Vietnam War Report; Smith and Ervin

This is Vietnam War report. Today's program is the last in a series of inquiries into the situation we faced in Vietnam. It's historical background current developments and a range of suggested possible solutions. In a two part discussion I speak first with Bob Smith a graduate student in physiological psychology at MIT and more importantly the education chairman of the Cambridge neighborhood committee on Vietnam. In a combined synthesis of a series of lectures arranged and given by Professor Mirsky Southeast Asian Studies at Dartmouth College and as a result of his own continuing research Mr Smith has produced and presented a four part lecture series on Vietnam this fall. Mr. Smith one of the major concerns of most Americans and most people around the world has been the problem of how to get out of Vietnam. And it is the feeling of most people here that we would like to get out of Vietnam. One criticism that one hears very often is that it's really the North Vietnamese who don't want to go. How do you feel about this.

My own personal feeling is that while the US has managed to project the appearance that it is we who want negotiations and they who do not and in fact if you look underneath at the diplomatic dealings it's really the other way around. But it is in fact the United States which is very much afraid of negotiations and which in the last analysis has done the most to keep them from coming about. Let me document this a little more carefully with a few incidents which of happened in the last few years. For example most of us remember in May 965 there was a short bombing pause which was ostensibly for the purpose of inducing the North Vietnamese to talk. At the end of this pause we were told that the North Vietnamese had made no response whatsoever and that therefore it was necessary for us to return to the bombing of North Vietnam in a military effort in general. The interesting fact which did not come out until somewhat later is that in fact the North Vietnamese did reply they reply to the French government since of course we had no diplomatic relations with them. What their reply stated was that they were interested in

negotiations that they offered a cease fire and that they made explicit The fact of which there's been some controversy that they did not require a prior withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam in order for negotiations to begin. Now. Again at the end of the law we insisted there had been no response from then I feel that you know when the French government made this known it was patently clear this was not true. Another indication. During the budget going to stop risings in 1066. We received other peace feelers from the North Vietnamese. At this they made a further concession namely that the representation of the National Liberation Front of our headcount could be worked out and would not have to be a precondition to negotiations. This is a substantial concession because this is a very sore point with the other side. Furthermore they publicly advocated that South Vietnam be made a neutral independent country which again is another concession. Furthermore during during those

months when the peace deal was taking place. The. Incidents of violence and terrorism in South Vietnam reached a love for the previous two years. The whole thing suggests that the. North Vietnamese were seriously interested in negotiations and it was our response. Well first of all we ignored the peace feelers and second of all at this particular time President Johnson made a speech calling for an increase in the cost of aggression and for a week or so there after there were a considerable number of mysterious leaks to the press to the effect that we were about to buy oil depots at Haiphong. And. At the end of that week we did in fact Man the oil depots a substantial escalation of the war in the opinion of many people. And as a result the talk of peace from the other side was abruptly cut off. And once the inclined ask why the why these mysterious leaks etc. according to some high placed sources the problem was that the raids on the

oil bases it Hi-Fi not yet been worked out. And the U.S. apparently fearful that we would be pressured into negotiations before we could cut them off of these red and felt obliged to. Start up the other side by making these leaks in advance since we could not in fact come across with the image of the real thing itself until the short the lie. Well. There are many other examples I could go on for quite a while. But I think. Want to just say one word the question is why. Why is the U.S. taking this position that we want peace. Well this is a very important point. Certainly we want peace but the point is we want peace on our terms I think. And I terms that. There must be a neutral or preferably a pro-western independent South Vietnam which is in some way immune to communist influence. Now this is a very tall order considering that the state of the military situation at this time we could not go into negotiations now and hope to come out with anything approaching this. That's the kind of the idea of

negotiations is in my opinion very frightening to the U.S. government because if they began. Pressure would be tremendous for us to accept some sort of a solution which would have to be a compromise. Consequently I think we are not interested in negotiations in any realistic sense at this time. Many people ask why does he make a demand our cessation of the bombing be unconditional. Why won't he accept some kind of peace talks as a beginning and work on unconditional cessation later after the talks have begun. Yes this is an interesting question. One might in a sense point out a parallel if you consider what hope Shimon really believes of the situation. One could say well why didn't the British agree to talk with the Germans when London was being bound in tremendous damage is being done. I think the same thing applies very strongly feels that Vietnam should be for the Vietnamese that the Americans have no place there and that American raids on his country urt are pure aggression. Now no one expected the British to knuckle under to

