Jungle of Snakes

by James R. Arnold

  On the military front, the British rejected large unit sweeps and indiscriminate use of firepower. The security forces had official sanction to kill anyone found in the jungle on the basis that they were terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. Yet there were few systematic abuses of this mandate. Instead, the emphasis was on capturing terrorists rather than killing them. Key to success was coordinating military, police, and civil activities. Unlike in Indochina, where the Viet Minh conducted devastating large ambushes against battalion-sized and bigger targets, the Malay Communists lacked the numbers and firepower to fight such actions. Consequently, except for the most remote police posts, security forces did not have to fear being overrun. Although the British could call upon artillery and bombers, they accepted that the war would be a struggle of small arms. By limiting the use of heavy weapons the British limited the harm done to civilians. To fight effectively a war with small arms the British emphasized individual marksmanship and jungle craft as taught in the handbook “The Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya.”

  Another component of victory was the fact that security forces did not commit routine outrages against the people. There were always instances of corruption when soldiers or officials accepted bribes to ignore Emergency regulations. There were incidents of police brutality, particularly during the early years of the Emergency. Police recruits, especially those who had worked in Palestine, were used to conducting interrogations with the butt end of a rifle. In the field, army patrols that could not find the insurgents and could not communicate with a sullen, Chinese-speaking population vented their frustrations by indiscriminately burning Chinese homes. Since a rubber tapper working in the jungle and a guerrilla looked exactly the same, soldiers shot and killed innocent people. The practice of dropping a few rounds of ammunition or a weapon around the body of a civilian to avoid having to explain why the person was killed was not unknown. Nonetheless, in contrast to behavior in so many other counterinsurgencies such as Algeria, Cyprus, and Palestine, security forces did not systematically brutalize the civilian population.

  Lastly, British leaders understood that winning the war in Malaya would take time and they fully committed to what one general called “the long, long war.”8 In turn, a solid majority of the British public patiently supported the war. Such strategic patience was necessary, particularly in the effort to dismantle the Communist infrastructure that undergirded the insurgency. One combat officer likened the difficultly of contending with this infrastructure to a skin disease that causes a face rash: “Temporary relief for the rash can be obtained by local treatment. For a time it may even disappear, but unless the cause of it is found and removed the rash will assuredly break out again.” The British understood that if they eased up, the Communist leaders would recruit replacements and within six months “be back in the same dominant position.”9 Consequently, instead of making a show of force and then moving on, instead of sporadic efforts that condemned them to capturing the same objective repeatedly, the British employed a methodical but ultimately relentless approach to pacification.

  Superficially, the British experience in Malaya resembled the situation in Vietnam in the 1960s. Both the physical environment (a seemingly all-concealing tropical jungle) and the nature of the opponents (a Western conventional army versus a Communist, Asian guerrilla army) suggested that the Malayan experience was highly relevant to Vietnam. However, the American military studied the Emergency with the same narrow focus that it applied to Algeria, confining itself to specific military subjects. Consequently, according to Sir Robert Thompson, their conclusions were “largely superficial” and most notably the Americans “never comprehended” the social and political dimensions of the conflict.”10

  Nonetheless, the successful campaign in Malaya, as interpreted by Thompson, influenced both South Vietnamese and American strategy in Vietnam. When trying to transfer the lessons of Malaya to Vietnam, counterinsurgency experts overlooked several factors. First and foremost, in Malaya, Great Britain had complete control of the police, civil service, and military services. Instead of these entities resisting reform, they could spearhead reform. As opposed to South Vietnam, Malaya had no common border with another Communist country. Also, the insurgent movement was concentrated within the Chinese population. popular grievances among the Malay majority were insufficient to make a Chinese Communist guerrilla look like a liberator to a Malayan peasant.

  Moreover, even among the Chinese population of Malaya the insurgent cause enjoyed only halfhearted support. Dedicated support only came from squatters who had nothing to lose except their illegally acquired homesteads. The squatters lived in defined areas along the jungle edge, which greatly eased the problem of bringing them under tight control. They did not have a long-standing connection with the land from which they were moved. Consequently, when the British introduced the New Village program, the squatters complained but there was no extreme reaction associated with a people experiencing change to their traditional way of life.

  Lastly, the British who lived in Malaya enjoyed established ties with the local community while those in the colonial service had deep understanding of the Malayan political and social system. Their counsel and advice helped inexperienced officers and men contend with an alien environment.

  In contrast to Vietnam, the insurgents in Malaya never became militarily formidable. By the time American ground troops intervened in Vietnam, Communist units of up to battalion size were conducting ambushes and assaults. As a Malaya veteran, General Richard Clutterbuck, observed, “If we had lost the battles of 1950 and 1951, this is what our war would have been like; but we did not lose them.”11

  All of these essential differences disguised the difficulties of applying the British strategy in Malaya to the American counterinsurgency in Vietnam.

