth. Throughout the ordeal the victim remained conscious. (This happened to one of my friends.)
By TigerHawk, at
Sun Mar 04, 10:06:00 AM:
Well, "almost quaint" was not the best choice of words. I certainly don't want to be arguing in favor of the VC's humanity. Perhaps the only difference is that the latter use modern technology to brag about their atrocities across the globe. Still, I think that the VC's brutality was more particularly targeted than the jihadis. The VC mostly went after their specific enemies; if you cooperated with them rather than Saigon, you were part of the team. The jihadis seem to define just about everybody as their enemies. Anyway, that wasn't really the point of the post.
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Sun Mar 04, 11:11:00 AM:
Any idea that the U.S. could have intimidated the North Vietnamese with a greater or a longer show of force is nonsense in my view. You had to exterminate your enemy or leave the country.
Sometimes words are more than propaganda. Look at Ho Chi Minh's words:
1. "You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win."
2. "If the tiger does not stop fighting the elephant, the elephant will die of exhaustion."
3. "It was patriotism, not Communism, that inspired me."
Everybody in the north wanted unification. An estimated one-third of the people in the south wanted unification. An estimated one-third of the people in the south wanted to remain separate, and the other one-third of the people in the south didn't give a damn one way or the other. Most of your opponents would have fought to the death.
In the end, America achieved its most important objectives in Southeast Asia by leaving Vietnam, forcing the nations of the region to come up with their own solutions to their own problems.
By Habu, at
Sun Mar 04, 02:34:00 PM:
TigerHawk,
many,many top North Vietnamese up to and including gen Giap have stated that had the US continued bombing the north they would have sued for peace, that they were beaten. He also admitted that our decision not to go into Laos in nubers to cut the Ho Chi Mihn trail also cost us. However their biggest support and reason to fight on came from the US left, the Jane Fonda's and Ramsay Clarks.
We won the war on the ground and air. We lost the war in DC,Boston , and Berkeley..
Our strengths have become weaknesses. Our technology, our ability to bomb one house nad leave the next door neighbors daisy's unharmed scares no one in the ME. I guarantee had we carpet bombed Baghdad, or a large section of it the population would wet itself every time it saw an American service man. High tech is lost on a 7th century society..brutality and massive lethality does impress them. Our side just doesn't know how to win anymore...we promote generals who can produce the best term paper at graduate school and can be charming on the DC cocktail circuit. We've got no warriors...just take a look at Patraeus' ribbons. Only one is for valor and it's circumstances are weak.
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Sun Mar 04, 03:47:00 PM:
"...including gen Giap have stated that had the US continued bombing the north they would have sued for peace..."
Habu1, at this point that seems to be nothing more than an urban legend left over from the last U.S. Presidential election. Can you give me a source other than Oliver North?
In 2004, Giap said in an interview with the CBC that the North Vietnamese never had any doubt that they would defeat the French, then the Americans.
There also is no mention of your claim in "Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954–1975" by the Military History Institute of Vietnam, translated by Merle L. Pribbenow. University Press of Kansas.
Some people have attributed the statement to Giap's "1985 memoirs." I have found no evidence that such a book exists.
By 
, at
Sun Mar 04, 05:18:00 PM:
DEC -- Giap's own strategy was to use the protection of China to deter an amphibious invasion of the North and wait until the Americans left, then attack conventionally.
Whenever Giap deviated from this strategy he suffered grievous losses, mostly due to complete Air Superiority over the South.
When Giap attacked with a conventional blitzkrieg in 1973, his losses were so severe due to US airpower (think the Highway of Death in Kuwait) that he held off for two more years and Congress cutting off aid to South Vietnam before repeating it.
You also ignore the horrific strain of the attacks in Vietnam. The VC were wiped out by Tet, and the few survivors believe that it was a deliberate attempt by the North to wipe out the Southern Communist leadership. The North itself paid a horrific price in casualties. Something along the lines of 40% of men of military age in the North died as a result, putting enormous strains on the ability to fight the war. The South in the Civil War suffered about the same casualty rate and absent a brutal Communist dictatorship collapsed.
The North felt relatively immune from sustained direct attack by means of the Chinese patronage (the threat of Chinese intervention on a massive scale as in Korea) and Soviet Nuclear umbrella. Without this constraint on US actions the North would have lost very quickly to a MacArthur style amphib invasion and conventional military forces for which the NVA had no effective counter.
