A “Good Start” in Le My
The airfields were located in northern South Vietnam, a five-province region designated by allied commanders as I Corps. The vast majority of the residents of I Corps lived along the fertile coastal strip where they grew rice and fished. Along a 100-mile sector of the coast the marines established three huge enclaves—from north to south, Hue/Phu Bai, Da Nang, and Chu Lai—and set to work preparing to defend the airbases and their associated infrastructure.
The Viet Cong dominated the hamlets surrounding the middle of the three enclaves, Da Nang. When marine commanders pondered how to accomplish their mission they realized that about 150,000 civilians lived within 81 mm mortar range of the airfield. Since hit-and-run mortar bombardment was a Viet Cong tactic of choice, this was a problem. They decided to conduct an experiment based on the Corps’ heritage of small-wars operations. The first target was the village of Le My, located on strategic ground eight miles northwest of Da Nang. A marine battalion commander surveyed the neighborhood on May 8, 1965. A Viet Cong sniper killed one of the marine scouts, thus providing persuasive evidence that the enemy was present. Three days later, two marine companies swept through Le My, easily evicting the two Viet Cong platoons based in the village. The marines made the male villagers destroy punji traps (concealed pits full of sharpened bamboo stakes), fill in trenches, and dismantle bunkers. Meanwhile, South Viet namese government officials verified the identifications of the 700 village inhabitants and sent fifty-odd to Da Nang for further questioning. Three days later a mixed force of militia, including recently recruited local villagers, relieved the marines.
While the militia purportedly worked to eliminate any remaining Viet Cong, marine patrols saturated the area to provide security for the village. The marines also initiated a comprehensive civil affairs program much like what had been done during the “benign assimilation” phase of the Philippine insurgency. They built a school house and medical dispensary, established a central market, and trained local nurses. In sum, the marine pacification effort in Le My followed the approach advocated in the Small Wars Manual. Lieutenant General Victor Krulak, widely regarded as the Corps’ leading theoretical counterinsurgency expert, visited Le My and pronounced it a good start: “The people are beginning to get the idea that U.S. generated security is a long term affair.”7 Le My became a model for future marine pacification efforts. It also did not work.
In the absence of locals willing to denounce Viet Cong military and political operatives embedded inside Le My, the so-called Viet Cong infrastructure, marines remained clueless about their presence. The Viet Cong infrastructure were the people who provided political and military direction to the Communist war effort. They recruited youth who fought in the Viet Cong regular forces. They collected food and taxes to support the fighting units. Most important, as a Viet Cong defector related, was the fact “8 that the people were willing to cover for us at all times. They would not report our activities or locations to the government forces.”8 The Viet Cong infrastructure formed a highly structured bureaucracy that presented the South Vietnamese government with a deadly political and military challenge. Quite simply, the war could not be won unless this infrastructure was destroyed.
The task of identifying the insurgent infrastructure should have fallen to the Vietnamese National Police. But most police were too inefficient, corrupt, or frightened to perform this job. Consequently, within months of the marines entering Le My, the Viet Cong were back in place, their operatives secure through a combination of genuine popular support and the threat of terror. In December 1965, some seven months after the marines had first entered Le My, the Viet Cong gave the villagers a chilling lesson by capturing and torturing a prominent South Vietnamese pacification official and then burying him alive.
The Le My experience was only too common. That same December, near the southern enclave of Chu Lai, marines participated in a banquet with the village elders of Tri Binh. The next day, with the enthusiastic participation of the hamlet’s chief, marine and South Vietnamese officials staged a flag-raising ceremony. On December 24, a marine Civil Affairs Team held a Christmas party for the villagers. On Christmas Day the marines invited the children to attend a celebration at battalion headquarters. On the last day of December, a Viet Cong assassin killed Tri Binh’s chief.
The failure to provide real security and the failure to follow up on the first village clearing operation at Le My were reminiscent of the Philippine Insurrection experience. In Vietnam, a handful of insightful people understood the importance of civilian confidence in American fortitude. One such person was a Viet namese official in Le My. He asked General Krulak, who was inspecting a newly “pacified” village, “All of this has meaning only if you are going to stay. Are you going to stay?”9 Vietnamese peasants had seen first the French and then the Saigon government commit and then withdraw forces, leaving the villagers to cope with the consequences. These villagers may have wanted relief from the Viet Cong and their forced requisitions and military draft. But before they aligned with the Americans or the central government, they needed to know that the counterinsurgents were going to be there to protect them for the long term.
The Combined Action Program
In the summer of 1965, the northernmost marine enclave centered around the airfield of Phu Bai. Because the marines here were stretched thin, the battalion civic affairs officer suggested utilizing an overlooked resource, the local militia, called the Popular Forces (PF). The battalion developed a plan to integrate a PF platoon with a marine rifle squad. An accommodating Vietnamese divisional commander concurred, and so was born the war’s most innovative pacification approach, the Combined Action Program. A young lieutenant named Paul R. Ek received the assignment of implementing this vision through the establishment of the first Combined Action Platoon (CAP).
