Oppose Any Foe

by Mark Moyar

  By the time of Kennedy’s narrow victory over Richard Nixon in the presidential election of November 1960, Communist insurgents were gaining ground in Laos, South Vietnam, Colombia, and Venezuela, and other countries seemed on the verge of joining the list of insurgent hotbeds. The Soviets and Chinese had initially sought to conceal their support for third-world Communist rebels, most of whom were posing as independent nationalists to attract supporters and deceive the antibodies of anticommunism. But on January 6, 1961, two weeks before Kennedy was sworn in, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev made plain the Communist bloc’s use of insurgency as a Cold War weapon. The world was progressing toward communism, Khrushchev said in a globally publicized speech, and the Communist powers would hasten the progress by supporting “wars of national liberation” in the third world.

  On the date of the presidential inauguration, a sunny but bitterly cold day in Washington, Kennedy called upon Americans to devote themselves to a crusade against the Communist scourge. “In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger,” Kennedy averred. “The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.” Kennedy proclaimed that “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

  Kennedy came into the Oval Office less concerned about pushing through a raft of domestic legislation than about combating the nation’s foreign enemies. Throwing himself and his administration into the business of national security, he would waste no time in beefing up the military, with extra emphasis on the special operations forces. For the special operators, a period foreseen as a swim through a shark tank would instead become one of explosive growth, in both size and activities, with profound implications for the strategic impact of special operations forces and their relations with conventional forces.

  Kennedy set out to bolster the nation’s capabilities for counterguerrilla warfare—defined as military operations against guerrillas—and counterinsurgency—defined as civil and military operations against insurgents supported by local populations. By his decree, all military schools, from the service academies to the war colleges, had to teach these subjects. The president also required senior military officers and civilian officials to take counterinsurgency courses, and he brought them to the White House to lecture them personally on the importance of defeating insurgency in underdeveloped countries.

  Kennedy gave unprecedented attention to special operations forces because they were integral to his counterinsurgency agenda, and also because the president and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, revered the Special Forces. The Kennedy brothers were fascinated by the mystique and gadgetry of the Special Forces, in much the same way as Franklin Roosevelt had been fascinated by the contrivances of William J. Donovan’s OSS. Michael Forrestal, a Kennedy administration official and the son of former secretary of defense James Forrestal, bemusedly likened the Kennedy brothers to “Boy Scouts with guns.” With encouragement from the White House, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) developed James Bond–like technologies for special operations, such as toothpick-sized nylon rockets that could kill a man, and explosives that could pass for soap.

  Kennedy inflamed most of the Army by authorizing the Special Forces to wear the green beret, a symbol of elite status that the Army leadership had previously banned. Stoking the fire further, the president encouraged the publicizing of the Special Forces, which had heretofore largely avoided publicity. White House adulation spurred the Special Forces, or the Green Berets, as they now called themselves, to engage in a number of publicity stunts that were to become the objects of scorn and ridicule among the rest of the armed forces. At the 1962 annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army in Washington, DC, Special Forces soldiers rappelled six stories down the side of the Sheraton Park Hotel. To lure tourists to Fort Bragg, the Green Berets created a demonstration area where they showed off skills such as how to catch and skin snakes.

  The Kennedy brothers had little idea of the practical realities of special operations forces, the mundane details that put limits on what could actually be achieved. “Why can’t we just make the entire Army into Special Forces?” Robert Kennedy once inquired. Soon after entering the White House, President Kennedy asked Congress to increase the Army Special Forces to 10,500 men over five years in order to enlarge the 1st, 7th, and 10th Special Forces Groups and form the 5th Special Forces Group. What Kennedy did not fully grasp was the downside of so precipitous an expansion. To meet Kennedy’s growth targets, recruitment standards had to be lowered and training shortened. In the next few years, the attrition rate at the Special Warfare Center fell from 90 percent to 30 percent. Proficiency in technical skills declined, as did the ability of Special Forces troops to withstand the stress of prolonged deployment in isolated and dangerous camps.

  Kennedy’s emphasis on counterinsurgency led the Special Forces to expand their expertise beyond the resistance-support activities of “unconventional warfare” to a new category entitled “special warfare,” which encompassed counterinsurgency and psychological warfare as well as unconventional warfare. Whereas in the past the Special Forces had concentrated on bolstering guerrilla insurgencies in enemy territory, they would now focus on defeating guerrilla insurgencies in friendly nations. Kennedy chose to spread the Special Forces across the world, which put substantial numbers into locations where there was no obvious need for special warfare. In these places, they trained conventional military forces, or latched onto sundry tasks that even charitable observers found difficult to characterize as worthwhile. “We were accepting any mission that came to the 10th [Group], or that we could dig up,” recalled a company commander in the 10th Group. “The value to long-range U.S. foreign policy was often doubtful.”

