An Interview With Everett I. Mendelsohn

[Everett I. Mendelsohn, associate professor of History of Science, recently returned from a Southeast Asian tour which took him to South Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia.

Under the sponsorship of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker service organization, Mendelsohn visited Quaker projects and sought to assess the possibility of a peaceful solution to the Vietnamese conflict through conversations with Vietnamese civilians. In Cambodia he met with a high representative of the National Liberation Front.

His departure from South Vietnam was delayed ten days by the Viet Cong urban offensive.

Mendelsohn questions the rosy picture of military progress presented by the United States government, and says the Thieu-Ky regime may be nearing collapse.

He believes the Viet Cong offensive, and the unlimited character of our response to it, have limited the future options open to us in South Vietnam. He fears that we will face continued miltary setbacks until we either withdraw, or resort to nuclear weapons.

The following remarks are taken from an interview which Parker Donnam had with Professor Mendelsohn on Thursday, Feb. 22]

What effect did this trip have on your opinion of the war?

I expect the trip didn't radically change my views of the war, it did two other things though. One: it personalized them. I think it's hard even with the greatest imagination to recognize what happens to specific people in specific parts of a country, with out seeing them. Seeing the war at first hand, meeting people who had been involved in it, people who have suffered from it, meeting people who have opposed it on the scene, gave me a series of new insights.

The other set of changes that I came away with, also had to do with getting some things at first hand. In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, I met with a high official of the National Liberation Front. He is a well educated man, not an unattractive man, obviously quiet intelligent, I gather that he's on the Central Committee of the National Liberation Front.

Even having been an opponent of the war, but having read the U.S. press primarily, and in detail, it was hard to believe anything but that the enormous firepower and large scale military operations the U.S. was waging was indeed winning the war. Perhaps it could never really become militarily victorious. It seemed from everything I'd been able to read that we were winning military victories.

Mr. Y [we shall call him] had quite a different view. So far as I could tell, in all honesty, he believed that the National Liberation Front was winning. We pressed him on this in a number of ways. We asked him about the impact of the firepower on the Vietnamese and he said, yes when it comes to bombing a village or a town, the enormous firepower from the air takes its toll. Primarily, he pointed out, on civilians, and in person I was able to see this on the ground later on. He said, however, that when it comes to controlling the country-side, this can be done only by infantry troops with riflles going out and winning an area and then controlling it and keeping it. And he said that the enormous gains of the firepower were lost in this kind of combat. He pointed out that the rifle of the N.L.F. soldier was just as effective as the rifle of the American. Even more, he pointed out that the N.L.F. soldier generally knew the terrain he was fighting in; it was friendly to him, whereas it was foreign to the American soldier.

He pointed out one other thing. He said the very history of the war suggests that the United States is not winning, indeed, might well be losing. He pointed out that the fighting takes place during the dry season, the winter months for us, November through April. For the rest of the year, he said everyone just sits tight and holds on to what they have and hopes not to be washed away by the flood.

He said in the winter of 1965-66, the first year of major escalation, the United States had some 200,000 ground troops in Vietnam. He said during that winter the U.S. attempted to launch offensive actions in all four areas, from the I Corps in the North down to the Delta. He said that they weren't really effective in too many of them, but they were on the offensive in all four.

The next year, the winter of 1966-67, during the dry season the U.S. had some 400,000 troops on the ground, yet was able to launch an offensive action in only the I Corps area. In the other three areas they were on the defensive, or holding tight. He said that in the winter of 1967-68, the United States forces with over 500,000 men on the ground, were unable to launch an offensive in any single of the four corps areas. Indeed, he said, to the contrary his own forces, stronger than they had been before, were able to be effective in all of the areas.

This, mind you, was two weeks before I got to Saigon, some two weeks before their attacks on all the cities.

How serious is the refugee problem?

Vietnam has probably suffered most through its civilian population. At the moment it is estimated that something close to one quarter of the total population are refugees. This number has probably gone up in recent weeks, after the atacks. The problem of refugees is an enormous one because most of the refugees come from the farm. They are peasants who made their living by tilling the land. What they've done was to flee to the cities, where they live in squatters villages surrounding the cities. Many of them in squalor, even the best of them providing nothing but a single room in a mud walled hut, the best perhaps with tin roofs. The others are in much worse shape. There is very little in the way of sanitary facilities, and there is no room whatsoever for these men to provide the livelihood the one way they know how, through raising the food which they would eat.

A visit to the refugee camps, and we visited them around Saigon, in Hue, most intensively in the city of Quang Ngai, a visit to these camps brought out one thing which I had not quite been prepared for. As you walked through the camp, looking around, smiling at people, greeting people, children run around your legs as children will anyplace in the world, having great fun. Even the women might smile back when you greet them. However, from the men, regardless what their age was, we got a very sullen stare in response.

