Jungle of Snakes

by James R. Arnold

  WHEN THE CAP marines first moved through a typical hamlet the villagers avoided contact with them. They ducked quickly into their homes and quieted children who called out. They exuded a palpable atmosphere of fear, avoidance, and apathy. To the villagers, the marines were just another group of armed strangers come to plague them in a conflict without end. Indeed, throughout the war rural people seldom shared information with outsiders, whether Americans or South Viet namese. But once the CAPs proved that they were present for the long haul, villagers overcame their fears and began using the militia or children to relay intelligence to the marines. Some of it was not useful, along the lines of “The VC will come here sometime next month.” But some was: “A tax collector comes to Minh’s house to night at eleven.” If the marines and the militia successfully acted on these tips by killing or capturing a Viet Cong tax collector or recruiting agent, by ambushing a Viet Cong propaganda team, or by repulsing a sapper attack, the flow of actionable intelligence increased.

  The PFs, in turn, gained confidence and agreed to extend the range of their patrols. Meanwhile, a marine civic action noncom worked to obtain cement to repair hamlet wells. Other marines spent small sums in the hamlets and people began to benefit economically from their presence. As the months passed additional positive changes in village attitudes occurred and the quality of the intelligence improved. But progress could be undone so easily. To succeed on CAP duty, individual marines had to exhibit nearly flawless conduct. Bad behavior by one could and did reverse months of trust building. If a marine greeted a village girl with inappropriate familiarity or a man who never should have been assigned to CAP duty exploded in a racist rage, patient progress was lost. External factors over which the marines had no control also impeded progress: an American vehicle accidently injuring a hamlet child, an errant artillery round destroying a home, a passing convoy of front-line soldiers throwing objects at the hamlet’s people out of dislike for all things Vietnamese.

  Moreover, although the CAP might maintain a presence in a village for three or four years, the particular Americans involved rotated away to other duties, thereby severing personal relationships between the marines and the villagers. As a 1969 assessment reported, “Their replacements, fresh from the States, spoke no Vietnamese . . . and, arriving in an area that seemed to hold no threat from the enemy, they could see little reason behind the requirements for continual military efforts. As a result, some relaxation of discipline occurred.”3 And this was what the patient Viet Cong agent embedded somewhere in the village waited for, even if that wait went on for months or years.

  The Viet Cong Adapt

  Even when the CAP marines managed to cope with all the social problems caused by the inevitable friction between a foreign army based in the middle of deeply suspicious rural society, the adaptable enemy could nearly always cause a setback. The village of My Phu Thuong, located only five miles from the first marine CAP village in Phu Bai, demonstrated this adaptability. When the CAP started to make progress, the NLF leadership summoned the best half of its twenty-man standing village guerrilla force to a special training program. These chosen ten were to spearhead a counterattack at some future time. Meanwhile, in their absence, recruiters entered My Phu Thuong to enlist ten replacements, including two women, all of whom belonged to the American-armed local self-defense force.

  Having dealt with its manpower problems, the Communists at My Phu Thuong also adjusted their operational methods. Because the CAP ambush teams had begun to interdict the local trails, the guerrillas extended their underground tunnel network. Because some villagers had begun to support CAP activities, the Viet Cong intensified attacks against informers and collaborators.

  A key to Communist adaptability was the possession of good intelligence. Guided by people intimately familiar with the local terrain, a Communist recon team would conduct a careful study. Briefing and rehearsal followed, and then came the assault. In the seemingly pacified village of Phuy Bong it came at 2:30 a.m. when all the marines and militia were caught in the patrol base. A North Vietnamese assault force pinned them in the base while enemy soldiers swarmed through the three hamlets that composed the village. The Communists killed four PFs and then brazenly set up a mortar next to the village market. The mortar fired against a bridge, undoubtedly with the intent of provoking American return fire that would damage the village. Although in this case the ploy failed, the attackers succeeded in their goal of reminding villagers that they still were vulnerable to reprisal. Worse, the next morning the marines discovered why their efforts to defend their base had been so difficult: wires controlling their Claymore mines—a vital component of their defensive scheme—had been cut, rendering the mines useless. The obvious answer was “an inside job,” betrayal by one of the militia. During the subsequent investigation matters grew so heated that a marine apparently beat a PF. And so the precarious bonds of trust dissolved and the insurgents chalked up another small victory.

  All these factors made it hard for even dedicated CAP marines to provide village security. In the absence of security Viet Cong terrorists struck: kidnapping the sister of a particularly effective militia officer, killing the kindly old couple who ran a beverage stand frequented by the marines, leaving a note with the message that this was the certain fate for all traitors pinned to the breast of a mutilated civilian who had provided intelligence to the marines. And always lurking was the fear that someday the marines would leave and the Viet Cong would resurface.

  Problems Emerge

  A CAP marine had a 75 percent chance of being wounded once during his tour and a 30 percent chance of being wounded a second time. Almost 12 percent died. High casualty rates occurred because as the program expanded the enemy recognized the threat and made CAP villages high-priority targets. They were particularly vulnerable at night, when most of the defenders were out on patrol and only four marines and six or so popular Forces remained. Thus a typical nocturnal attack by fifty or sixty Viet Cong enjoyed overwhelming numerical advantage and routinely inflicted serious losses. And, as had been the case with the CIDG camps established by the Special Forces, reaction forces—this time American, not South Vietnamese—were reluctant to come to the rescue because they feared night ambush.