  Kennedy pressed the Air Force and the Navy to create new special operations forces for use in counterinsurgency and unconventional operations. In April 1961, the Air Force activated a new special operations unit, the 4400th Combat Crew Training Squadron, code-named Jungle Jim. Manned entirely by volunteers, Jungle Jim deployed a detachment to Vietnam in November 1961 with a fleet of upgraded World War II aircraft, including the B-26 Invader and the T-28 Trojan. In what was termed Operation Farmgate, the squadron’s pilots and South Vietnamese trainees flew together in American planes painted with South Vietnamese markings. The Americans were supposed to serve only as instructors, and the Kennedy administration claimed publicly that they were not engaged in combat, but in practice the American pilots often flew the aircraft and fired their guns while their South Vietnamese counterparts observed the proceedings from the passenger seats.

  The Navy answered Kennedy’s summons for special operations forces with the Sea, Air, Land (SEAL) teams. According to Navy planning documents, the SEAL teams were to engage in intelligence collection, raids, sabotage, counterinsurgency, and advising of partner forces. Unlike the Frogmen of the Underwater Demolition Teams, which generally stayed in coastal waters, the SEALs could operate as far as twenty miles inland.

  Composed of volunteers from the Underwater Demolition Teams, the SEAL teams underwent the same basic training course as the Frogmen, a course that was renamed Basic Underwater Demolition / SEAL Training (BUD/S). SEALs also took courses in advanced subjects like High Altitude, Low Opening parachuting and Ranger operations. Many of the early volunteers struggled with terrestrial skills that distinguished the SEALs from the Underwater Demolition Teams, such as advising foreign allies, and were returned to their original units.

  The first Navy SEALs to deploy to Vietnam arrived on March 10, 1962. Setting up a training program similar to BUD/S, they trained South Vietnam’s naval commandos, the Lien Doan Nguoi Nhai, whose name means “soldiers who fight under the sea.” Four-man SEAL detachments advised
Vietnamese units on planning, tactics, and equipment and accompanied them into battle, where their main duty was the direction of naval gunfire and other supporting assets.

  The number of SEALs in Vietnam was small in comparison with that of the Special Forces, and it would remain so throughout the war. Deployed to Vietnam on a limited basis since June 1957, the Special Forces increased their presence in Vietnam exponentially in 1961 as part of a huge increase in US troops ordered by President Kennedy. Unlike the Special Forces assigned to other countries, they had no trouble finding useful missions, for the South Vietnamese government faced a formidable Communist insurgency in the Viet Cong and needed help in a multitude of counterinsurgency tasks.

  During the fall of 1961, soldiers of the 5th Special Forces Group began staffing a CIA paramilitary program in South Vietnam’s central highlands. The Vietnamese Communists coveted this region because it offered base areas for conventional warfare and contained hidden roads and trails that could be used to slip men and materiel from Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam. The principal residents of the region’s remote mountains were the Montagnard tribes, who were readily distinguished from the ethnic Vietnamese majority by their dark skin, loincloths, and slash-and-burn agriculture. Driven long ago from the coastal lowlands by the swords of the ethnic Vietnamese, the Montagnards had little affection for either the South Vietnamese government or the Vietnamese Communists.

  The CIA program originated with a visit by a small group of Americans to the Montagnard village of Buon Enao. Through offers of US weapons, military training, and medical supplies, the Americans convinced the Montagnards to build a fence around the village and declare loyalty to the South Vietnamese government. Seven Green Berets trained Montagnards at Buon Enao and organized them into units, called Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDGs), and soon Montagnard men from forty nearby villages were coming to Buon Enao for training. When the Special Forces were not teaching the Montagnards the arts of war, they were building schools and dispensaries, administering medical care, stocking ponds with fish, or repairing roads and bridges.

  The Americans learned that the Montagnards did not care to practice marksmanship with the M-1 carbines and other surplus US firearms they received, much preferring to spray semiautomatic bursts in haphazard fashion. American carping on such matters often had little effect. Nevertheless, the Americans appreciated the work ethic and straightforward devotion of the Montagnards, seeing in those virtues a pleasant contrast to the stubborn evasiveness of the ethnic Vietnamese. The Montagnards took a liking to their American advisers and welcomed them not merely as trainers but as leaders. “The American Special Forces soldier loved the Yards,” observed Henry Gole, employing the affectionate nickname that he and other Green Berets affixed to the Montagnards. “In addition to a winning innocence and child-like sweetness, the Yard was tough, brave, and loyal. The fact that he treated his Special Forces leaders like royalty was a nice bonus.”

  The early successes of the Montagnard program in mobilizing villages against the Viet Cong led the United States to invest in a breakneck expansion. To increase the number of American personnel, Washington transferred control of the program from the overstretched CIA to the Special Forces and boosted the strength of the Special Forces in Vietnam to 126 officers and 544 enlisted men. By late 1963, the Special Forces had trained and armed 62,000 Montagnards.

  Several years of improvement in South Vietnam’s counterinsurgency capabilities ended abruptly at the beginning of November 1963 with the assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. The US ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, had instigated the coup in disregard of White House objections because of his conviction that someone else could lead the country better than the autocratic Diem. The generals who took over, however, soon set upon each other like Byzantine noblemen, leading to a series of purges that decimated the government’s rural administration and security forces.

