those Kennedy years, many of the characters who would play roles throughout the American war, some prominent and others less so, gathered around the stage and set about learning their lines. In 1961 Duong Van Mai travelled from Saigon to Washington to study. She was fascinated by the US, but troubled by segregation in Southern states, feeling unsure whether she was expected to use a White or Coloured bathroom. Then she met David Elliott, who would become her husband and the other half of a remarkable partnership that committed most of two lifetimes to studying the Vietnamese people. A Bostonian, he had attended Yale before serving with the US Army’s radio interception unit at Tan Son Nhut. He then spent a year with MACV intelligence before joining RAND, for which he embarked on a protracted research programme in the delta. Why Vietnam? Elliott said: ‘This was where it was happening, the most intense front in the Cold War. I was offered a front seat to see history being made.’
Idealists and sensation-seekers alike plunged into the heady mudge created on Saigon’s streets by diesel fumes, spices, obsessive vehicle-horn abuse, breathless heat. Some of those strolling up Tu Do and gawking at the sights – or, more likely, at the girls – were bright young men eager to set the world to rights, who came to care passionately about the Vietnamese. Frank Scotton, born in 1938, grew up in Massachusetts, ‘where the revolutionary war against oppressive foreign occupiers is part of the culture’; his father had been killed at the Bulge in 1944. ‘I thought that I would perform some sort of service. In the past we had been good tinkerers abroad, getting in there and fixing things. We had the folk belief that we would always win, even after Korea sandpapered that ideal a little.’ Throughout Scotton’s long stint in Vietnam he remained powerfully conscious of his own heritage, his family’s record of physical courage: ‘I didn’t want them to feel that I wasn’t measuring up.’
He joined the US Information Agency rather than the Foreign Service, ‘because I’m a natural field man’. In Washington before flying, he met three young Vietnamese lieutenants who asked if he spoke their language. No, he said, but he had been told that French would do. They looked uncomfortable. One said, ‘That is the colonial language.’ When the American reached Vietnam in 1962, he quickly became aware of the handicap imposed on almost all his countrymen by the inability to converse: ‘They couldn’t even pronounce place names. I also became very conscious of the weight of history against which we were contending. Within a few weeks, I was a sufficiently wise guy to recognise that Diem was not “the Winston Churchill of Asia”.’
Scotton became an impassioned student of the country, travelling fearlessly and indeed recklessly through paddies and jungle, supervising a survey for the US ambassador about sentiment in remote hamlets. One of a small band of Americans who became committed to the cause, he said, ‘I was always looking for other people who felt the same way. There was a divide between those who really cared, and those who did not.’ Young Saigonese who met him soon began to say that Scotton was ky qua – strange or eccentric – and plenty of Americans would have agreed: embassy people called him ‘the maverick mongrel’. Vietnam cost him a marriage: his wife Katherine did her utmost to make a life at their house in Qui Nhon, organising English classes. After some months, however, she went home, they divorced, and thereafter he formed a series of passionate local relationships.
Doug Ramsey also arrived in 1962, fresh from language school, and was posted to spend his first months circulating USIA material from an office in Dalat: ‘I found it ironic to be distributing a paper entitled “Free World” in the interests of the Diem dictatorship.’ Local people proved wary of expressing opinions about anything to a foreigner unless or until they knew him well, but Ramsey quickly decided that Diem was not a credible or sustainable leader, and developed a matching enthusiasm for some elusive political ‘Third Force’. ‘I got interested in what Frank Scotton was doing – trying to build from the bottom.’ He came increasingly to believe that a decade or two of communist domination was preferable to ‘the imbecility of our policies’, an interminable war. Dominance of a given area by either side ‘in many places extended to no more than the lethal range of an AK-47 or an M-14’. Ramsey professed to be less dismayed by communist terror than by ‘indiscriminate artillery and air strikes by the US and Saigon regime’. Down in the Mekong delta, he caught an early glimpse of the limitations of government forces when the mere rumour of an impending attack caused the local ARVN unit to take flight.
Bob Destatte was one of sixteen children in a Catholic family of poor but fiercely hard-working Ohio factory workers. He abandoned a college teaching course in favour of the army: ‘I wanted to see something outside my small town.’ He volunteered for the Army Security Agency because a military friend told him this would ensure overseas postings, and he became a morse interceptor. In 1961 he was sent to Saigon. On the plane flying in, he expected something, he said, ‘like those people in Terry and the Pirates – sneaky folk hiding in the shadows’. But from the moment that from the back of a truck he glimpsed his first two girls in ao-dais, he thought differently: so differently, indeed, that within months and at the age of twenty-two he was married to Nguyet Thi Anh. He met her when a young Vietnamese boy who worked with their unit, in those days based in two vans at Tan Son Nhut airbase, invited him to a family dinner. He liked the mother from their first meeting, and the boy’s sister taught him to use chopsticks. ‘I guess it was love at first sight.’ They were joined in a civil ceremony, but in collusion with his officers the marriage was not made official until just before he rotated back to the US in 1963, because local weddings triggered instant repatriations. Unlike many such partnerships, that of the Destattes lasted.
Bob Kelly, a psychological-warfare adviser working with the South Vietnamese in Quang Ngai province, organised pro-government rallies, of which the first was not an unqualified success. Local people were herded like cattle to attend, then left sitting without water under a hot sun. The occasion’s highlight was to be a C-47 flying low overhead, broadcasting government propaganda. The plane arrived early, and from a thousand feet its raucous tones drowned out the local province chief’s speech on the ground. Then the airborne broadcaster demanded in Vietnamese: ‘Mr Province Chief, have you finished yet?’ This infuriated and humiliated local officials, whose temper was not improved when the plane began to drop leaflets in bundles that failed to burst in the air, so they landed like bombs. It never occurred to the Americans involved, some laughing and others almost tearful amid the shambles, that it was wildly inappropriate for them to be seen to be orchestrating a Vietnamese political rally.
William Colby, born in 1920, spent part of his childhood in China, then attended Princeton. In 1944–45 he served some months with the OSS in occupied France and Norway, which he found an intensely romantic experience, then spent a few boring years working for ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan’s law firm. Better times started in 1950 when he joined the CIA, ‘a band of brothers’. He did an apprenticeship in Sweden and Italy, then in 1959 was posted to Saigon. He travelled widely across the country, and decided that containment of the communists was the only realistic objective. He dissented when Max Taylor and Walt Rostow recommended a dramatic increase in US advisory strength: Vietnam ‘really wasn’t a military problem’. In July 1960 Colby became CIA head of station, and presided over a series of doomed efforts to infiltrate paramilitary groups into the North, and to launch counter-terror operations against the Vietcong. Like many Americans, he grasped a few strands of the Vietnam tangle, but never enough to promote coherent policies.
Al Gray, born in 1928 the son of a New Jersey railroad conductor, became a career Marine and found bootcamp easy: ‘We were tough guys.’ He became an NCO, then in 1952 was commissioned and saw a little service as a forward observer at the back end of the Korean war. Thereafter he got into signals intelligence and special operations, monitoring North Korea, Russia, the Thai–Burma border. In 1960 Capt. Gray was sent to Saigon, liked the South Vietnamese, and admired Diem: ‘I thought he was on the right track.’ As a semi-spook he travelled in civilian clothes, often as a passenger with Air America. He spent the next ten years working on an interface between the Marines and the intelligence community: ‘I felt what we were doing was some day going to save lives.’
They all had adventures, which of course was what most were seeking. Though Frank Scotton was a civilian, he indulged a passion for roaming the countryside, often alone but always armed, in search of action as well as knowledge. This practice led him into situations unexpected