Iron Man: Behind Enemy Lines

Tales of Suspense #93
Cover art by Gene Colan

In August 1967, Iron Man visited Vietnam to personally test new tracer shells invented by Tony Stark that will enable American combat troops to have better accuracy when firing their weapons. After a successful demonstration, Iron Man meets with the unit’s colonel, who points at a map of the region. “See this castle?” he asks. “It’s located atop a heavily fortified mountain called Hill 38. Our intelligence reports that some new type of weapon is being developed within those walls. A weapon so dangerous, so deadly, that nothing can stop it once it’s unleashed.”

The castle is under the command of a mysterious scientist called Half-Face, who is considered the communist version of Tony Stark. Intrigued, Iron Man agrees to cross enemy lines and investigate. Once inside the castle, however, Iron Man comes face-to-face with a revived Titanium Man, the Soviet Union’s answer to Iron Man who supposedly perished the last time the two met. Although the Russians abandoned their creation, the Vietnamese recovered him and Half-Face not only healed Titanium Man but made him stronger as well. The power boost proves too much for Iron Man to handle and the superhero quickly finds himself incapacitated.

With American bombers on their way to attack military targets in North Vietnam, Titanium Man is sent to a nearby village to destroy it so ferociously that everyone will assume that it was American bombs that caused the damage and killed innocent peasants. “The entire world will be shocked!” Half-Face tells Titanium Man. “It will be our greatest propaganda victory!”

Nine months earlier in the real world, New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury was invited by the North Vietnamese to likewise cross enemy lines. His primary objective was to investigate allegations that American planes were dropping bombs on residential areas and not just on military targets. The U.S. Department of Defense refuted those claims as propaganda, arguing that any damage came from the misfiring of North Vietnamese missiles and not American bombs.

Upon his arrival in Hanoi, Salisbury was taken to Pho Nguyen Thiep Street, where an explosion on December 13, 1966, caused the destruction of thirteen houses, killing five and injuring eleven. Salisbury was a veteran reporter from World War II who had witnessed firsthand the German blitzkrieg in London and later walked through the ruins of Stalingrad and Warsaw.

He noted in his 1967 book, Behind the Lines – Hanoi December 23, 1966-January 7, 1967, that what he saw on Pho Nguyen Thiep Street palled in comparison. Although he admitted feeling “shock and futility,” he ultimately concluded that it was “not a very dramatic incident.” Salisbury also wrote that the damage was too minimal to have been caused by a stray North Vietnamese missile, as American officials had argued.

A short distance away was Phuc Tan Street, which was likewise reportedly hit by American bombs. The damage area was larger and more severe, with three hundred mud-and-wattle huts that served as working-class homes having been destroyed. Although a stray missile could have been the culprit, Harrison Salisbury found three small craters amidst the debris, confirming that American bombs had been responsible.

Salisbury wondered if the attack was meant to show how easily American planes could attack the nearby Long Bien Bridge, the only structure that connected the main portion of Hanoi with the northern. He concluded that it was a plausible explanation but there was no way to be certain.

“This was the great problem of trying to establish – from the ground – what the man at the controls of a twelve-hundred-mile-an-hour plane was actually trying to do,” Salisbury wrote in Behind the Lines. “Was he dropping his bombs precisely? Or was he just being careless? Even the American command could not always be sure, and I did not see how the factor of sheer accidental destruction could be ruled out.”

Harrison Salisbury next visited areas outside of Hanoi, small villages that had also been bombed by U.S. fighter planes. While the people who lived in those villages believed they had been intentionally targeted, Salisbury found that hard to believe. He therefore searched for alternative targets that might have been missed, like the dike on a nearby river or an antiaircraft gun on the shore, but they ultimately appeared too minor to have attracted American attention.

One installation intentionally destroyed was the Vandien truck park on the outskirts of Hanoi. A half mile away was the Polish Friendship School, a high school that received financial aid from Poland. Like the truck park, the school had been demolished by American bombs.

“It was perfectly plain what had happened,” Salisbury realized. “The planes had come sweeping in on the truck park, and the chain of bombs had continued in a straight line and hit the school as well.” While the bombing of the school was obviously an accident, Salisbury didn’t understand why the Vandien truck park had been targeted in the first place, especially since it only contained a dozen or so broken-down buses and trucks at the time.

The most logical conclusion was that despite U.S. military assertions to the contrary, American reconnaissance information was flawed and the precision of American aircrafts were not as accurate as advertised. This was just speculation of course, as there was no way for Harrison Salisbury to know for sure.

“But I could begin to see quite clearly that there was a vast gap between the reality of the air war, as seen from the ground in Hanoi,” he wrote, “and the bland, vague American communiques with their reiterated assumptions that our bombs were falling precisely upon ‘military objectives’ and accomplishing our military purposes with some kind of surgical precision which for the first time in the history of war was crippling the enemy without hurting civilians or damaging civilian life.”

Back in the Marvel Comics Universe, Half-Face arrives at the village that Titanium Man was sent to destroy. “I have no wish to slay innocent people,” the scientist tells him. “But those are our orders and this is war. Therefore go! I, your master, shall guide your actions.” The peasants immediately run away in panic as Titanium Man smashes through the jungle terrain and into the village. By now Iron Man has escaped from the castle and likewise arrives on the scene. Since he has no intention of fighting his communist counterpart in the village, he leads Titanium Man into the jungle and a nearby river.

As the peasants gather to watch, Half-Face recognizes his wife – who he was forced to abandon years earlier by the North Vietnamese government – amongst the villagers and immediately runs towards her. She refuses to leave the village, however, declaring that she and her son are willing to accept the same fate as their fellow peasants. Iron Man, meanwhile, has his hands full trying to stop Titanium Man and only finds success after maneuvering his colossal nemesis onto a stone bridge that collapses under his substantial weight. Titanium Man refuses to be defeated so easily and begins to rise again but then topples over for good, as if by magic.

“It was not magic,” Half-Face explains, still holding the portable controls for Titanium Man. “I have destroyed my greatest creation. No longer do I serve those who are the oppressors. From this moment on, I fight for freedom, as do those whom I love.”

“I shall report that both Titanium Man and Half-Face are gone,” Iron Man replies. “For, in truth, they are.”

In the real world, the death and destruction in the actual Vietnam was a lot more difficult to end. The conflict continued for another eight years, with an estimated four million Vietnamese losing their lives as a result. The United States dropped fourteen million tons of explosives in Southeast Asia, twice the number of bombs detonated during World War II. The village that Iron Man visited in 1967 may have been saved, but it was one of the fortunate few to survive the onslaught.

Anthony Letizia

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