Talking with Victor Charlie

the long version

With All The "Intel" and Sophisticated Technology, Why didn't The U.S. Win the Vietnam War? Review of "Talking with Victor Charlie" written by Bernie Weisz 10/21/09 [email protected] I am reading the other 2 reviews of this book, and I am truly wondering as to whether the authors "skimmed through" this book, or simply ddidn't know that much about the intracicies of the Vietnam War to pick up on the latent points Mr. Tourison made within the pages of "Talking With Victor Charlie". This book, while only 291 pages, took me an unusual 8 days to read it. It was so densely packed with up to now unknown facets and idiosyncrasies of the American War in Vietnam that I could write a 20,000 word review and only cover 1/4 of Tourison's revelations. Needles to say that it is doubtlessly a scathing indictment of America's "botching" of the conduct of the war. Tourison certainly knows what he is talking about. Aside from writing 2 other books (I've read them both-they are awesome!) Tourison is s a retired army chief warrant officer and holds a B.A. in political science from Mt. St. Mary's College. He served and well documents his tours in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as both an enlisted and warrant intelligence officer from 1961-1963, 1965-1967 and 1970 to 1974. He was the acting branch chief of the the Defense Intelligence Agency's "Special Office for POW/Mia Affairs". Finally, Tourison is 100% fluent in Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese and is considered an expert in Morse interception operations and intelligence analysis. While the fluency of Tourison's writing lacks the eloquence and flow of an accomplished novelist (there were parts of this book that were kind of "dry" at times) the profuse information put forth within the pages of this book will keep the historian of this war ruminating for weeks on end! While Tourison teaches the reader the professional tricks an interrogator used in Vietnam, one has to wonder why this country lost this war even after uncountable times he was able to extract from captured North Vietnamese and Viet Cong cadre military intelligence that made the difference in each instance between strategic victory and hours of our forces conducting fruitless search, being ambushed, or worse, being killed! Tourison had an interesting past. He had seen the world by age 21. Starting his military career at Fort Devins, Mass. in 1958, as a Morse incercept operator, he was soon transferred to such worldly posts as Italy, Germany, Yugoslavia and Germany (1959-1960), Ankara Turkey and Tripoli, Libya (1960-1961), he was forced to end his world wind tour when tonsillitis forced him to go stateside to recuperate with bed rest for 6 months. Reenlisting in 1961 and immersing himself in Vietnamese language courses, he turned 21 in Saigon in October, 1961. Although there is a book to confirm Tourison's thoughts about the way Vietnamese viewed Americans at the time. It is interesting to note the Asian sentiment towards Westerners prior to the massive American build up (after the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident"). Using the cliche about trying to win the "hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, it would be hard to accomplish this when, as early as 1961, Tourison recorded these observations: "The Saigon of those days was a beautiful town, the people in many ways still unaffected by the war in the countryside. The worries in urban Saigon were not about Communist murders. They were more about grenadings by noncommunists who didn't support President Ngo Dinh Diem. I was a very naive boy from Philadelphia encountering Vietnamese and Chinese families that wouldn't let me date their daughters because I was a foreigner and an American. I was from a culture which many in Saigon viewed down upon; a culture they viewed as too coarse, a culture which produced soldiers who came to Saigon and got drunk, whored around, spent half their lives in massage parlors, and thought all Asian women were all easy pickings. It was a rude awakening to the realities of relations between the East and West which no amount of orientation material could provide." Just as a footnote, Tourison wound up marrying a Vietnamese woman named "Ping" and had 3 children with her! Tourison described a chaotic Vietnam of 1962 where Diem's wife, Madame Nhu (the infamous "Dragon Lady") decreed that dancing between husband and wife in public and private was taboo and could by law only be performed in the privacy of one's own bedroom, violators at Tu Do' streets "dance halls" were being hauled off to jail ,by Diem's "White Mice" Police, Saigon's whorehouses (called "chicken houses" in the slang Chinese suburb of Cholon) were running double time, with payoffs to the police under the command of Madame Nhu's own husband. Returning to the U.S. in 1965, he studied for a year at the "Defense Language Institute" in Monterray, Ca. perfecting Hanoi-dialect Vietnamese. Returning to Vietnam in July, 1965 right before the Tonkin Gulf Incident, he was temporarily assigned as a radio operator. Because of a shortage in Vietnamese proficient Intelligence and Interrogation forces, Tourison was reassigned to that branch, an assignment that would prove to be permanent. Initially assigned to interrogate "ralliers" (a former Viet Cong or North Vietnamese and has "seen the light" and returned to the South Vietnamese fold, which would develop into a program called "Cheiu Hoi") Tourison innovated many prorams before the age of computer, such as photographing, documenting, fingerprinting and documenting everything and anything of value previously ignored. There are countless instances in this book that you will come across that Tourison elicited from a Communist P.O.W. that certainly saved American G.I.'s lives. from deadly ambushes, capture or worse. Tourison wasted no time throughout the book reminding the reader that the myth Hanoi tried to perpetuate (that the conflict between North Vietnam and South Vietnam was simply a civil war fought mostly by Southerners) was false. He details the development of the "National Liberation Front, the "Viet Cong" and how all the key cadre and decisions made in South Vietnam of the Communists, political and military, didn't move unless the North told it to. Unless Ho spoke, nothing happened. When Tourison first entered Vietnam, he angrily announced that the branch of intelligence was "so off base" that it operated incorrectly in S.E. Asia. It was more appropriate to the Cold War situation in Europe. Very few, if any, of his fellow intelligence colleagues were fluent in Vietnamese, and to learn it and become more proficient at utilizing it in conjunction with intelligence activities would require time "In Country". Tourison rips our country's use of intelligence assets by maintaining that by failing to come to grips with in-country tours which were standardized at 12 months, by the time a linguist began to reach maximum ability, it was time to return to the U.S. to an assignment which routinely didn't involve the use of Vietnamese, which was often lost within 6 months of departing Vietnam. Another bone of contention Tourison had was quarreling with his South Vietnamese counterparts for access at the "1st crack" at interrogating Communist captives. Tourison wrote in that regard: "Our counterparts (ARVN) insisted that they have first access to all arriving prisoners and ralliers, and it was almost impossible, at that point, for our counterparts to accept our interrogations as completely professional products." Another issue was interviewing civilians. Throughout the book, despite U.S. attempts to win the "hearts and minds" of the South Vietnamese, Tourison wrote that trying to obtain information from civilian suspects was like trying to pull teeth. Civilians had much to lose by providing American interrogators with information. They all believed (and in some cases this was true!) that if they talked, the Viet Cong would inevitably find out who said what and kill them once U.S. forces left the area. An interesting trick of interrogation Tourison wrote about was what he called the "three no's". While pointing out that Viet Cong are taught not to be curious (in the Vietnamese Communist system, individual initiative is bad, the average VC is taught to do nothing unless he's told to do it!) when prisoners respond to an Intellignnce Analyst's first 3 questions with 3 no's, Tourison asserted that it is a dead giveaway that they were withholding information. Aside from using other obvious interrogation techniques such as 2 interviewers, one playing "good guy", and the other "bad guy", Tourison found another way to get a subject talkiing. It's actually a logical fallacy called "Ad Hominen" where one person tries to win an argument with another by bringing up something totally irrelevant. It is actually a case of appealing to one's prejudice or emotion rather than reason. An example is that you are arguing with someone about something and you tell that person they are wrong because they have a bad haircut and their teeth are crooked. Tourison would get reticent prisoners to talk by mentioning a deformity or character flaw about them. In one case, Tourison was able to get a captive senior high level Communist cadre to talk by opening up the conversation like this: "My new friend had a built in item, his hand. His left hand was deformed, and he was very self conscious about it; he kept trying to hide it. This looked like the best point to start. "What's the matter with your hand?" "Nothing." "What do you mean nothing? It looks like a claw! What's the matter, can't your stupid Vietcong doctors fix it?" That was it. The POW wouldn't shut up! Tourison discovered and explained just how intricately organized the enemy in the South, the Viet Cong, actually was as he identified a sophisticated mail delivery system where a communist family member could mail a letter in northern Hanoi to a sibling in the South's Mekong Delta, with immediate "underground delivery"! Other covered subjects were the "Battle of the Ia Drang" in the Fall of 1965, the Tonkin Gulf Incident" , Operations "Marauder, "Irving" and "Crimp". Tourison includes an account of his interrogation with Sr. Captain Tran Bo, the senoir North Vietnamese Navy Officer captured, where Capt. Bo clearly explains how the U.S. "provoked" and manipulated the entire "Gulf of Tonkin" incident. This excerpt is a historian's "gold mine"! However, even after you read Tourison's description of the unheralded victory the U.S. Military scored in it's trouncing of the North's forces, the reader still wonders why this war is considered a U.S. defeat! Tourison also revealed some of the difficulties he had in interviewing