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Chapter 6 - The Brass Responds, Part II: From Counter Insurg
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the brass responds, part ii from counterinsurgency to narco-insurgency in southeast asia If we have found we cannot be the world’s policeman, can we hope to become the world’s narc?—H. D. S. Greenway, 1972 Never in his wildest dreams could Bill Hart have envisioned himself running a heroin clinic—especially in Vietnam. On July 4, 1971, however, the colonel found himself in just that position as the head of a newly created drug treatment center at the Long Binh military stockade. At 9:30 p.m., Hart phoned Dr. Tom Robbins of the Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., to report on the clinic’s progress. Displaying a brief level of candor, he asked Robbins, “Did you ever think that you would be doing this?” Robbins replied with a curt “No,” and the two men continued with their routine.1 Hart’s revealing question reflected the frustration of an officer trained in the art of modern warfare but forced to play the role of drug specialist. It also epitomized the significance of the military’s drug war pledge, which came to consume enormous resources—while causing more than a few gray hairs. The military first became vigilant in policing drugs during the mid-1960s when rumors of an addicted army first became manifest. The State Department stepped up efforts to immobilize trafficking networks in South Vietnam and the poppy-rich Golden Triangle region and trained local police in narcotics suppression techniques. As public hysteria intensified, the Nixon administration authorized aerial surveillance and chemical defoliation, as well as crop substitution and alternative economic development projects in opium-growing regions—in addition to the urinalysis program and funding for 122 the brass responds, part ii rehabilitation. All these initiatives, which lay at the heart of Nixon’s international drug policy, were designed to cut the supply of drugs reaching American troops, assuage the specter of moral panic, and bolster the prestige of the armed forces, which had reached a nadir in their history. They were also intended to silence charges of government complicity in the international drug traffic, while limiting public dissent over Vietnam. The Southeast Asian drug war ultimately served as a watershed in U.S. foreign narcotics policy in its breadth of federal commitment and the scope of its programs. It also came to expose the limits of American international policing and the nation’s universal approach to foreign policy more broadly, arousing popular animosity and resistance but failing to curb supply rates.2 “Stifled by the CIA?” Origins of the Vietnamese Drug War During the mid-1950s, the FBN first established bureau posts in Southeast Asia because of an interest in curbing the sources of drug supply . Following the French defeat at Dienbienphu in 1954, FBN agents began to investigate the involvement of the Communist Vietminh in trafficking opium from Thailand and Laos, which, according to French colonial sources, had provided an “appreciable” source of income for the purchase of arms since the declared formation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945. They found more evidence, however, about the corruption of American strategic allies in the region, which consular officials had been warning about since the late 1940s.3 On January 1, 1955, with American prodding, Bao Dai, the former French puppet emperor and newly designated ruler of South Vietnam below the 17th parallel, issued a decree banning the government monopoly on opium as a means of bolstering his political image. Government advisers from Michigan State University, nevertheless, remained suspicious about his continued links with the Binh Xuyen criminal network.4 After being taken on a tour of an abandoned opium refinery, Dr. Wesley Fishel, who oversaw the creation of the South Vietnamese police, articulated his fear to the American embassy that the refinery was being used to process drugs clandestinely at night. He urged Bao Dai’s successor, Ngo Dinh Diem, to make drug enforcement a top priority in order to promote law and order and legitimize his political rule.5 Despite this plea, FBN field agents working out of Thailand came to suspect that GVN police under the command of Diem’s brother, Ngo [52.15.63.145] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:58 GMT) from counterinsurgency to narco-insurgency in southeast asia 123 Dinh Nhu, were continuing to receive regular payments from gambling and the smuggling of opium.6 Nhu’s forces had worked to violently crush the Binh Xuyen, which posed a threat to the government’s...