  Therein lay a flaw. Even in areas of heaviest concentration, the CAPs and their supporting reaction forces could not prevent the enemy from massing to attack a vulnerable garrison. In essence, like the garrisons of the larger strongpoints and firebases, the marines on CAP duty owned only the ground they occupied. Aided by thorough local intelligence, the Viet Cong usually navigated between the American and South Viet namese positions to attack when and where they wanted. Thus the CAPs failed to provide the villagers with the security that was the necessary precursor to everything else the Americans hoped to achieve.

  At its best, the CAP program attracted brave, dedicated men who over time took the goal of helping their village to heart. In spite of the manifest hardships and dangers, in 1967 60 percent of the 1,100 marines assigned to CAP duty volunteered to extend their tours. They knew that the progress they had achieved was precarious and that much depended on the personal relationships they had forged and the local knowledge they had acquired. They wanted to see the job through.

  However, as the CAP program expanded, the quality of its marine participants declined. For some marines, the transition from regular combat duty to CAP duty proved too difficult: “We’ve been up in the mountains for months where it’s been kill, kill, kill; now we come down here and are told we’re supposed to love them all. It’s too much to ask.”4 Combat officers were understandably reluctant to release their best men for CAP duty. Instead, they had every motive to send their misfits. As one Colonel recalled, “Although the requirement states that they should be volunteers, it doesn’t demand volunteers.” So he followed a rule of thumb that “if a man doesn’t object he is a volunteer.”5 Other participants came from combat service support units.

  As time passed the selection process incre
asingly paid mere lip service to official requirements. One bored supply clerk who applied for CAP duty recalled his five-minute interview. It was clear to him that the clinching question was a hypothetical query about how he would respond if a militiaman stole his camera. “The right answer was self-evident, and I laid it on with a trowel.”6 By demonstrating his “cultural sensitivity,” the clerk, who had no combat experience and spoke only a few words of pidgin Viet namese, aced the entrance exam.

  But passing the exam and actually being effective in the field were two different things. During indoctrination, instructors had told the CAP marines that the Viet namese people would perceive that they were better than the French and would grow to like them. Arriving in his assigned village, one volunteer soon learned that this was not so: “We could read it in the studied indifference of the people as we passed, the way they ignored us even as we searched their homes and property.”7 It was plainly evident that the villagers considered the marines as just another species of foreign barbarian.

  A marine colonel complained that the two teams in his tactical area lacked ground combat experience and skills as well as knowledge of Viet Cong tactics and “were unfamiliar with the social and religious customs of the people they were living with.”8 Equally distressing, the PFs with whom the two inexperienced teams worked were not local villagers. The local men were absent, having been drafted into either the South Vietnamese army or the Viet Cong, or having gone into hiding to evade service with either side. In a society where village identity was everything, these CAPs “kept themselves aloof from the villagers they were supposed to be helping.”9 Needless to say, neither team accomplished anything useful, failing to capture a single enemy combatant, let alone dismantle the embedded Viet Cong infrastructure.

  The marine presence in Vietnam swelled from the initial two battalions to a peak strength of 85,000 men in 1968. However, the CAP never reached its benchmarks, although it expanded to 57 units in 1966 and 79 in 1967. In 1967 CAP employed a mere 1,249 marines and 2,129 militia. Even at its height, CAP operated in only some 20 percent of the villages in I Corps. A major obstacle was the reluctance of South Vietnamese leaders to commit manpower to the program. Marine planners had envisioned a ratio of one marine to three Popular Forces. This ideal was never met. By 1970 the actual ratio fell to one marine to one and a half PF.

  Even at this diminished ratio, advocates pointed to some undeniable statistics indicating the effectiveness of the CAP approach. Consequently, senior marine commanders continued to promote the program. The officer who first supervised training for CAP duty, Lieutenant Colonel William R. Corson, described it as “a specific and unique response to the challenge posed by the Communist doctrine of Wars of National Liberation.”10 Proponents cited the fact that in 1966 there were about 110 villages in the Marine Corps area of responsibility. Less than one quarter of them were considered government-controlled. Within this cohort, villages where a CAP operated for six months or more achieved a 60 percent secure rating or better, a rise of 20 points since the arrival of the teams and a rating judged to indicate that the government had established “firm influence” in the village. Notably, the performance of the Popular Forces in the CAP villages was far superior to militia elsewhere. In the entire I Corps, only 12 percent of all PFs participated in CAPs, but they accounted for almost 29 percent of all enemy killed by the popular Forces. Overall, the kill ratio, a statistic much beloved by MACV, was fourteen Viet Cong to one marine or PF, as contrasted with a three-to-one ratio for popular Force units not serving with CAP marines. Armed with such statistics, marine leaders tried to persuade MACV to adopt the Combined Action Program for all of Vietnam.