In talking to the refugees, the answer was found very simply. They'd been driven from their homes, and they'd most often been driven out by airplanes which came and strafed and bombed their villages, and they'd fled to the cities. They'd lost their means of livelihood. In a sense they'd almost lost their manlihood. Their indigation at the government of South Vietnam and at the Americans was very pointed and direct. They pointed the finger at us as having driven them from their land.

How adequate were facilities for civilian wounded?

When we turn to the question of wounded, again the civilians seem to suffer most. This comes about really through the same process that has made the refugees. Something close to two thirds of the land area of South Vietnam is today declared a free fire zone. This means that anything in that area can be bombed, can be machine gunned, at the will of the spotters flying over in planes.

What was interesting to recognize, though, is that these free fire zones started just a few kilometers down the road from the major cities. The free fire zone outside Quang Ngai was just eight or ten kilometers from the city center. What this meant is that peasants working out in the field were regularly subjected to firing, to bombing, to harrassment. All night long as we lay in our beds at Quang Ngai, we could hear the mortars and artillery and the helicopters raining down their terror on different parts of the countryside. And in the morning the results were quite clear. The litters carrying people in from the countryside with the gaping holes in their bodies, the wounded limbs, and the broken bones.

We visited the hospital at Quang Ngai and went through it in some detail with a doctor working with the Quaker unit. There was a standard medical ward which perhaps had an increase in the standard diseases of the area, malaria, diphtheria, cholera, plague had broken out in the region. And the other things that you are wont to find in this part of the world. But when we went beyond the medical ward into the severe injury ward, you saw the full horror of the war itself.

The hospital that we visited had first been built by the French, and it was a small hospital. During the last four years it has been enlarged to a hospital of some four hundred beds. In the week just prior to our visit the daily patient population of the hospital was over 750, meaning that there were two patients to many beds. The hospital itself, judged to be one of the best of the province hospitals in South Vietnam, had very little in the way of sanitary facilities. Walking through it, one had to take care to avoid stepping in human defication. There were no screens in the windows, and open wounds were festering with maggots in them.

The most common operation carried out in South Vietnam today is amputation. The difficulty, however, is that the amputations are not always good. The sanitary facilities are not generally good enough and there is a lack of antiseptic procedures. What this means is that often a leg must be amputed two or three times before the amputation heals successfully.

There has been a lot of controversy as to whether napalm victims are to be found in Vietnam. As I recall, Dr. Howard Rusk, the New York Times medical correspondent found only six or seven in the whole of Vietnam. I often wonder, having visited the hospital at Quang Ngai, just where he had his eyes as he walked through this hospital. There were over seventy people in the burn ward at Quang Ngai when we visited there. Some forty of them had burns traceable to napalm.

The record was always the same in the hospital wards as to how these people were injured, whether the broken bones or the burns. In nine out of ten cases they were tending their animals, they were cultivating the fields, they were alseep in their huts, when things came from the air. Bombers or helicopters came over, loosing rockets, machine guns, or bombs. They knew that the only people in the country who were using bombers and planes were their own government and the United States.

Every now and then, one in ten or or so of the injuries as we looked over the hospital's records, were recorded as coming from ground fire. Here it is impossible to tell whether the ground fire was Viet Cong or that of the ARVN or American troops.

Did you speak with civilians who oppose the war?

In talking to one group of South Vietnamese businessmen, lawyers, professionals, men who were parts of former governments, we began asking them about how the prospect of reaching agreements with the National Liberation Front struck them. Was it possible? What might come from it? The response of one man was typical. He pointed out that the men of the National Liberation Front and in the government of North Vietnam were people he'd known. They were not just faceless opponents. These were men who had lived down the street from him when he was a young man. One of the leaders of the National Liberation Front had been to college with him in Paris. Another had been married to a distant cousin. Another had been in a law office of his. Some of these men he trusted; some of them he distrusted. Some of them he had liked; some of them he had disliked.

He said that there was some real reason to expect that a civilian government in South Vietnam, with the burden of a military war and leadership lifted from it, could well come to some sort of agreement with the National Liberation Front. I asked him and pressed him about what would happen after an agreement in the South. Unification, he felt, would ultimately come. After all Vietnam was one country; Vietnamese were fundamentally one people.

This man felt that what you would have is a socialization of the South and a liberalizing of the North. He felt there would be this interaction.

He was wealthy, he was a part of the mandranate, he was French educated, he was part of a former government, and yet for him this was a chance which he saw every well worth taking.