German aggression if they fought and would have fought to the to the last. And I think whether you agree with. The condemnation of the American position I think this is what the North Vietnamese believe and as such bombing them only hardens their resolve to do what they think is right. In a sense however from our point of view the Vietcong in South Vietnam can be seen equally as invaders and aggressors. Yeah this is. This is a very difficult point the problem is as most people are not aware. North and South Vietnam are not legally separate countries. They are parts of one hundred which were divided in 154 with the provision that they would be reunified by elections two years later. That was the South Vietnamese government with our firm support which refused to permit these elections. In general the opinion of the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong is that. The Geneva agreements provided for Vietnam for the

Vietnamese and then it has been American effort which has prevented this. So they feel that the Geneva agreements have been abrogated and that what they are doing is simply continuing their struggle which they have fought for the last 25 years to free Vietnam from foreign influence or that they can run their country themselves. The United States is certainly a powerful and frightening presence in Vietnam. Comforting to those who would like to see us there in this country and perhaps elsewhere but how does the rest of Southeast Asia in general feel about American presence. Yes it's very dangerous to generalize entirely about a region containing so many countries. But I think that one can say is that the independent native governments of Southeast Asia those governments which are trying to run their own affairs are almost without exception in strong disapproval of what the U.S. is doing. Now that seems very strange to Americans we find it hard to believe that these countries which are already under the gun as it were of

communist China are not frightened to death. But in fact they're not. And perhaps they have good reason for this because. As they look at history the U.S. has actually meddled much more in the affairs of Southeast Asia than China has. For example we intervened in Laos in 62. We are intervening in Vietnam. The Cambodians are still furious over an apparent attempt by the CIA to topple the Cambodian government. Excuse me. Sukarno of Indonesia. Was and still is presumably furious over the attempts of the CIA to aid rebels against his regime. About 10 years ago. When you contrast this with the efforts of the Chinese which have really been very slight a considerable propaganda a small amount of support for a local Communist movement. But in many of these countries even those which have strong communist movements there has never been any indication of Chinese assistance.

Chinese armaments money advisors anything so that. A great many of these countries are much more annoyed by the efforts of the United States to interfere in their affairs than they are by the efforts of China. In fact again as I say in the case of Burma. And one could also point to Cambodia and a few other countries. The attitude of China toward a toy is very small. Weak neighbors has been much better than you normally expect from a great power dealing with a small weak neighbor. Certainly it's difficult to hypothesize about the situation in China right now but don't you feel that if China were having her own problems with feeding her people and right now with the Cultural Revolution she would be more interested in exporting her own form of communism to these other countries in Southeast Asia. This is very hard to say. I won when I was very little about what the Chinese government is thinking at times. My personal feeling is that China is probably not nearly as interested in exporting revolution as she says she is and

will press more important is interested if we say she is for example. The recent document by the NPR which was held in this country as a sort of a mine Kampf of world communism. Is very strange because if you actually read it instead of reading what Secretary McNamara for example says about it what it really says is that the local Communist movement should not count on a great deal of aid from the communist bloc that in fact this is detrimental to the course of evolution etc. etc. and the point is especially when viewed in the context of Vietnam where there seems to be considerable pressure on China to supply and the point of this document while exhorting local countries to revolt is to say you vote yes but do it yourself. It's not good for you if we help you. So that. In many ways I don't think it's reasonable to consider China in this respect. It should be noted that China has never been a country that was at all interested in what went out outside her borders. At this point. There are as far

as we know no Chinese soldiers outside the Chinese border. And while one wishes one could say the same thing for the United States for example Secretary Rusk in many others in and out of the government have been supporters of the president's policy in Vietnam on the basis of what they consider the domino theory in Southeast Asia. In other words those people who are supportive of Johnson's power politics feel that this is the only way of securing a region that would fall entirely Were we to pull our forces out of Vietnam and by implication out of Southeast Asia. My fear is that the way best to drive these countries away from Independence. It. Is simply to try to hard to help them. We've tried south to help South Vietnam since we started bombing in 1955 the number of NLF forces in the south has increased by a factor of 5 and most of these are not from the north. So that. Suggests that our interference in Southeast Asia. Much more than the changing of

government from. Pro-Western to communist is what really drives people in Southeast Asia the communists. If we are going to take over the country they feel they have no choice but to go the other direction to oppose us. And this is simply not healthy if we permitted them to maintain some sort of middle courses. And I think they would follow the US and at least have past experience is any indication from what I've indicated China is perfectly willing to let the countries of Southeast Asia follow a middle course is also going to think China is really concerned about is the U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia which they naturally feel is a potential threat to them whereas countries like Cambodia which don't permit the United States in but are not communist these countries have excellent relations with China. And. In general it seems to me that what China wants and what we should want is a buffer of small independent neutralised countries between the US and China which both sides would consider to their advantage to simply leave alone.

