The oil spot strategy was well grounded in the historical record. It received its first Vietnam test in 1962. The Diem government built fortified enclosures, called strategic hamlets, in order to deny the Communists access to the civilian population. In addition, these hamlets put the villagers within the reach of the government administrative structure, allowing the government to provide better social services such as schools and infirmaries. At the same time government propagandists tried to convince the people that not only were the Communists morally wrong but also they were losing. However, the Diem government ignored Thompson’s recommendations about where to build the first strategic hamlets and insisted on locating them in remote, Viet Cong–dominated areas. Worse, Diem ignored the peasants’ fierce attachment to their native villages and transgressed the custom of village autonomy by compelling them to relocate to the new hamlets regardless of their personal wishes. They then had to perform “voluntary” labor to build the hamlets. They could depart to tend their fields only with permission and while accompanied by security forces whose job was to protect them from the guerrillas. In sum, the government was forcing rural people to abandon their traditional way of life in exchange for security and asking them to think well of the government for demanding this upheaval.
The Strategic Hamlet Program began in March 1962 under the optimistic code name Operation Sunrise. An army detachment drove the Viet Cong into the nearby jungle while a security force entered the village of Ben Tuong. About a third of the families agreed voluntarily to relocate but the other two thirds accepted relocation only at gunpoint. Government forces then razed the village to the ground. The “new” Ben Tuong consisted of a concrete infirmary and administration post and freshly cleared ground. The families had to build their own homes while also constructing fortifications. Notably, there were very few men of military age present in the “new” village. Most of them were serving with the Viet Cong.
Three months later, the Viet Cong conducted a near-perfect ambush in broad daylight near the model strategic hamlet. They killed twenty-six South Vietnamese soldiers, several public works officials, and two American military advisers. The ambush could not have been carried out without the help of the local villagers. Whether this help came from willing cooperation or intimidation hardly mattered. The Diem government, the British Mission, and the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) argued about what had been done and what to do. All three actors refused to acknowledge honestly what was taking place—namely, that a nationalist-inspired insurgency was winning a war against an unpopular, corrupt government—and instead, in the predictable fashion of a bureaucracy under stress, all three continued to promote an unchanged policy featuring more of the same. Unsurprisingly, the Viet Cong also continued with more of the same. A little over a year later, in August 1963, they overran Ben Tuong.
And so it went throughout the country. Whereas in Malaya the Communists had too few fighters—at most 8,000 armed men against 300,000 men in the security forces—to attack the New Villages, this was not the case in Vietnam. The South Vietnamese militia who defended the strategic hamlets proved woefully inept. The hamlets were not mutually supporting. The Viet Cong took advantage of their isolation by staging assaults to compel relief columns composed of regular South Vietnamese units to be dispatched from distant bases. Then the Viet Cong ambushed the relief columns with deadly effect. Also unlike the British in Malaya, the Strategic Hamlet Program lacked adequate local police and government forces living in the hamlet. In sum, the program proved counterproductive by alienating the people it was supposed to convert to the government side and chewing up valuable military units that were sent to save the hamlets from being overrun.
Moreover, it soon became apparent that Diem and his brother, who was in charge of the program, were more interested in using the program to expand their influence rather than to protect and inspire peasants to fight the Viet Cong. The construction of each new hamlet gave Diem an opportunity to install a party loyalist. The creation of a new government bureaucracy allowed him to hand out even more lavish rewards while consolidating his family’s power. Numbers told a tale of strategic lunacy: whereas the British in Malaya spent three years to establish 500 New Villages, the South Vietnamese created more than 8,000 strategic hamlets in under two years, with most of the construction and relocation taking place in the first nine months of 1963.
John H. Cushman, a future lieutenant general, received the assignment of visiting the southern tip of the country to assess progress. Cushman ordered the American advisers and their South Vietnamese counterparts to make a simple, color-coded map with red marking areas of Communist control, yellow showing contested areas, and blue indicating government-controlled areas. There were only two criteria for government control: officials could move around at night without an escort and there was no open Viet Cong taxation. South Vietnamese officers dutifully created the map. It appeared encouraging until an American adviser pointed out a blue area and asked to visit. The South Vietnamese officer protested vehemently, explaining that it was far too dangerous. In Saigon, a senior American staff officer complained that the program “is a disaster. They’re doing it too fast. They’re coming in here with grandiose schemes and massive enterprises, and nothing’s happening. They don’t even do a good whitewash job.”7
By 1964, after the Viet Cong had overrun all of the first four “showcase” strategic hamlets, the failure became manifest to all. The debacle had been costly. It gave the Viet Cong priceless propaganda material. It revealed Diem’s government to be inefficient or, what was worse, aloof and out of touch with Vietnamese rural reality. It also discredited Thompson and the British Mission, which was just fine with the American military mission in Saigon. They had never welcomed British interference and had chafed at the defensive nature of Thompson’s approach to counterinsurgency. In their minds, tying down combat troops in static garrisons while pursuing civic action programs was not the way to defeat a Communist insurgency. Some American planners believed that they had a better idea and set out to prove it.