  THE FEDERATION OF Malaya merged with Singapore and the colonies of British North Borneo to form Malaysia in 1963. Three years later, the hardcore remnants of the Malaya Liberation Army, numbering fewer than 500 men, showed they still had teeth. A guerrilla band, unimpressed by the British 1960 announcement that the Emergency was over, ambushed and annihilated a fifteen-man Thai-Malay motorized patrol near the border. They continued sporadic operations until 1989. Twenty-nine years after the official end of the Emergency, they signed a peace accord with the Thai and Malaysian governments and ended military activities.

  In 2004, after three years of escalating violence that the Thai government tried to pin on “bandits,” Thailand declared martial law in its provinces bordering Malaysia. The former enemy, Communist “bandits” from Malaya, were no longer the culprits. Rather the government blamed a Muslim separatist movement dedicated to evicting its “colonial oppressors” and regaining control of lands it claimed had been “illegally incorporated” by Bangkok some 100 years ago.

  PART FOUR

  The Vietnam War

  FIFTEEN

  In Search of a New Enemy

  In default of knowing what should be done, they do what they know.

  —Eighteenth-century German general Maurice de Saxe on conventional leadership1

  A Nation of Villages

  THE SOUTH VIETNAM OF THE 1960s was a nation of villages. The original written Viet namese character for “village” came from a Chinese character that signified “land,” “people,” and “sacred.” Ninety percent of the population of 16 million lived in one of the nation’s 2,500 rural villages. Most were poor peasants who supported themselves by working nearby rice fields or fishing in adjacent waters. They spent their lives within a few miles of their birthplaces, insulated from the outside world by the structure of family and village life. The village was the heart of Vietnamese social and economic relationships.

  An ancient Vietnamese edict said, “The emperor’s rule ends at the village wall.” Rural people greeted outsiders, which meant anyone not from the village, and particularly foreigners, with deep suspicion. During a century of colonial rule, villagers learned to think of the government as a remote
body that collected taxes, demanded unpaid labor, and conscripted young men for the military. They cherished a tradition of resistance against distant authority and memories of successful war against foreign invaders. For as long as most villagers could recall, there had been fighting—against the Japanese in the 1940s, against the French in the 1950s, and now against a government based in Saigon.

  The Communist leaders of this current conflict possessed the esteem, or at least the grudging respect, of many Vietnamese because they held claim to the great victory over the French imperialists in 1954. In contrast, the anti-Communists in the Saigon government possessed little popular support because of their association with the French imperialists. The fact that the government’s strongest support came from 850,000 northerners who had moved south in 1954 to escape Communist rule further alienated South Vietnam’s villagers.

  Roots of Insurgency

  On May 7, 1954, the climatic battle of the First Indochina War ended when Communist Viet Minh soldiers captured the last French strongholds at Dien Bien Phu. Later that summer diplomats in Geneva negotiated the terms of the French withdrawal along with a cease-fire and a provisional military demarcation line at the seventeenth parallel. The so-called partition was supposed to be a temporary measure, a compromise leading to elections and a unified Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Communists in the north and the anti-Communists in the south organized separate states. The United States, in turn, viewed Indochina through the lens of the Cold War. American political leaders and the Eisenhower administration regretted what the French had lost and thought that they could do better. However, according to the terms of the Geneva agreement, Vietnamese representatives from the north and south were to meet in July 1955 to arrange the mechanics for a general election. The voting would follow one year later. From the American perspective, the problem with any general election was that the wrong side would probably win. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, began casting about for means to thwart the election. Simultaneously, South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem spoke out against any election on the ground that fair elections in Communist-dominated areas were impossible. Diem’s public utterances interfered with a variety of more devious American plans. An American diplomat in Saigon cabled the U.S. State Department, “Vietnam Government must agree [to] play the game at least in appearance and cease repudiating [the Geneva] Agreement.”2

  While most everyone in the U.S. government endorsed the strategy of checking Communist expansion by supporting anti-Communist governments in South Vietnam, the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned that any political maneuvering that prevented the victory the Viet Minh had earned on the battlefield risked a strong Communist military reaction. Indeed, in 1956 Diem declined to hold the elections called for in the Geneva declaration. The Communist political underground in South Vietnam understood that Diem’s decision denied them a path to victory via the ballot box. Their response came in 1957 when a terror campaign began against local officials of the Diem regime. Assassination squads chose their victims carefully, targeting men “who enjoyed the people’s sympathy” while leaving “bad officials unharmed in order to . . . sow hatred against the government.”3 Three years later, Communist leaders formed the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF). It was a classic Communist front organization designed to disguise its true roots in order to acquire support from non-Communist South Viet namese nationalists. At the vanguard of the NLF were southern Communist guerrillas who would be labeled by the South Vietnamese government with the derogatory term Viet Cong.