Ek had prior experience as an adviser in Vietnam. More important, he had taken an intensive two-month course in Viet namese and could understand and speak well enough to communicate in most situations. From a pool of volunteers Ek picked the best men to form four rifle squads. He gave them a one-week primer on Viet namese language and culture so they could know their place in this rural society—“who to call ‘sir’ and whom to call ‘you,’ ” as Ek phrased it—and the marines entered four villages to live and work with four militia platoons.”10
Ek’s mission was to “run counterinsurgency operations” to defend the military installations at the nearby Phu Bai airfield.11 Foremost in Ek’s mind was the need to handle things differently than the French. Although the marines would be occupying villages, they were not to behave as an occupying force. Ek thought that by assisting the people and training the militia the marines could build an infrastructure to compete with and eventually replace Viet Cong influence.
The terrain consisted of densely grouped homes surrounded by open rice paddies. The Viet Cong dominated the area but did not maintain a regular military presence. Instead, several times a week Viet Cong tax collectors or propaganda teams made nocturnal visits. The propaganda teams held meetings and distributed leaflets to spread the message that the Vietnamese had successfully resisted powerful foreign armies in the past and they could do so again. With slogans such as “Unite the People, Oppose the Americans, Save the Nation,” they kept patriotic and revolutionary fires burning. They also warned against cooperating with the Americans and issued threats against those who served as American “puppets.” Although the CAP soldiers seemingly controlled the villages, such visits sought to remind the villagers who was truly in charge.
Ek figured that the Viet Cong would react to the marines in one of two ways: by immediately attacking to wipe out his platoon or by leaving them alone to make blunders that would alienate the villagers. The Viet Cong chose the latter but failed to reckon with the resolution of Ek and his marines to avoid such blunders. Unlike the French, they did not try to impose their own methods but rather adopted and used local approaches. The PFs, many of whom were seasoned anti-
Communist fighters, particularly appreciated this attitude. Ek’s marines also adopted a special policy that whenever there was firefight they made sure the militia participated. That way, if a mistake or a stray round injured a noncombatant, the blame would come to the combined PF-marine team instead of falling solely on the Americans.
In the Phu Bai area, as elsewhere, each village consisted of multiple smaller hamlets. At first the marines visited the hamlets only during the day and while accompanied by the militia. They avoided direct contact with the inhabitants. Instead, each marine kept a notebook to record his observations about the people’s daily habits. By learning what was routine, the marines learned what was extraordinary. They acquired a special sense, “an attitude you feel,” that indicated the extent of Viet Cong control.12 Then, having grown confident in their new environment, the marines and Popular Forces saturated the area with nocturnal patrols and ambushes.
Contact with armed enemy was infrequent. Alarmed by the unexpected marine tactics, the Viet Cong avoided the four CAP villages. However, it became apparent that the Communists and the villagers had arrived at a tacit agreement whereby the Viet Cong would leave them alone as long as the villagers contributed money and rice to the NLF. But the rice harvest of 1965 was poor and the Communists needed food, so they sent women and children to the market to purchase rice. Villagers began tipping off the militia, thereby allowing CAP patrols to intercept the rice agents. Ek came to learn that the armed enemy “were the easy ones” to find and eliminate; it was the unarmed rice or tax collector or the woman who showed a torch from her home to betray an ambush site who were the more difficult foe.”13
Ek and his superiors judged the Phu Bai experiment with Combined Action Platoons a success. With hindsight it can be seen that several special circumstances contributed to this outcome. The first set of CAP marines were highly motivated, experienced volunteers who were quick-thinking and socially aware. Two thirds of this first cohort volunteered to extend their tour with the Combined Action Program rather than depart Vietnam. Backing them were some especially competent Provincial Forces and an unusually efficient national police unit. The four trial villages lay in open rice paddies with no easy route for Viet Cong infiltration. Lastly, the Viet Cong responded to the marine presence with a wait-and-see attitude. Later CAPs would have none of these advantages.
SEVENTEEN
Progress and Setback
Life in the Village
THE SUCCESS AT PHU BAI PERSUADED the marine leadership to expand the Combined Action Program. Officially, the program emphasized destroying the insurgent infrastructure embedded within each village while protecting the people and government officials from insurgent reprisal. As it formally evolved, a fourteen-man marine rifle squad plus a navy corpsman operated with a 38-man local militia, or popular Forces (PF) platoon. Because the marine rifle squads were dispersed around different CAP villages, young marine sergeants or corporals held in dependent command positions. Their counterparts back in Central America during the Banana Wars, as well as British noncommissioned officers (NCOs) in Malaya, had served in the same way. While not unprecedented, it was still a heavy responsibility. The NCOs and their men received a short primer on Vietnamese language (although the language barrier remained the cause of frequent and sometimes fatal misunderstandings), culture, and history before being permanently assigned to a hamlet or village where they lived twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
For the villagers, the most popular American was the navy corpsman. Hundreds attended his sick call. As one marine rifleman recalled, “You won’t find too many Marines that’ll dispute the fact that Doc won more hearts and minds than all of us combined.”1 Far more difficult was the challenge of forging an effective command relationship between the marine NCO and the Vietnamese platoon leader. It was one thing to establish the principle that they shared responsibility for the well-being of their troops and operated on the basis of mutually agreed courses of action. It was something else to adhere to this principle.