You have been able to mention. What's I'm like rather hopeful solutions to our problem in Vietnam. Can you perceive that this kind of solution might actually come about in the near future and that in fact there is a possibility of some sort of representative popular government in South Vietnam. If you want to make any sort of generalization from history you can say that. Really violent revolutions. Or wars when they're finally resolved tend to lead to very repressive and. Paranoid almost government certainly the French Revolution the Russian Revolution Cuban revolution are all examples of this the American Revolution example in the opposite way and the revolution is not very violent and produced a very moderate and livable government. So that I'm seriously concerned that if either side wins in South Vietnam that. It will be very difficult to keep them from taking out the. Tremendous losses and difficulties they've had in the few in the last. 10 years or so the remnants of the other side.

I think this is a sham but I'm afraid that this may well be the case and I have to admit it and given a few years to cool down. And some sort of international peace force that everyone would feel reasonably safe with. Such a resource exists which I'm not entirely sure of. Then I think. There would be some chance at least to have a reasonable government in a few years. I'm very dubious about about the possibility now everyone is simply too distrustful of everyone else. Thank you very much. Our second speaker is Dr. Frank Irvin psychiatrist at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He and Dr. Needleman who is chairman of the committee of responsibility a group seeking to bring more injured children to this country for treatment. I recently returned from an extensive visit to Vietnam. I question Dr. Irvin about the nature of his committee its goals and achievements thus far and about the facts he discovered while visiting Saigon and the provincial hospitals of South Vietnam.

The committee of responsibility was officially incorporated in January of 1955 and with the intent of bringing to the United States for treatment war injured children from South Vietnam. As you perhaps know the three billion casualty problem in Vietnam has been a theory if one with the official estimates for this year running about 50000 civilians casualties of whom some 20 percent. Are children under the age of 12. It was the intent of our committee to supplement. The considerable efforts that are going on to supply medical care within the country there by bringing to this country children who needed long term reconstructive or repaired if surgery plastic surgery

neurosurgery orthopedic surgery that could not be supplied there. The opportunity to go arose from a necessity of talking with the Minister of Health about our difficulties in arranging for exit visas which had dragged on for some months after our initial medical team selected cases in April. Dr Needleman and I went to try to complete negotiations for the removal of a small group of four children whom we thought simply as the token. First COD of the hundreds that we would hope to treat over the next year or so. While we were there we had the opportunity to visit the six major prevention hospitals and I corps that is the northernmost

region of the country where a great deal of the fighting has gone on and where some 35 percent of the civilian casualties in Vietnam occur. We also look at some hospitals and fight going on particularly the pediatric hospital. The first thing that is of importance to note I think is the tremendous dearth of any decent standards of medical care for civilian casualties are indeed for the civilian population in general. I think you tiresome statistics tell the story very well I think there are available to the civilian population only something like one hundred fifty Vietnamese physicians for the 15 million individuals who live in the country. And more than half of these physicians are centered in phi GA.

These are at the present supplemented by about 200 physicians American volunteers American military physicians and volunteers from other countries such as England Germany Spain Italy and so on. These physicians are backed up by even lesser numbers of nurses for a few laboratory technicians or other and flurried Perth and now. There are only about 16000 hospital beds in the country for 15 million people. Which leaves a patient bad ratio. Worse than that in the United States by a factor of like a hundred to one. And as you may be aware we are sometimes short of hospital beds in this country and are not at war. There is a general shortage of supplies so that the hospitals are

without running water often frequently without electricity or have it only intermittently from gasoline generators. They do not have blood available to them and this is often thought limited by using outdated blood for military hospitals the hospitals themselves are crowded they are dirty. One is struck by the stench of rotting garbage excrement and pots which clutter the floors. People lie on litters on the floor and in spite of the dedication and hard work and conscientious efforts of the medical health professionals who are there. Only the most primitive emergency care can be given. Amputation for instance are often carried out in place to restore it if surgery partly

