Henry Allen: From Vietnam to Afghanistan: Not Winning Hearts and Minds
I'd done some counterinsurgency work as a corporal in the Marine Corps.
This was in 1966, three years earlier. I was at Chu Lai, south of Danang. We gave away truckloads of flour, cement and roofing tin. The Vietnamese were cool with their thanks, but that was understandable. We'd gotten a warm response from one village chief we worked with until the Viet Cong worked with him too, by cutting off his head. I think of him when I read of Taliban reprisals against Afghans who work with Americans.
One day our 105mm howitzer battery was particularly noisy, taking out a Viet Cong hamlet. Then came a cease-fire order. It seemed it wasn't a Viet Cong but a friendly hamlet. We'd leveled it.
Sorry 'bout that, as we'd say when things got especially ugly.
The colonel asked us to smooth it over, get those hearts and minds back. Cement? Flour? Roofing tin? Never happen, colonel.
I think of that day every time I hear about a drone lighting up a number of Afghan women and children, about our fighter planes taking out a wedding party.
When I went back to Chu Lai as a journalist in 1999, my guide told me that the coolness I'd noticed might have been more than fear of reprisal or resentment at the leveling of a friendly village.
In this area during the war, he said, "very high revolutionary spirit, very high."
His face seemed to imply there was a joke, and he pitied me because I was the butt of it.
Indeed, local legend had it that the Viet Cong used our cement and roofing tin to build not houses but underground launchers for the rockets they fired back at us. Even so, it was nice when two women thanked me for our long-ago generosity with our medical care. Hearts, minds, rockets.
We paid off one village chief with an old French sedan, a Panhard. We had to deliver it by ship because the village had no roads. The chief couldn't drive it anywhere, of course, but we were there to oblige.
I think of that Panhard when I read about the money and goods we use to buy the Afghans -- the crane and gasoline we gave, for instance, so they wouldn't attack us while we were evacuating the Korengal Valley after spending years there winning no hearts or minds. How many suicide bombs could Taliban cars deliver with that gasoline?
Sorry 'bout that....