Only by remembering a lost war can we defeat the ‘Abu’ rebels today

US President George W. Bush phoned President Macapagal-Arroyo Saturday to reassure her of their partnership in combating terrorism and promise her that the new American Ambassador, Francis Joseph Ricciardone (whose confirmation is still pending in the US Senate) will be in Manila before the end of the month.

The background to the "phone pal" relationship between GMA and Bush is that it seems the Philippine President was the third person to ring up Mr. Bush in the first hours of America’s agony over the terrible attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The first individual to reach Bush was Admiral Denis Blair, the commander in chief of the US Forces in the Pacific (CINCPAC), the second was Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The third, to express her condolences and support, I’m informed, was our GMA.

Now the anti-American clique and the GMA-baiters in some sectors of Congress and in the streets will be provoked to new paroxysms of fury over Georgie and Gloria being so buddy-buddy with each other in their "get- tough" insertion of American troops into the battle against terrorists in Basilan and elsewhere in Mindanao.

Last Saturday night, I saw a General Teodosio on television, his chest gleaming with a "salad" of medals and decorations (thereby, I suppose, battle-tested), assure ABS-CBN televiewers that the US Special Forces advisers in Basilan would not operate in the front lines, but remain close to each Filipino company commander they are "advising" (They are assigned in teams of two of each of our Army companies.)

This presumably will make certain the American participants in Balikatan will not be unduly exposed to gunfire of direct attack from the Abu Sayyaf. What the general did not point out, of course, is that in a guerrilla war there are no front lines. The guerrillas strike everywhere, set ambuscades front and rear, and their mortars and rockets have a long reach. There is no "front line." Every man in what they used to call in Vietnam the "killing zone" is at risk.

But the US Green Berets know that. This is the field of expertise in which, precisely, they were trained. What they can "teach" our soldiers, who’ve been fighting insurgents for many years (some sergeants for over 20 years), may not be new techniques. However, they’ll be bringing in a fresh approach and more modern, state-of-the-art, night-vision capable equipment. That’s a plus. The presumption is that they’ll "gift" our military with the sort of equipment we lack.

* * *

All that furor over the danger of the Philippines turning in another Vietnam or Afghanistan is not new – and not intimidating, either. We won’t.

I was one, I confess, among the original scaremongers. In April 1985 this writer ran an article in Manila Magazine entitled: Is the Philippines Going the Way of Vietnam? Why, that was almost 17 years ago, and we haven’t become another "Vietnam" yet. Okay, so I was wrong.

Rereading that piece yesterday, I was reminded of one of my best friends, the irrepressible French correspondent of Newsweek Magazine, Francois Sully. When you cover a war, your memories are not just of events but of people – and Sully was one of the most memorable individuals you could ever hope to meet. When I met him in Saigon, he was debonair, cocky – and had just been fired by Time Magazine when Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk swore to ban TIME coverage of his country in a fit of anger over Sully criticizing his campaign to recruit not just Cabinet ministers and bureaucrats but even foreign ambassadors in ditch-digging, road-building projects "for the upliftment of the people." In his pungent Time article, not only had Sully cheekily asserted that one bulldozer could complete in an hour what Sihanouk and the sweating diplomats would take two days to accomplish. What’s worse, he had included a photograph of a startled-looking Prince Sihanouk in his jockey shorts over the caption: "Girding for Work", or something like that.

Anyway, it was his subsequent stint in Newsweek, after a brief period of free-lancing, that made Francois famous. He was a born Parisian – a bon vivant, a confirmed bachelor, effortlessly suave, greeting each lady, young or old, with the Gallic flourish of a kiss on the hand. Far from being a dandy, however, he was a tough, courageous combat reporter.

When this writer was assigned to Saigon in 1958 (my wife and I lived there until I was "kicked out" in 1960), I was afraid that I had arrived too late, and that "the war was over." When I told this to Sully, he grinned that fierce derisive grin of his: "This war over? As long as there are two Vietnamese left alive, they’ll be fighting each other!" 

And he was right. The phoney "calm" which had come in the wake of the division of Vietnam into "North" and "South" after the French Indo-China War soon turned into the "American" war – and we were both back in the swamps, jungles and "killing fields", covering the same dirty patches of ground, lost, won, and fought over so many times.