because of the pressures of time and limitations. The scale and facilities often because for civilian casualties there is a long delay between wounding and entrance to the hospital so that infected wound simply demand that potations which is left us with 35000 amputees known in the country at the present time. The next most striking point flows from the one I just made and I think it's terribly important to recognize that there is no evacuation plan for wounded civilians. That is from the point of wounding to the hospital. Now you may know that we are suffering for military casualties. The. Smallest death rate and morbidity rate after injury that we've had in any war. This is generally credited to our really fantastic ability to fly helicopters and to remove our wounded soldiers to excellent medical

treatment. The civilian casualty on the other hand has to make his own way to whatever hospital care is available to him. This lack of evacuation for the civilians I think has to affect one. It certainly accounts for the massive amputation that I mentioned because of late infection. It probably also produces a natural tree that is the sorting of the severely injured from the lesser injured that if one is faced with a let's say an 8 to 36 hour journey. Carried by a friend on a bamboo pole through the jungle or by famine and through the delta where apparent that everyone travels only by day and not at night. The severely burned the bleeding the massively injured simply die along the way. The

civilians that we're talking about that is the remaining population in the villages that are not at war are by and large young people are old people. And in a country which is chronically malnourished where there is endemic infection where everybody has Paris or the tuberculosis rate is 15 percent of the people involved have little resistance to tolerate. Matthew venture a next question Doctor urban about the use of napalm on the civilian population and the methods being used in hospitals for treatment of napalm birds. The plan is a very effective weapon. It is a favorite weapon of the pilots that I talk to. Because it is cheap. It is quite easy to use. And it will cover a large area rapidly. It is

therefore used quite often and particular lately where there are clusters of personnel to be attacked rather than a specific structure or target like for example a bridge. Now obviously within found Vietnam it is people that are being attacked not structures. By and large in apparent contrast to what Leith officially said about the targets in North Vietnam in the hospital in every hospital which we visited we following up on cases so identified to us by the medical staff and with a careful discrimination between the youth and the quite a large number of civilian burn cases indeed caused by the use of gasoline in cooking stoves and the like one see fewer cases than one might anticipate from the widespread use of the weapon. And

we were struck by the rarity as have other observers of cases in whom more than 20 25 percent of the body surface. What burned with their long evacuation time that we're talking about with the poor general state of health and the special vulnerability children to burn. It's the gift of most of the physicians that I talk to there that these cases simply either die immediately or die before they get to the hospital so that the wards are not literally full of the Palmer cases. Next I asked Dr. Lynn if United States pacification program had been at all successful in bringing some additional medical aid to South Vietnamese civilians. And if so to what degree it had been effective. Pacification is carried out partly in conjunction with the military by the Vietnamese contingent which are known as

revolutionary development teams. We should be aware of. I know very little about the formality and success of the pacification program except for the general feeling that the winning hearts and minds of the people doesn't work out too well under present circumstances. A notable exception. I have been told by American official thing there is the impact of medicine on the villages. And indeed the people. Like a logical warfare operations field that the use of medical treatment is a key weapon in the armamentarium of the path the cation program. I mentioned to Dr. Irvin that BBC reports had quoted figures as high as 2 million in reference to the number of refugees in Vietnam. Based on his own observations I asked if you consider this an accurate figure.

I believe that that is close to the official figures presented to the Kennedy Committee on refugees and displaced persons which met an open hearing last week. Recently there have been a policy of removing home villages to refugee camps before making a large artillery strikes which is reduced to three million cash only problem but increased the refugee problem including. I asked Dr urban to operate on your responsibility to date in bringing children to this country and to elaborate on their plans for the future. Thin three turning from our visit we have been able to evacuate the first three of what we hope will be a large Qadri of children to this country. They arrived in San Francisco last week and are being treated at Mount Thiam hospital there. I understand that by next week probably six more will come. Of whom are selected to be treated

in Boston. Following that although the machinery is not entirely clear we would hope to bring out appreciable numbers in the hundreds of children who require the very threshold very unique long term reconstructive surgery available in this country and not at all available in Vietnam. We are a private public supported tax exempt welfare organization. We do need donations to carry on this work and we do have roles for interested people in the community to help in planning for the complex of these of caring for children. Moving to a new culture. The name of our organization is the committee of responsibility. It has an office said one thirty one thirty three in Boston.

Thank you doctor. On Vietnam War record. I've been talking with Bob Smith education chairman of the Cambridge neighborhood committee on Vietnam and with Dr. Frank Irvin psychiatrist at the Massachusetts General Hospital recently returned from Vietnam where he traveled as a member of the committee of responsibility. This is Mira bag.