The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

by Max Boot

returning to the chaos of the 1954–55 period—just as Lansdale had warned would happen if Diem were removed. This was a heaven-sent opportunity for the Vietcong. “Our enemy had been seriously weakened from all points of view, military, political and administrative. . . ,” a leader of the National Liberation Front crowed. “The police apparatus set up over the years with great care by Diem is utterly shattered, especially at the base. . . . Troops, officers, and officials of the army and administration are completely lost.”25 The number of “violent incidents” across South Vietnam increased from four hundred per week before the coup to more than a thousand in the week after the coup.26 The Strategic Hamlets program, the most promising counterinsurgency program initiated by Diem, was all but abandoned as hamlet after hamlet was overrun by attackers and not rebuilt. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was widened and improved to allow trucks to deliver supplies through Laos all the way to the border with South Vietnam, while seaborne shipments of weapons to transshipment points in Cambodia and to secret landing spots along the ill-patrolled South Vietnamese coast increased. (The South Vietnamese navy was all but immobilized after its chief was murdered during the 1963 coup.)27 The quantity of supplies reaching Communist forces in the South would be four times greater in 1964 than in 1963.28 Most ominously of all, in 1964 the first North Vietnamese regular troops began heading south. Le Duan a...