Francois was a frequent visitor to our small villa on Duong (Rue) Huynh Kyong Ninh in the Dakao area. Sully and John Stirling of the London Observer came by frequently, not because of my natural charm and wit, but because I had inherited a large case of Philippine cigars from a visiting Filipino Cabinet member. Sully prized good cigars as much as he savored fine wine and admired beautiful women.

We were a closely-knit group in those days of the "twilight war." Our Association des Correspondants Etrangers had a membership of only 12, and our most pressing concerns were how to book a table or a tennis court at the Cercle Sportif Saigonnais, the sports club, and attend our bi-weekly dinners at the My-Canh (floating restaurant) on the river.

What a contrast this was to February 1968 when I flew in by MAC-V jet from Clark Field, with Tony Tecson, chief camera editor of our newspaper’s TV affiliate, Channel 5 (then run by Marquitos Roces) on the second day of the murderous "Tet" Offensive. Our plane had to zig-zag as it bounded to a landing at Tan Son Nhut airport, since it was under mortar attack from the Vietcong, who were among the most accurate mortar-men in the world.

Much of the first day was spent searching for the bodies of eight Filipino technicians who had been among the first "hit" by the V.C. offensive when they were on their way to the airport to take a military flight home to the Philippines. (We discovered later the victims had been bulldozered into a common grave with Vietnamese casualties of the first wave of attack.)

I was amazed at how the ranks of foreign journalists had swelled. Instead of the sleepy dozen of my earlier stint, there were already 150 accredited resident correspondents, and almost 700 more were registered as transient correspondents at the offices of the US Military Assistant Command-Vietnam (MAC-V). Gone were the boring dinners at the Cercle Sportif. The Vietcong had taken care, the first week of their offensive, of our favorite My-Canh floating restaurant by blowing it up.

* * *

It was a weird but exhilarating "homecoming" for me. I was back in a familiar war.

I looked for Sully but was told he was "out" covering one of the bloody engagements of the "Tet" fighting We all had our hands full. I was eager to find Francois.

When I had been banned from Vietnam in 1960, accused of being a Communist agent provocateur, it had been Sully who gathered the boys together and organized the wildest farewell party for me.

"Don’t worry, Max, you’ll be back," he had predicted laughing. "This is your war. Vietnam is like a beautiful woman you love – but cannot have. You will never be able to forget her!"

How true that was. I had been booted out by the late President Ngo Dinh Diem. But the unfortunate Diem was overthrown and assassinated in 1963. By 1965, I was able to fly back to Saigon, via Bangkok, to chronicle the arrival of a wave of hundreds, then thousands of American "advisors."

They flew in by helicopter gunships and C-130s. They waded ashore in Danang. They brought in the sinews of war – tanks, armored personnel carriers, recoilless rifles, and cases of peanuts, ground-nuts, and chocolate bars. They brought in ice-cream making equipment for their favorite brand, Fairmont. They bragged that they would give the Vietcong the knockout punch, "finish the war", and bring the boys home by Christmas. But Christmas never came.

I recall one day when Sully and I came back from the Battle of Dong Xai where hundreds of allied (Army of Vietnam) and Vietcong dead lay sprawled amidst the shell-blasted rubber trees and rolling hills of the Michelin rubber plantation. I had just had a helicopter blown up from under me by a V.C. rocket (a Soviet-type B-42, hand-held type, I think). Only three of us riding that chopper survived. The two American flyers, those brave chopper jockeys with balls of iron, would never see home again. I was shaken by the experience and my narrow escape.

Sully and I went over to the "Versailles" (formerly the old "Arc-en-Ciel" or rainbow restaurant) in Cholon’s Chinatown to wash the stench of blood and cordite from our mouths with Champagne – for Francois, who hated the red "rot-gut" Algerian wine so favored in the early days, there was no other libation.

Would the killing ever end? I asked Sully. An inane question, really. In reply, he morosely quoted from Gogol to point out that any solution to the endless cycle of murder and ruthless strife would only be crushed under le poids des ames mortes, the weight of the dead souls.

I finally saw my friend on the second week of the "Tet" offensive. I had just flown in by helicopter from My Tho where the South Vietnamese Rangers had dislodged the V.C. after a four-day battle. I spotted Sully at Tan Son Nhut as his own chopper was lifting off, headed towards Hue (the ancient royal capital) where some of the heaviest fighting was still going on.