Allright. If the cream of Vietnamese civilian leadership is willing to take this chance, if their major message--and he made it very clear that the message he wanted me and others to bring back to America was that the war had to be stopped and the U.S. had to get out and that Vietnam had to be turned back to civilian rule to work out their problems--if he's willing to take all these risks, we should be willing to go with him.

They put it very bluntly. It's hard to know whether to believe them or not. They said they doubted that I would find a single major Vietnamese civilian individual who was not intimately tied to the current government, or enormously profiting from the war, who would not now be in favor of ending it. They said that nothing that any of them could conceive of happening in the future was worse than what was happening now under U.S. protection.

Were the attacks a surprise?

I would say that they came as an absolute and complete surprise. The American military claim they knew about them. If they did know about them why they were thoroughly unprepared for them, and in a sense are culpable because of that. My guess is they really didn't know about them, or that they didn't believe the attacks could be as widespread, as well coordinated, as strong as they were. I mean I think the American military command in South Vietnam has suffered from what one newsman called an enormous dose of self-deceit. They had begun to believe their own statistics, which is terribly dangerous when the statistics are fundamentally in error. There was no sign that these attacks were expected. Americans were on leave all over the country. The South Vietnamese Army was spread out going home for Tet.

We drove down from Quang Ngai the day before Tet in a plane filled with men who had left the barracks in Quang Ngai going home to their families in Sagion. Well, if you are expecting a major attack within a day or two, you keep your army ready and you don't let them go home on leave. This just wasn't the case. The guard at the U.S. Embassy was lighter that night than it had been for months. The gate of the U.S. Embassy was standing open. You don't have all these things open if you expect an attack.

There was a lot of stew in the days just after the attack. General Westmoreland got on the Armed Forces Vietnam network to tell us all that this was the greatest defeat that the enemy had ever suffered. Ambassador Bunker got on to tell us that American forces and their gallant allies were having their greatest victory. They even had a brief dub-in from President Johnson in Washington telling us that this was a great defeat for the Viet Cong and a victory for America and South Vietnam. And that this was an act of last desperation on the part of the Viet Cong.

One of the reporters in Saigon was so appalled at all this deceit that in the middle of all this he filed a report to his newspaper with the lead, "The Viet Cong, in an act of desperation, today took over most of South Vietman." This is about the way it looked to those of us who were there.

What effect did the raids have?

It had several very dramatic effects. It demonstrated to every Vietnamese citizen, that the government of South Vietnam and the enormous military power of the United States, were unable to provide them with the one thing which they thought they could get, security in the cities. Every major city in South Vietnam was broached. Every major city was invaded and attacked, sometimes by small groups, sometimes by much larger ones. If you want to undercut the authority of the government, if you want to undercut confidence in it, this was done with real ferocity.

We know that the pacification program is now over. The villages have been lost completely. There's another set of secondary effects which have come which I think are perhaps of even longer range importance. And this was the inability of both the United States and the South Vietnamese to cope with the attacks. We watched the government of South Vietnam and the American military call in air strikes against their own cities and their own civilians. We watched the whole Eastern industrial suburbs of Saigon, Gia Dinh, burned out, sector after sector, for five days running. And the thousands--hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring out of the area. We watched the whole of the area just south of the Ton Son Nhut Airport being burned out segment after segment for four and five days running. When we left they were still bombing out sections of the Pho To around the race track. Read for that the area around Fenway Park and the density of the population around it.

And we watched them burning out sections of Cholon, the Chinese section of the city, which to this day still has fighting going on in it. There are parts of it still being burned out. What you did was to create hundreds of thousands of new refugees. And the indignation here against a government calling air strikes on its own residential sections, its own cities and its own population, is something which the Vietnamese had emblazened in their minds as they fled from their homes, many of them being killed, many others being wounded.

We visited a couple of the refugee camps in the days just after the initial fighting and the indignation was very high. They pointed the finger directly at the United States and the government of South Vietnam.

Were civilians given any warning prior to these counter attacks?

In some places a loudspeaker would come over in a helicopter or sometimes they came up to a segment of a city and broadcast over bull horns that people were to leave their homes immediately because they were bombing an area. In other sectors no warning was given. Sometimes you had as much as a couple of hours; sometimes you had no warning whatsoever. Anything which ran out of these areas of course was shot as being a suspected Viet Cong.

How badly was Saigon disrupted?

There was this marvelous juxtaposition. The Armed Forces Vietnam Network, which has a news broadcast for five minutes every hour on the hour, would come on first with this bland statement by General Westmoreland about the victory we are winning and how Saigon has now been completely retaken and that there are just pockets of resistance left. And that would be followed at the end of the news by an important anouncement to all American personnel: All American personnel are required to stay in their billets until further notice. There is a 24-hour curfew for all American personnel. Do not leave your billets except under armed escort.