  The North Vietnamese responded by moving beyond their strategy of low-intensity insurgency, implemented by guerrillas and political cadres in black pajamas, to one of high-intensity conventional warfare, fought by battalions of uniformed North Vietnamese soldiers wielding heavy machine guns and 75mm pack howitzers. During 1964, Hanoi enlarged and improved the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a collection of routes in Laos and Cambodia used by North Vietnamese vehicles and soldiers to skirt the demilitarized zone between the two Vietnams. The widening of roads and strengthening of bridges for truck traffic enabled the North Vietnamese to quadruple the amount of supplies shipped to the South. In November 1964, Hanoi for the first time dispatched an entire North Vietnamese Army Division to South Vietnam.

  Three weeks after the assassination of President Diem, an assassin’s bullet claimed the life of John F. Kennedy, thrusting Vietnam and the nation’s other problems suddenly into the hands of Lyndon B. Johnson. A blustering career politician from the Texas Hill Country with none of Kennedy’s glamor or charm, Johnson had served in the Navy during World War II, though his only brush with combat occurred during a passenger trip aboard a B-26 bomber. When Japanese Zeroes chased after the bomber, Johnson did little but hang on and pray that the aircraft would make it back safely, yet he subsequently convinced military authorities to award him a Silver Star for the flight. Johnson later regaled journalists with stories about how he had flown months of combat missions over the Pacific during the war, claiming that his exploits had earned him the sobriquet “Raider” Johnson.

  Unlike Kennedy, Johnson cared much more about domestic issues than foreign affairs. Preoccupied with an expansive legislative agenda and the looming presidential election, Johnson wanted to keep Vietnam off the front pages during 1964. Thus, when presented with proposals from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to initiate covert attacks against North Vietnam in early 1964, Johnson authorized a lengthy slate of operations as a low-visibility way of fending off the North Vietnamese in the near term.

  McNamara was convinced that the Defense Department could wage covert warfare in North Vietnam more effectively than the CIA, which in recent years had lost 85 percent of the agents it had inserted into the North. He formed the Studies and Observations Group (SOG), manned primarily by Special Forces soldiers, to initiate covert activities in North Vietnam and neighboring countries. Captain Bill Murray, a naval officer in the Pentagon who worked with SOG in its formative stages, recounted that “the people assigned to SOG were in general undisciplined, wild-eyed Army Special Forces people… who believed that the whole of Southeast Asia could be conquered by a handful of Green Berets.” He lamented that “for a considerable period of time, McNamara also believed this myth.”

  The first Special Forces officers assigned to SOG advocated the organization of resistance forces in North Vietnam. The fact that organizing resistance forces had been the foundation stone of the Special Forces no doubt had something to do with their position. But the idea also had merit in its own right. North Vietnam’s Catholics and tribal minorities had a history of taking up arms against Communists, and individuals from these groups who had fled south after the division of Vietnam were offering to return to their home areas if the Americans would underwrite resistance organizations.

  President Johnson, however, opted against resistance operations, for fear that they would provoke North Vietnam or its ally China. This line of argument was the cause of bewilderment and derision among US military officers, who had been watching North Vietnam provoke South Vietnam and the United States for years by running a large resistance movement in the South. The White House restricted SOG’s activities in the North to insertion of intelligence agents, a business in which the Special Forces had much less expertise.

  The first adverse consequence of this decision was the snubbing of SOG by northern Catholic and tribal refugees, who accurately predicted that operations into the North would fail without resistance movements that could assist SOG’s personnel. The Vietnamese individuals who ultimately entered North Vietnam for SOG were, by and large, poorly educa
ted young men of lackluster spirit and aptitude whose principal motive was monetary. The Vietnamese Special Forces assigned some of their personnel to the operations, but the cream of the Vietnamese Special Forces had been skimmed off and discarded during the purges that followed the November 1963 coup.

  Although McNamara and the Green Berets had denigrated the CIA’s agent operations in North Vietnam, SOG could not come up with better ideas on how to carry out the operations and ended up relying on the same methods that the CIA had employed. After undergoing SOG training, small teams of Vietnamese agents parachuted into North Vietnam with instructions to melt into the population, make contact with relatives, and develop networks of informants. No Americans were permitted to accompany the teams.

  Some of the inserted teams disappeared immediately and were never heard from again. Others began broadcasting messages on their radios, but in a disturbingly consistent pattern. In the first few days after insertion, these teams sent a large number of short messages, usually on basic administrative matters, then went silent for a spell. After that, they came back on line with messages explaining the silence, most often citing equipment malfunctions. The teams would request supplies and equipment, including luxury items for bribing Communist officials, such as Salem cigarettes, Seiko watches, and pistol silencers. When pressed to carry out intelligence or sabotage missions, they invariably came up with excuses as to why such missions could not be performed.