In the Central Highlands
Some twenty-nine tribes numbering more than 200,000 people lived in the central highlands along South Vietnam’s western border. Collectively labeled “Montagnards” in the same way that native Americans were called “Indians,” they were a village-centered tribal society practicing subsistence slash-and-burn agriculture. The fact that they occupied strategic ground that potentially blocked Communist infiltration routes made them pawns in the war. The Communists exploited Montagnard dissatisfaction with the Saigon government and made them prime targets for propaganda and recruitment. Diem’s government treated them as second-class citizens and tended to ignore them as primitive, remote, and insignificant. The American mission in Saigon wanted to enlist minority groups in the counterinsurgency fight. The U.S. Special Forces received the assignment of recruiting the Montagnards.
From Rogers’ Rangers in the French and Indian War to Darby’s Rangers in World War II, the American military had employed special units for special duties. But the Special Forces were a unique departure. In response to Communist wars of national liberation, the U.S. Army had created the Special Forces for the purpose of waging unconventional war within a conventional war environment. Boosted by President Kennedy’s personal interest, the Special Forces enjoyed an elite status reflected by the jaunty green berets that became their signature. Twenty-four Green Berets entered Vietnam in November 1961. At first they operated under the CIA’s direction, and therein lay the basis for bureaucratic strife that eventually thwarted a very promising beginning.
The original mission was to organize and train a paramilitary Montagnard force to provide village security and a select “strike force” to conduct offensive actions and border surveillance. Like the American regular forces that were to follow, the Special Forces initially lacked an appropriate counterinsurgency doctrine. Regardless, team members were intelligent and flexible. They worked hand in hand with the Mo
ntagnards to dig bunkers and fortify their village and provided training and weapons for a volunteer militia. They built a dispensary where the team medic healed and cured that which answered to modern medicine, and slowly forged bonds of trust with the tribesmen.
The Montagnard units were called Civilian Irregular Defense Groups, or, in this war that granted virtually every unit and program a ponderous acronym, CIDGs. After the pi lot program showed progress, more Special Forces teams arrived to expand the CIDG program by first building a cluster of fortified villages and then moving the secure perimeters outward. This was, of course, exactly the approach recommended by Robert Thompson. It was a process of trial and error, which an official army historian later argued was “one of the most successful programs for using civilian forces ever devised by a military force.”8 At the time the CIA agreed. By the end of 1962, all statistical measures indicated that the CIDG program had achieved startling progress.
Yet many senior army leaders had never liked the Special Forces, with their unorthodox conduct and culture, and consequently had never been supportive of the CIDG program. But what really stuck in their craws was having army personnel controlled by anyone but army brass. An army evaluation team arrived and grudgingly acknowledged the accomplishments of the CIDG program but complained about the improper use of the Special Forces. Eventually the army replaced the CIA and took charge of the program. Thereafter, the CIDG program continued its rapid growth but completely changed in focus. Instead of gradually building mutually supporting, village-based security networks, American planners in Saigon either converted the Montagnard militia into Territorial Forces or upgraded them into mobile strike forces. In either case, the change meant the abandonment of local security in the Montagnard communities since the former militia no longer lived and operated in their home villages.
The senior American commanders at the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, particularly wanted to use the Montagnards to block infiltration from Cambodia. So, repeating the mistake of the Strategic Hamlet Program, they assigned the Special Forces the task of building new CIDG camps in remote border regions. These camps were far from all support and thus painfully exposed to enemy attack. The ensuing Communist assaults overran two camps. These debacles highlighted endemic problems that were to haunt all pacification efforts in Vietnam. The camps were vulnerable during the hours of darkness, when reinforcements were unable or unwilling to come to the rescue. In areas where the Viet Cong dominated the villagers, the attackers were able to complete their approach march and assemble without detection. The Viet Cong were also often able to infiltrate into the ranks of the defenders before the attack and thus obtain detailed intelligence about the garrison. By the time the defenders knew that they were under attack the Viet Cong were already at or inside the camp’s protective barbed wire.
Another festering problem was relations with the South Vietnamese military. South Vietnamese Special Forces held nominal command authority over the CIDG camps. But they were often reluctant to perform their duties. Moreover, they typically detested the Montagnards, who heartily reciprocated. In this unpromising environment, the U.S. Special Forces were supposed to defend their bases, conduct offensive actions into Communist base areas, improve the Montagnards’ living standards through civic action programs, and develop Montagnard support for the central government. In spite of all obstacles, the Special Forces made remarkable progress.
THE EVOLUTION OF the Special Forces program from local defense to offensive combat operations was another recurring theme of American counterinsurgency efforts. American officers, particularly senior officers who had learned their trade in World War II, were imbued with an aggressive military philosophy summarized in the phrase “find ’em, fix ’em, destroy ’em.” In their experience American mobility and firepower reigned supreme. They deemed the slow business of pacification unpalatable and did not think that it should tie down American fighting men.