Moreover the NVA was entirely supplied by the Soviets and Chinese. Food, medicine, clothing, arms were all supplied by the Chinese and Soviets to "bleed" the Americans the way the US did in Afghanistan in the 1980's. North Vietnam absent massive Soviet and Chinese aid could not have prosecuted the war.
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Sun Mar 04, 05:51:00 PM:
As a U.S. soldier I was in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, Anonymous. For eight years after the war, I helped an American friend in his successful fight to get his Vietnamese daughter out of the country. Today I do business in Vietnam.
By , at
Sun Mar 04, 06:15:00 PM:
"War is always a bargaining process, one in which threats and proposals, counterproposals and counterthreats, offers and assurances, concessions and demonstrations, take the form of actions rather than words, or actions accompanied by words."
This statement demonstrates, I think, the fundamental intellectual problem with the "intellectuals".
DEC, and a lot of men I have personally known, served with valor, duty and distinction in Viet Nam, but to what end, I'm not sure. To win a war, you have to have war aims, and devote planning and actual warfare to reach the desired end. It doesn't always have to be "total" war, and a massive body count, but you have to move in a determined way to meet you war aims. What were our "war aims" in Viet Nam?
Really. I grew up in that era, and I don't have a clear notion that LBJ ever expounded on that item.
AS much as many detest GWB (I don't), I think I can summarize his war aims in Iraq, if called upon.
War is not about sending a "message", cha-cha-cha. Unless the message is "die infidels!".
-David
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Sun Mar 04, 06:26:00 PM:
David, thank you for your kind words.
By , at
Mon Mar 05, 06:30:00 AM:
"Incompetent comedy"? How so? By being prepared? By saving the crowd the embarrasement of the remote possibility of drawing a blank at the wrong time? By ensuring a smooth enjoyable show? Have you ever seen Bob Hope in his heyday? You would never know he had cue cards ready for occassional "reminders".
Cue cards are the hallmark of a professional. Don't forget, this was the era of rapid fire jokes, not long drawn out "observations" culminating in a one-liner...he might have rattled off hundreds of jokes in a single performance...
Anyway, it was the olden days!
By Habu, at
Mon Mar 05, 07:01:00 PM:
DEC,
As a start please see the August 3, 1995 Wall Street Journal interview conducted by Minnesota attorney, Stephen Young.
The interiew is conducted with Bui Tin who took the surrender of Saigon and was on the General's staff.
It is not a first person interview but I will locate that one in time and let you know. Bui Tin leaves little doubt they would have lost for a number of reasons, including the one I mentioned.
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Mon Mar 05, 07:14:00 PM:
Habu1, thank you for the information.
By Habu, at
Mon Mar 05, 10:11:00 PM:
DEC,
This pains a former Marine, however after two hours keyboarding the Giap quote in question I am unable to produce a citation for it. Nor does it appear that he wrote any memoir in 1985.
I have asked our intelligence services to get on it and produce at least one copy ASAP or we'll be forced to waterboard Giap to get at the truth..he's still kick'n last I looked.
The citation I did provide is from a general staff Colonel who makes his claims, but he is not Giap. I may be forced to resort to lowcountry voodoo practices.
Habu
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Mon Mar 05, 10:26:00 PM:
This comment has been removed by the author.
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Tue Mar 06, 02:14:00 AM:
Forget about it, Habu1. It's no big deal. Your point was that the North Vietnamese could have been beaten. My point was that you would have had to kill many, many more of them to do it. Any differences between us on this issue are very, very minor.
By Habu, at
Tue Mar 06, 06:16:00 AM:
DEC
A-OK...thanks for the lesson. Knowing the truth is always best.
Habu
By Dawnfire82, at
Mon Mar 12, 02:11:00 AM:
Re: Operation Linebacker. When the North agreed to talks, the Linebacker bombardments ceased. When they stalled the talks, the bombardments resumed. Ultimately, a cease fire was signed. Point: A greater USE of force (contrasted to the word, show, in the earlier posts) did in fact result in forcing the opponent to negotiate. Now, what happened in the aftermath was a separate issue. When the US military deterrent evaporated... well, there was no longer a deterrent.
There are better ways to win a war than "kill all the enemy." An (even moderately successful) invasion of the North, for instance.
Or cutting their supplies. http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Linebacker
Hitting the North's capacity to wage war by destroying its heavy industry and mining its harbors did indeed bear fruit, hence the resulting peace negotiations during the Nixon administration.
It doesn't matter how much your opponent wants to fight, if he is unable to.
In the end, the US failed to achieve it's first tier goals in Vietnam because of political constraints.