Nine days after this, when I left, American personnel were only getting to work part of the day and were having to go in armed convoys. And half of the offices hadn't reopened yet. This huge war machine--you've got no idea how big it is until you see it--this huge war effort of civilian and military personnel in Saigon had ground to a halt for over a week.

Was the kill ratio in these battles as great as the U.S. forces have claimed?

Most of the newsmen I talked to just laughed. The body count is given primarliy by the South Vietnamese. If you compare the number of bodies supposedly counted to the number of weapons captured, the ratio was five, six, and even seven to one. The reporters told me to look at that figure because they said weapons are a good indication of how many soldiers you have killed.

There's little doubt that the Viet Cong did lose men in this attack. I saw dozens of Viet Cong dead in the city. The figures they were giving, however, I think were absolutely ludicrous, believed by no one on the scene.

What is the significance of the arrests in South Vietnam in the last few days?

At the moment I know of four men who've been arrested although the teletype tells us that there probably have been upwards of thirty-five arrests. Among these four, we met and talked with two of them. Thich Tri Quang, the militant Buddhist leader, perhaps one of the most important of the Buddhist leaders in South Vietnam, has been arrested. We saw him just before the attacks; we saw one of his colleagues, Thich Tinh Minh, just after the attacks.

During the attacks themselves the South Vietnamese government announced that An Quang pagoda where Thich Tri Quang had been living just on the outskirts of Cholon was being used as a command post by the V.C. Thich Tinh Minh said it's absolutely absurd.

He said that what was happening was that the Thieu government was using this as an occasion to take revenge and create harrassment for the Buddhists against whom they feel they have many scores to settle.

He said the An Quang pagoda was probably the place under greatest surveillance by the police, since they distrust it so. He said the Viet Cong would have been idiots to try to come near the place, and probably stayed very clear of it if they were going to try to get into the city secretly.

Trich Tri Quang, probably the single most influential Buddhist in the country and a major opponent of the current government is now jailed.

The two runners-up in the presidential campaign against Thieu, including the man who received the greatest number of votes in Saigon itself, Truong Dinh Do, have been arrested. As has the man who was behind him in the number of votes he received, Pham Khae Suu.

The fourth man who has been arrested, Au Truong Thanh, a former finance minister in the government of Premiere Diem, a former finance minister again in the civilian government of Dr. Quaht, probably the single most respected non-government civilian leader in the country, a man who was barred from running for the presidency probably because of the fear that he would have been elected.

What seems to be happening is what Professor Galbraith predicted. The government of President Thieu and Marshall Ky is very near colapse. What they are doing is rounding up and threatening all the possible forces who can oppose them. They're making sure if they can that there will be no possible civilian government to follow them.

Now the embassy supposedly, according to the papers, has shown some disturbance. But let's be absolutely blunt and clear. The American forces in Vietnam can do what they want to do. And when they're interested enough in getting something done they get it done. If these men remain in prison or are shot, it's with the complicity of American forces.

What is the outlook now in South Vietnam?

A few weeks ago I would have said that was real hope that a civilian leadership could be brought into power and could reach a modus operandi with the National Liberation Front; that they could set upadministrative procedures whereby the country could be shared until such time as a full South Vietnam government could be elected.

In light of the recent attacks and in light of the severity and the inhumanity of the response of the South Vietnamese government and the United States--of calling in bombing attacks on their own cities and their own civilian population--in light of this, I'm not sure it is any longer a viable solution.

Perhaps the Viet Cong spokesman in Cambodia was right and the U.S. must be handed a stunning military defeat. Then I become terribly frightened as to what our response will be. Here is where the people in Saigon began wondering: If Khe Sanh falls, if another city or two is badly struck, if there are civilian uprisings--which I would not be surprised to see in the next few months because of what we are doing to defend the cities now--if this did happen, what would the response of the United States be? If Thieu and Ky fall, as Professor Galbraith suggests, what can we do?

I'm terribly afraid, as some of our Vietnamese friends over there were afraid, that we'll resort to even the greater fire power that we have. We'll lay rubble to everything, including perhaps using nuclear weapons. It's in this context that people get very worried. They have no confidence at all in restraint on the part of the United States.

We could be driven out by a Viet Cong victory, and I'm not sure that America would ever face that without going to all-out nuclear war. The only other thing you can hope for is that somehow the present American government is brought down, and that a government be brought into power which will arrange for America's withdrawal.

At this stage the one real answer is for the United States to recognize that the war it has tried to fight has been lost. It is neither winning militarily nor is it coming anywhere close to winning the hearts and minds of the people of Vietnam. Facing this, America has to be tough enough to withdraw from Vietnam as speedily as possible, leaving behind the civilian population of that country to work out their own destiny