If the men meshed, it proved a good blend, with the marines instructing the PFs in basic small-unit tactics and discipline while the Viet namese taught the marines the terrain and informed them about the local population. In the absence of harmony, a PF platoon commander exercised his power by refusing to cooperate. Many of the problems with the militia stemmed from sources beyond the control of the marines. The popular Forces troops sat on the bottom of the pecking order in the allied order of battle. They were nominally volunteers recruited within their native villages to protect their own families. In reality they served at the discretion of the Viet namese district chiefs. Sometimes they remained in their home villages but too often they were sent elsewhere for ancillary duties such as guarding fixed installations or acting as bodyguards for well-connected politicians. Even worse, the PFs often received assignments outside their home villages, where the inhabitants viewed them with the deep suspicion directed at all outsiders and foreigners. At all events, until much later in the war, the PFs received last call on weapons and equipment. The Viet Cong outgunned them and they keenly felt their inferiority. Lastly, service in the Popular Forces did not provide draft exemption. Consequently, most able-bodied men were in the regular forces, leaving the ranks of the militia filled with the very young, the too old, or the physically or mentally infirm. Out of such unpromising material, marine NCOs set to work to forge motivated anti-Communist fighters.
Special Men in a Strange Place
Like the original volunteers who served with Lieutenant Ek around Phu Bai, the nineteen-and twenty-year-old marines who volunteered for service in the initial CAP cohort were special. They had at least four months’ combat experience and personal records free of disciplinary blemishes. They had to receive favorable endorsements from their commanding officers and had to be without discernible racial prejudice against the Vietnamese. This last qualification eliminated many candidates, since more than half of all marines candidly acknowledged that they did not like any Vietnamese.
For those who made the grade, CAP duty proved lonely and dangerous. The marines involved in the Combined Action Program confronted myriad difficulties, many of them unperceived by generals and civilian theorists. The program’s success depended on establishing cooperation and trust with the militia and the villagers. The inability to speak the language and the difficulty of understanding an alien culture made these goals almost unattainable. Even had the CAP marines spoken Viet namese, it would have been hard for them to penetrate the complexities of village life with their bewildering (at least to an outsider) network of inter-and intrafamilial relationships.
Among many cultural differences leading to tension was the attitude toward personal property. Whereas the marines believed in the sanctity of such property, the Vietnamese did not consider “borrowing” an unused object wrong, and in the marine view they had a very elastic notion of what constituted “unused.” If a marine came in from patrol in a rainstorm and hung up his poncho to dry, a militiaman would borrow it to begin his patrol and perhaps return it three months later when the rainy season had ended. Nothing provoked the marines more than the frequent thefts by the militiamen, with cameras, watches, and other personal possessions disappearing with alarming regularity. Even items vital to security disappeared: “Every morning we would awake to find that a few more barbed wire stakes or another roll of barbed wire had walked out of the compound overnight.”2
The marines conceived that they and the militia were “in it”—patrolling, guarding, repairing, and the welcome respite of actually fighting—fifty-fifty. But they saw the militia as not carrying their weight. Whereas the marines were on duty round the clock, the “lazy” militia routinely took breaks, including three-hour siestas at noontime. Worse, too often the PFs seemed unwilling to fight. The marines sarcastically labeled their behavior “search and avoid.” They would accidentally-on-purpose cough loudly or discharge a weapon at a purported foe, thereby compromising a carefully set ambush. The marines k
new that the village’s sons and daughters served in the Communist ranks. They understood that a militiaman might be reluctant to fire at a potential relative. But given that they were putting their own lives on the line, the CAP marines still found it hard to tolerate such conduct.
In the absence of cooperative militia and living amidst an indifferent civilian population, the CAP marines could accomplish little more than any other American soldiers. One patrol leader recalled conducting more than sixty night ambush patrols and at least as many daytime patrols and never encountering the enemy. This led to the inevitable suspicion that the militia were in cahoots with the Viet Cong. (The marines also suspected that an unknown number of the militia were in fact either Viet Cong agents themselves or at least had made discreet accommodations with the enemy. So when a PF guide refused to advance any farther along a jungle trail, a marine had to consider: was it because the dangers were really too great or because the PFs had reached an accommodation that divided territory into “ours” and “yours”? Such suspicions led to enormous frustration, stress, and often alienation: many marines developed an attitude that while the militia would steal anything not nailed down and do what ever necessary to avoid danger, it didn’t matter, because the marine would be leaving pretty soon. Marines with this attitude would not give their wholehearted effort to make the CAP program work.
Jungle of Snakes Page 23