The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

The American military command thought this was like any other war: you searched out the enemy, fixed him, killed him and went home. The only measure of the war the Americans were interested in was quantitative; and quantitatively, given the immense American fire power, helicopters, fighter-bombers and artillery pieces, it went very well. That the body count might be a misleading indicator did not penetrate the command; large stacks of dead Vietcong were taken as signs of success. That the French statistics had also been very good right up until 1954, when they gave up, made no impression. The French had lost the war because of a lack of will (the French were known for that) and a lack of fire power; Americans lacked neither will nor fire power. At an early intergovernmental meeting on the importance of psychological warfare, one of Harkins’ key staffmen, Brigadier General Gerald Kelleher, quickly dismissed that theory. His job, he said, was to kill Vietcong. But the French, responded a political officer named Douglas Pike, had killed a lot of Vietcong and they had not won. “Didn’t kill enough Vietcong,” answered Kelleher. Such was the attitude of the American headquarters; despite all the faddishness of counterinsurgency it was all very conventional, with a dominating belief that more and more force was what was really needed. Besides, it was not a serious war or a serious enemy; as the French generals had been overconfident because the enemy did not register in terms they...