He saw me at the same time, waved gaily, and shouted over the engine roar: "Hey, Max! Welcome back! I’ll see you later!"

He never did. I left Vietnam after a few weeks to return to the "real world," as those embattled US grunts used to call it. (Everyone of those G.T.s there knew, to the day and the minute, when they were due to be rotated out.)

In early 1971, I picked up a newspaper and read that "the well-known war correspondent, Francois Sully" had been blown up by a "terrorist" bomb while accompanying a Vietnamese general to the "front."

When you are mired in the teacherous quagmire of conflict, like that lost war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the most painful punishment from a reporter (and for each soldier, too, I’m sure) is to see your friends go, one by one. There is a death in every "family." Francois used to cheerfully hum that old French marching song, which goes: Chacun son tour. . . Aujourd’hui le tien, demain le mien – "to each his turn, today yours, tomorrow mine."

This was always in good-humor. We did not think those poignant words referred to us. We all thought that we would live forever.

* * *

Going over some of my old clippings, I think my observations of the Vietnam War when I had just returned from a sortie there (my article, The Last Redoubt, appeared in the Phi-lippines Free Press on July 24, 1965) are relevant to the Filipino-US military build-up in Basilan, Zamboanga, and rear-echelon Cebu (where the US Marines are landing).

I had written: "What is disquieting about the ‘new war’ in South Vietnam is that the Americans have convinced themselves that their approach to the problem of battle is ‘new’ The Yanks have, admittedly, equipment far superior to that of the French. A visit to the huge air complex of Danang, on the airfields at Bien Hoa, or Tan Son Nhut, reveals row on row of the most modern and solendid aircraft in the world, a grim technological array... But the principle remains the same one which doomed the French to failure. You cannot overwhelm a ‘phantom’ army with machines. This was demonstrated only last June 18 (1965) when 27 B-52 jet bombers of the Strategic Air Command flew all the way from Guam to pound a forest in ‘Zone D’, some 35 miles northeast of Saigon. Two of the B-52s collided in mid-air north of the Philippines even before reaching target. After the raid was over, the US tallied costs. The raid had cost $20 million. The score: Two Vietnamese men, two women, and three children killed. They were not even sure the two male casualties were Vietcong. The net result of the raid was that the Strategic Air Command had destroyed hundreds of trees and created 470 craters!"

* * *

These are the same B-52s utilized so "successfully" in Afghanistan to pound the Taliban and al-Queda into submission. The temptation, therefore, is for the American to be gulled into believing that their superior technology is sufficient to win the global war on "terrorism." The 1965 article this writer published, I trust, will help jog their memory and remind our boys in Basilan and other battlefields in Mindanao of the limitations of technology.

Of the Vietcong or V. C,, I wrote in the same piece: "Over the past few years, the impression has been created that the V.C. like their predecessors, the Viet Minh (who defeated the French) are invincible... in reality they are only five feet tall. When you see the dead, after an encounter, lined up in a row, they even look pathetic. Many of them are young, perhaps 16 to 17 years old. They are dressed in either black pajama peasant costume or in shorts, barefoot or shod only in crude sandals made of old rubber tires or woven fiber.

"In life, however, the Vietcong’s battle discipline is superb. They throw themselves on barbed-wire barricades, tear them down with Bangalore torpedoes, handle their mortars and recoilless rifles with efficiency, rush up to gun emplacements and destroy them with potato-masher grenades manufactured in Red China. In contrast, the ARVN (Army of South Vietman) appears almost timorous in battle. The South Vietnamese troops seem afraid of the forest and of the dark, unlike the Vietcong who had been taught that the jungle and the darkness of night are their friends.

"Like the French who preceded them, the South Vietnamese armed forces lock themselves up in forts, fortified outposts and garrisons – dan le beton ( in the concrete) as the French would say. While the Vietcong move freely through the countryside, the army is a virtual prisoner of the towns —— waiting for the enemy to strike. When you wait for your foe to attack you, you have lost the initiative, and having lost the initiative, you have lost half the battle."

We hope this is not what’s happening in Basilan. And that the arriving Americans won’t believe, as they did so disastrously in Vietnam (and in Somalia), that engines of steel can replace men of steel.

The soldier is the ultimate weapon in war. How he stacks up in combat is what decides victory.