captured NVA prisoners. Tourison explained the false belief among the North's soldiers that it was better to die than surrender as Americans always kill their prisoners. Thanks to overzealous intelligence officers conducting helicopter interviews with captive NVA soldiers where the wrong answer to a question got the prisoner a 2000 foot drop to his grave, Tourison wrote: "Most of the NVA prisoners had been emotionally exhausted long before we ever got to them. These soldiers of Uncle Ho were not allowed to consider defeat, they had no code of conduct, and they knew nothing of escape and evasion procedures. As we learned later, many had died, lost in the impenetrable jungle because they ran rather than surrender". In addition, "Viet Cong cadre preached that admission to the South Vietnamese Government of being a Viet Cong always ended in death". Tourison also elucidated how the Viet Cong kept the South's youth in uneducated ignorance. Most families of the South were poor and illiterate. The villagers wanted their children educated, but teachers had to be paid to teach, and when the VC took all the villagers money in taxes, there was nothing left to pay the teachers. Of course, the VC wanted to keep the villagers ignorant until they could get their own teachers into the village to educate the villagers the "Marxist Way" Prisoner of the Word: A Memoir of the Vietnamese Reeducation Camps Another memorable part of this book is while on "Operation Crimp", Tourison gets within miles of a B-52 air strike. Leaving a lifetime impression, he recounted: "By the time the last explosion came I lay there shaking, as much from fear as from the shaking of the ground. It too could not have lasted more than several minutes but the memories have lasted a lifetime. Such is a B-52 strike". Tourison's chapter on "Operation Crimp" is the essential chapter of this book. Operation Crimp was the largest operation of the war with over 8,000 total U.S. troops deployed. The goal of Operation Crimp was to capture the VC headquaters believed to be located in Saigon. Although U.S. forces failed to locate a significant VC base, the Australian contingent of Operation Crimp initially discovered massive tunnel complexes, some as large as three story underground complexes with operating rooms, soldier's quarters, laboratories, pharmacies, etc. U.S. "Tunnel Rats" quickly descended into the tunnels, located in an area called "Chu Chi". Using smoke, tear gas, explosives and one's own body with just a pistol and a flashlight, tunnel rat G.I.'s wriggled down into these holes risking their lives to explore the enemies underground haven. It was a bonanza, and a severe setback to the Communists, losing prime hiding ground. Tourison writes of one very upsetting anecdote, whereby thousands of documents detailing every American base, it's specifications, it's key personnel all on typewritten paper stuffed in burlap bags. Furthermore, there were target folders of every senior American whose home had been located and surveyed for execution by sappers. Tourison sadly wrote that those documents were : "resting ignominously in a faded rice bag bearing the legend "Donated by the People of the United States. Not to be bartered or sold". How embarrassing! While not mentioning the author, Tom Mangold, Tourison maintains the book "The Tunnels of Chu Chi" was completely inaccurate, full of falsehoods and undocumentable information, and was based on 2nd and 3rd person reports (95% of the enemy occupants of the tunnels were buried alive in preemptive B-52 air strikes or executed by tunnel rats). Tourison gives a fascinating account of "Operation Cedar Falls", meeting the famed Viet Nam War historian Bernard Falls two weeks before his tragic and premature death. Equally descriptive is the ride with Tourison on "Operation Junction City" and his description of the continuous sophistication of the enemy after the "Tet Offensive" of January, 1968 in terms of their air force, ground defenses, weapons, leadership, infiltration techniques and unstoppable progress of the infamous "Ho Chi Minh Trail". Captured during "Junction city" were thousands of feet of movie film, still shots and undeveloped rolls of key Viet Cong and North Vietnamese cadre, generals and key politicians. Ruffling many people the wrong way, Tourison was asked by his superiors to leave Vietnam. He refused, continuously reextending. Then, one Friday in 1967, he flew up to Nha Trang from Saigon to visit a Vietnamese collegue, Col. Ngon. Planning to return later that day, he arrived at Nha Trang airport and had too many beers in the terminal lounge missing his flight. He stayed at his friend's house a few days, and flew back to Saigon and was aghast to find out that the flight on the C-47 he missed was blown out of the sky by 12.7 mm antiaircraft fire when it got near Phan Rang. All on board were killed. Intentional? One can only speculate. Tourison's days in Vietnam were numbered. He left shortly afterwards and would not return until 1970. What follows in the remaining pages is a detailed explanation through Tourison's eyes why he felt the U.S. did not win, and could not win the Vietnam war, given the obstacles stated. This is a book that is a "must read", and will certainly put the war in S.e. Asia permanently in a different light, with a permanently altered perspective! A great story, a historical gem and a must read!