On October 27, 1965, having evaded enemy fire by corkscrewing through a steep descent to a mountain airfield, a Beechcraft 18 opened its door onto a blast of tropical heat. Henry Kissinger had flown through a monsoon from the Vietnam coast to the city of Pleiku on the country’s western border with Cambodia. Home to two of Vietnam’s more than 50 indigenous groups, the Bahnar and Jarai (collectively known as Montagnards), this district capital in the Central Highlands had grown from a colonial hamlet into a city bloated with CIA contractors, U.S. Army Special Forces, a South Vietnamese Army division, and several thousand of the three million refugees who had been driven from their homes during the Second Indochina War—known in Vietnam as the American War and in the United States as the Vietnam War—then entering its 11th year. A new phase in the war had begun in March, when 3,500 Marines splashed ashore. Soon there would be half a million American troops, supported by long-range bombers that would drop on Vietnam more than twice the total tonnage dropped by Allied powers in the European theater during World War II. France had already lost the First Indochina War, after a calamitous defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The question was whether the United States, with its massive arsenal and legions of troops, might fare better. Kissinger had come to Vietnam in search of the answer.
“The flight to Pleiku was as beautiful as is possible,” Kissinger wrote. Turning inland from the coast, the Beechcraft had navigated between 10,000-foot, cloud-shrouded peaks. On another flight, Kissinger had spied troops fighting on the ground below. “It was an eerie feeling,” he wrote, “to see an action in which thousands of lives are involved and have it appear almost as in a television serial of Indians besieging a Western fort.” Kissinger’s destination was less picturesque. From the air, it looked to him like the set for a Hollywood cowboy movie, “like one of those frontier towns inside
THOMAS A. BASS, a professor of English and journalism at SUNY Albany, is the author of The Eudaemonic Pie and The Spy Who Loved Us. His eighth book, Return to Fukushima, will be published in the spring. a stockade.” The buildings were “heavily sandbagged” with “a mortar shelter in the center of the compound” and a barbed-wire fence around the perimeter. The Pleiku airport was buzzing with fighter jets returning from the first big battle of America’s ground war in Vietnam. Twenty miles to the south, in the village of Plei Me, Montagnard irregulars, led by American special forces advisers, had repulsed an attack by mainline troops from the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), eventually driving them across the border into Cambodia. This was a trial run for the NVA. Could they fight American troops defended by helicopter gunships, bombers, and long-range artillery? The battle convinced Ho Chi Minh, leader of the communist North, that they could. The United States ruled the air, but the communists could assert some measure of control on the ground—enough at least to inflict heavy casualties before retreating to the safety of their bases in Cambodia and Laos. A month later, for example, 17 miles south of Plei Me in the la Drang Valley, the communists would kill more than 500 American soldiers before again retreating across the border.
These details about Kissinger’s travels come from a “personal and confidential” diary that he kept during two trips to Vietnam—three weeks in the autumn of 1965 and a few days in the summer of 1966. Access to the diary, which is stored with Kissinger’s papers at the Yale University Library, is granted by permission only. A couple of scholars have drawn on the diary, and Niall Ferguson devotes a chapter to it in his official biography. Although Kissinger described his diary as a