  However, the North Vietnamese main-force threat, a threat of unique gravity in I Corps because of its shared border with North Vietnam, compelled the marines to trim their goals for expanding the rural pacification program. Then in January 1968 the Tet Offensive exploded on the ground in Vietnam and on the television sets of a stunned American nation.

  BACK IN 1966, thunderous congressional applause had greeted President Lyndon Johnson’s State of the Union address when he said, “I believe that we can continue the Great Society while we fight in Vietnam.”11 Johnson’s decision to wage war in Vietnam with minimum disruption of domestic life remained both publicly and politically Popular until the human and financial cost of the war rose. However, as the months passed, and in spite of a large and steady escalation of American troop strength and firepower, there seemed to be little progress. The beginning of the large search-and-destroy missions in 1967, with their attendant increase in American casualties, coincided with a large increase in racial and civil unrest in the United States. During the first nine months of 1967, public antiwar protests, ranging from minor demonstrations to full-scale riots, occurred in 150 cities. Public skepticism about the war’s final outcome caused Johnson to worry privately, “This thing is assuming dangerous proportions, dividing the country and giving our enemies the wrong idea of the will of this country to fight.”12

  Two major factors fed this skepticism: a lack of candor about the American policy in Vietnam that extended throughout the Johnson administration from the president to the military spokesmen in Saigon, and immensely skillful North Viet namese and Viet Cong manipulation of public opinion. Far better than anyone in the Johnson administration, the Viet namese Communists understood the link among international opinion, American public opinion, and battlefield outcomes. This understanding informed the Communist conduct of what became known as the Tet Offensive, a surprise, nationwide offensive that coincided with the traditional Vietnamese celebration of the lunar new year.

  On the night of January 30, 1968, as revelers swarmed Saigon’s streets to celebrate the Year of the Monkey, the explosions of thousands of traditional firecrackers rocked the air. Slowly, as some of the 67,000 Viet Cong committed nationwide to the first assault moved from their safe houses into attack position, the sounds of combat replaced the sounds of festival. The ensuing synchronized ferocity brought fighting into previously untouched urban centers and surprised every allied commander in Vietnam and in Washington. To achieve this feat, the Communist leadership concentrated its forces. The act of concentration exposed the Communists to American firepower and they suffered terrible losses. By the time the offensive ended, the Communists had suffered 40,000 to 50,000 battlefield deaths while killing between 4,000 and 8,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and inflicting about 4,000 American casualties.

  By any conventional calculation, Tet was an enormous Allied military success. Instead, the American public perceived it as a complete debacle. It shattered their confidence in official statements regarding the war’s progress. The public’s perception astonished many combat soldiers. Standing next to enemy corpses stacked like cordwood outside his headquarters, one American cavalry officer mused, “To our complete bewilderment in the weeks that followed, nobody ever publicized this feat of battlefield triumph. Instead, we read that we had been defeated.”13 Quite simply, the American public had witnessed on television an unprecedented scenes of bloodshed and concluded that the Communists remained much stronger than American political and military leaders had led them to believe.

  That February, the voters of New Hampshire expressed their shock by giving dark-horse antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy almost enough votes to defeat the incumbent president. McCarthy’s vote total underscored public disapproval of Johnson’s war management from both the right and left. For every two voters who wanted out of Vietnam, three anti-Johnson voters believed the president should unshackle the military and let them fight. Nationwide opinion polls showed that for the first time more than half the people considered involvement in Vietnam a mistake. Johnson tried to stop his slide in public esteem, telling the nation that Hanoi was trying to “win something in Washington that they can’t win in Hué, in the I-Corps, or in Khe Sanh.”14 But it was too late for Johnson to save his presidency.

  After Tet

  In Malaya, the Communist capacity
to attack isolated police posts dramatically declined as the war progressed. In Vietnam, the opposite occurred. Whereas prior to Tet a Viet Cong attack against a CAP compound typically involved 20 to 30 guerrillas, beginning with Tet they featured between 150 and 200 troops backed by powerful supporting weapons. One such attack against a compound defended by 48 marines and militia began with a mortar and recoilless rifle bombardment. Simultaneously, sappers detonated Bangalore torpedoes to blow gaps in the defensive wire. The attackers instantly surged through the breaches and rapidly fanned out to attack preselected objectives. They hurled grenades and satchel charges into the dispensary, command bunker, and ammunition bunker. Intense rifle fire covered their rapid withdrawal. Only seven minutes elapsed from the time the first mortar rounds exploded until the attackers withdrew. The assault happened so quickly that there was no time for a reaction force to intervene, and it was delivered with lethal precision, killing four marines and four militia while wounding nine marines and eight militia.

  An assault against a CAP village in the northernmost province of Quang Tri pitted a reinforced North Vietnamese battalion against some fifty to seventy marines and militia. The PF performance was uneven. One Vietnamese lieutenant hid in a bunker until morning. Two PF privates fled to an ammo bunker, tossed out the ammunition to make room, and hunkered down in safety until the fighting ended. The situation grew so desperate that the marines called in close support artillery “to save our skins” without regard for the fact that the artillery fell on the homes of the villagers.15