They were about to get the opportunity to impose their vision of how the war should be fought, because American political leadership had come to the realization that the Communists were winning the war. The Viet Cong main-force fighters were routinely defeating Saigon’s regular soldiers, thereby opening the way for the guerrillas to return to the villages and undo whatever progress the South Vietnamese government had made. Equally alarming, while the South Vietnamese military was losing control of the countryside, Viet namese politicians in Saigon engaged in a seemingly endless battle for power. The resultant political instability meant that America’s ally could neither fight nor govern.
With defeat looming, President Lyndon B. Johnson and his advisers decided that the only way to stem the tide was to send regular American ground forces to Vietnam.
SIXTEEN
Pacification, Marine Corps Style
Enter the Marines
ON MARCH 8, 1965, TWO MARINE BATTALIONS began landing in South Vietnam, the first wave of an American commitment that surged to a peak strength of 549,500 men. The marines came to provide security for a key airfield and related installations, including a top-secret intelligence center. Airlifts brought one battalion directly onto the Da Nang airfield. The other battalion conducted an amphibious landing complete with tanks and artillery. As they waded ashore in full battle gear it appeared that they were restaging the Iwo Jima invasion. Instead of encountering blistering machine-gun fire, they met a throng of South Vietnamese dignitaries and a collection of attractive girls who presented colorful leis of tropical flowers. Before the marines landed, some 23,700 American advisers and support troops were on the ground in Vietnam. Two hundred and six had died the previous year. The arrival of the marines in Vietnam marked a watershed. In the sad words of General William C. Westmoreland, “The time when we could have withdrawn with some grace and honor had passed.”1
The Marine Corps retained some institutional memory of how to conduct counterinsurgency operations. Between 1909 and 1926 the marines had intervened in Central America four times. During these “Banana Wars,” they fought local guerrillas or bandits, established an armed constabulary, and became involved in various forms of civic action. By 1934 a marine major concluded that despite its successes the Marine Corps was making unnecessary errors. He issued a challenge: “We might well ask ourselves ‘Have we fully profited by past experiences?’ ”2
In response, the Marine Corps published the Small Wars Manual, a distillation of lessons learned from previous interventions. It was a practical compendium of how to fight an insurgency. It explicitly recognized that pure military strength might be unable to overcome an insurgency whose basis lay in economic, political, or social causes. It promoted a blended approach to counterinsurgency with a heavy dose of psychology. It advocated the employment of as little violence as possible in order to avoid native bitterness that would obstruct the return to peace. However, with unfortunate ill-timing, the Corps issued its final version of the Small Wars Manual in 1940, which guaranteed its quick passage to apparent permanent irrelevancy. World War II saw the Marine Corps change focus from counterinsurgency to amphibious assault. The change was so thorough that the officer who wrote the 1960 training manual on fighting guerrillas did not even know that the Small Wars Manual had ever existed.
But the Marine Corps is a tight tribe, and even in 1965 some marines still remembered their counterinsurgency history.3 Senior marines, including the commandant of the Corps, had been commissioned in the early 1930s when the experiences and stories of fighting Sandino in Nicaragua and Charlemagne in Haiti were still fresh. Lewis Walt, commander of the marine expeditionary force that landed in Vietnam, had been a young cadet in 1936 whose company commander was the renowned Lewis “Chesty” Puller. Walt recalled that Puller “told us tales about fighting in Haiti and Nicaragua” and “every story had some point.”4
However, when trying to apply historical experience to Vietnam the marines confronted two fundamental differences. The Guardia Nacional in Nicaragua and the Haitian Gendarmerie were local constabulary
forces commanded by marine officers. In Vietnam, all Americans had a strictly advisory relationship with the South Vietnamese forces. Second, during the Banana Wars the marines had been their own boss. In Vietnam, the U.S. Army was boss.
Moreover, in 1965 the marines labored under two flawed doctrines. Their own doctrine had been revised only three years earlier. In an astonishing understatement of both the lessons of history and the Corps’ own experience, the 1962 field manual Operations Against Guerrilla Forces paid lip service to the Small Wars Manual by observing that success against guerrillas was affected by the attitude of the civilian population instead of emphasizing that the battle for popular support was the key conflict in fighting an insurgency.”5
In addition, the marines operated under the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, headed by General Westmoreland. Westmoreland was an army general whose views had been formed by his conventional war experience. He followed the army doctrine that focused on achieving victory by destroying the enemy’s army in open combat. General Walt quickly found the army doctrine unhelpful at best. Walt later recalled that shortly after arriving in Vietnam he realized that he personally “had neither a real understanding of the nature of the war nor any clear idea as to how to win it.”6 But he and his men had to learn fast because like it or not, the mission to provide airfield security plunged the marines into the pacification business.
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