A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam by Lewis Sorley

Author:Lewis Sorley [Sorley, Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 20th Century, Asia, History, Military, Southeast Asia, United States, Vietnam War (1955-1975)
ISBN: 9780547417455
Google: 0u0IWtUikcAC
Amazon: B003ZX86AA
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 1999-06-03T03:00:00+00:00

THE POOR CONDITION of Route 9, and the inability of ARVN forces to keep it secure, meant that virtually all resupply and medical evacuation for ARVN forces had to be done by air, the bulk of it by U.S. air. Calculating that in any given twenty-four-hour period a helicopter could fly for between five and eight hours, Abrams noted that in Laos the South Vietnamese had “eighteen battalions over there, and ten batteries of artillery—and all the resupply and everything that’s got to be done for those eighteen battalions and ten batteries in the five to eight hours every twenty-four. Well, there isn’t a lot of sightseeing going on.”

A couple of weeks into the thing there wasn’t a lot of flying going on, either, at least not compared with the huge requirements the operation was generating. By about 23 February it became apparent that U.S. Army aviation support for Lam Son 719 was having some problems. Not only was the intense and well-sited enemy antiaircraft weaponry making operations extremely difficult—every mission, even dustoff medical evacuations, had to be planned and executed like a full-scale combat assault—but maintenance problems were causing many helicopters to be out of service just when they were needed most.

Sutherland had apparently been slow to recognize and report these problems, much less act aggressively to deal with them. Another senior officer present on the ground judged him to be “very passive,” really “a negative factor” in the operation. Until 23 February, a MACV staff officer told Abrams, “I think it’s fair to say we had no feel that his helicopter situation was quite as acute.”

This news precipitated intense reaction at MACV. “The way this thing is supposed to work,” erupted Abrams, “is that, once I said what the priorities were and what was going to be done around here, goddamn it, then these—USARV’s responsible to have maintenance people up there, keeping track of this, goddamn it! And they should know what’s happening! That’s their job! That’s McCaffreys responsibility! And that’s what hasn’t been done.”

Abrams asked his deputy, Fred Weyand, how it looked to him. “Well,” he began, focusing on Sutherland, “I guess I’m not too forgiving on Jock. I recognize the truth of what you’re saying, but goddamn it, you’ve got a corps commander up there who’s supposed to be keeping track of every fucking bird in the place every hour of the day. There’s something wrong there. You’ve got an organizational problem of some kind. He just doesn’t know what the hell’s going on.” Weyand recalled that there had been a battalion on Route 914 for two days before Sutherland was aware of it, even though they knew it at MACV “That tells me that the coordination and tie-in between his headquarters and Lam’s is not fully effective.”

There followed a long pause, several minutes. Then Abrams said, “I guess I’d better go up and talk with General McCaffrey now. I just feel we’ve got to get some people up there today who can be feeding the facts back.

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