  To conquer the south, the NLF followed a policy that closely integrated tactics and strategy into a unified whole—a whole that in contrast to Western military strategy recognized the interplay of military, political, and social dimensions. Unlike most military forces, the Viet Cong emphasized organizational learning and adaptation. Candid self-criticism sessions occurred at all command levels. Meaningful after-action reviews led to new tactics. They were also willing to learn from foreign experience. The Viet Cong experimented with tactics and doctrine, latched on to what worked, and then rapidly spread the lessons. Adaptation and change were hallmarks of the Communist Vietnamese way of war.

  Long before 1960 and long before the South Vietnamese government understood that it faced a significant insurgency, Communist propaganda teams had laid the foundation for the NLF campaign. Many of the personnel were recruited from the most gifted village youth. Some had traveled north for training and then returned to join like-minded people and speak about the corruption of Saigon government officials, the inequity of land ownership, and the promise of a brighter future under Communist rule. The propaganda teams explicitly set about changing the way rural people viewed their lives and future prospects in order to motivate village youth to fight and to inspire the balance of the village to assist them. By convincing peasants that they were able to address peasant grievances, the Communists made impressive strides toward building a dedicated base of popular support. Then in 1960 the insurgency exploded into violence.

  “If Freedom Is to Be Saved”

  The insurgents held an enormous advantage: a powerful ally, North Vietnam, that had access to every inch of South Vietnam’s land borders. The American ally, the South Viet namese, was a weak reed dominated by an elite minority that was corrupt, inefficient, and badly frightened. During the years prior to the outbreak of violence, American advisers had trained the South Vietnamese army for conventional warfare to repel a direct, Korean War–style invasion across the demilitarized zone along the seventeenth parallel. When instead Communist insurgents committed to guerrilla warfare emerged as the prime threat, the American military mission in Saigon prepared a Counterinsurgency Plan. It called for expanding the South Vietnamese military and increasing American assistance. In return, President Diem was to broaden political support for his government.

  On the eighteenth anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1962, President John F. Kennedy spoke to the newly minted army lieutenants at West Point and described the special challenges posed by insurgents:

  This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin—war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what has been strangely called “wars of liberation,” to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved. It preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts. It requires in those situations where we must counter it, and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved, a whole new kind of strategy.4

  The president’s remarks were designed to underscore the administration’s commitment to create an effective counterinsurgency strategy. However, in spite of the increased flow of American assistance, the erosion of South Vietnamese government authority continued. Regardless, the U.S. Army resisted mightily all proposals for new doctrine, organization, and training aimed at combating insurgents. However, as trouble in Southeast Asia increased, numerous people in and out of government warned that the situation required measures well beyond a conventional military response. An American colonel serving as an adviser in the Mekong Delta echoed Templer’s formulation in Malay in an essay for the prestigious service journal Army, entitled “Fighting the Viet Cong”: “Most of us are sure that this problem is only fifteen per cent military and eighty-five per cent political.” The solution was not just killing Viet Cong but instead “coupling security with welfare.”5

  The army brass wanted nothing to do with such notions. General Earle Wheeler, who would rise to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Lyndon Johnson, represented the army’s position in an address in late 1962: “It is fashionable in some quarters to say that the problems in Southeast Asia are primarily political and economic rather than military. I do not agree. The essence of the p
roblem in Vietnam is military.”6 Before putting such conclusions to the test, the U.S. military had to endure a protracted, British-inspired experiment.

  Strategic Hamlets, Strategic Lunacy

  One man who had received great credit for implementing the successful British counterinsurgency campaign in Malaya was Robert Thompson. At Diem’s invitation, Thompson arrived in South Vietnam in 1961 as head of the five-man British Advisory Mission. Thompson toured the countryside and concluded that Communist control of the rural population presented the gravest challenge to the South Vietnamese government. Thompson firmly believed that Diem’s government could survive only if it protected the rural people and they in turn began to support his government. Based on his Malaya experience, Thompson’s solution was to build a solid base of political support by protecting rural villages with local security forces.

  In detail, Thompson advocated what was called the “oil spot” strategy. The South Vietnamese government would occupy and secure selected areas where Diem’s regime already was strong in order to deprive the Communists of their ability to recruit, tax, gather supplies, and obtain intelligence. Over time, government control would expand, or seep outward like a pool of oil, ultimately merging with adjacent controlled areas to create a larger oil spot. Eventually the uncommitted segments of the population would align with the government, thereby facilitating the further spread of government control. At that point the insurgents would be faced with the impossible choice of either engaging superior government military force or withdrawing from populated areas. In the absence of protection from its military wing and confronted with a diminishing base of popular support, the insurgent political apparatus would erode leading to eventual victory.