Jungle of Snakes

by James R. Arnold

  Such assaults, duplicated throughout I Corps during Tet, inflicted such serious losses that the marines made a fundamental change. As one marine captain working in the Combined Action Program observed, “The complexion of the war has changed,” with civic action “gone by the wayside.”16 As long as there was a menacing North Viet namese presence, CAPs had to restrict where they sent patrols. In places where the enemy had either overrun or come close to overrunning the CAP compounds, the marines took a more draconian attitude toward the civilian population. Homes that interfered with fields of fire were leveled. People living in hamlets that had always been considered sympathetic to the enemy were relocated, their homes destroyed, and the area redesignated as a free-fire zone.

  It seemed that fortified CAP patrol bases provided the enemy with too easy a target. A CAP marine noted, “It only takes about three seconds to overrun a small perimeter.”17 Henceforth, most CAP teams abandoned these bases and adopted a new approach, called a “mobile CAP.” Rather than providing the enemy with a fixed target, during the day the marines and militia set up temporary command posts, or “day havens,” where they rested and ate. They relocated before nightfall to set up new command posts that served as hubs from which they sent out patrols. They carried all their food and weapons with them and moved around in an almost random way, thereby avoiding a routine that might provide the enemy with a predictable target. The marines and PFs shared food, a few comforts, and a great deal of discomfort.

  Then and thereafter, the mobile CAP was controversial. The absence of a fixed base imposed enormous physical and psychological strain. It was a complete departure from most of the principles underlying the original CAP strategy. The fact that the marines did not feel safe staying put in one place sent an unmistakable message to the villagers. No longer was there a permanent place for village officials and their people to go to seek help and security. The theory underlying a permanent CAP post held that it served as a center for pacification and an alternative to what the Communists offered. That theory was now abandoned.

  However, mobility did please senior commanders because of the reduction in CAP marine casualties. Also, the mobile CAP posed a new challenge for the enemy. As one CAP leader explained, the marine mobility kept the Viet Cong “guessing”; they “don’t like to come after you unless they’ve had a chance to get set and do some planning.”18 So as the war continued, the marines proceeded with a modified but still unique experiment in counterinsurgency. In 1967 one typical dedicated CAP marine responded to an interviewer’s query about the effectiveness of the CAP: “We’ve got some real good PFs here and the CAP is what’s going to help win this war.”19

  THEN AND THEREAFTER it was left to a handful of military specialists to assess the validity of the marine strategy. At the time, regardless of what the marines accomplished by pursuing their vision of pacification, the very fact that they were trying infuriated many among the army high command. General Harry W. O. Kinnard, the commander of the first army division to arrive in Vietnam, the famous First Cavalry Division, Airmobile, later pronounced himself “absolutely disgusted” with the marine approach. Major General William E. Depuy, Westmoreland’s chief of operations and commander of the army’s First Infantry Division, concurred: “The Marines came in and just sat down and didn’t do anything. They were involved in counterinsurgency of the deliberate, mild sort.”20 Had Depuy read the 1940 edition of the Small Wars Manual, with its emphasis on applying the least force to achieve decisive results while exhibiting “tolerance, sympathy, and kindness” toward the civilian population, he might have understood better what the marines were about.”21

  Instead, MACV focused on the Communist main-force threat, and it was formidable. In 1966, an entire North Viet namese division had invaded across the demilitarized zone separating North and South Vietnam. The invasion compelled Marine General Walt to reposition about half the marines who had been assigned to pacification duties. The statistical analysis so dearly loved by Pentagon planners highlighted the challenge. In the middle of 1966, in I Corps the enemy had 17,000 North Viet namese regulars (NVA); 8,000 Viet Cong armed, equipped, and trained for conventional combat; and 27,500 guerrillas. Each month an estimated 2,600 regulars infiltrated across the demilitarized zone and the Viet Cong gained 2,000 recruits. Against such numbers, pacification could make little progress. Clearly, the solution had to start with curtailing the enemy’s ability to reinforce and recruit. Only then could pacification make progress, and even then it would take an estimated fifty-one months to destroy the Communist infrastructure. The somewhat more optimistic marine assessment recognized that until the NVA threat was gone, the marine enclaves would be unable to link up, the oil spots unable to merge. Then another twenty months would be needed to establish effective government control and this presumed improved, increasingly effective South Viet namese forces.

  Herein lay another huge problem. Until the Tet Offensive, the marines and regular South Viet namese forces had shielded, albeit imperfectly, the villages from the enemy main forces. But the government forces, both the militia and the civil officials, were unable to convert the villagers to the government side. According to decisions made in October 1966, the South Viet namese were supposed to undertake the balance of the pacification effort throughout Vietnam. This effort faltered for numerous reasons, including corruption and ineptitude, with the results ranging from ineffective to counterproductive. Even had the existing South Vietnamese forces been effective, there were not enough of them. The village-based popular Forces and National Police were keys to an effective pacification program. However, casualties and desertion, and a nationwide competition for qualified recruits, left both forces badly under strength and filled with marginal manpower. In I Corps, American planners estimated that another 18,000 militia were required along with twice the number of available National Police. The Rural Development effort was likewise weak, with only 13 operational teams when planning called for 111. At that rate, marine analysts estimated it would take twenty years to complete the government’s planned Rural Development policy.

  The British in Malaya had understood that pacification was a long, drawn-out process. They made an open-ended commitment to see the job through. If the Combined Action Program was to succeed, it required a similar commitment. As the Vietnamese official in Le My, the first village to experience the marine version of pacification, had said to General Kru-lak, “All of this has meaning only if you are going to stay. Are you going to stay?”22

  EIGHTEEN

  The Army’s Other War

  Westmoreland’s Way of War

  THE MARINE CORPS STRATEGY TO PACIFY I Corps confronted opposition both from senior South Viet namese leaders and from the head of MACV, General William C. Westmoreland. For the South Vietnamese leaders, pride and politics played a role. They did not want the marines accomplishing something that they could not do. They also wanted their own fingers in what they sensed could become a very lucrative pacification pie. Somewhat oblivious to these underlying currents, Westmoreland had reached the plausible conclusion that because the South Vietnamese spoke the language and presumably understood the local culture they were better suited for pacification than Americans. The “Other War” was no doubt important, but Westmoreland’s every instinct informed him that the path to victory lay in defeating the Communist regular units in a big-unit war of attrition.

  The fifty-year-old Westmoreland had seemed marked for high command ever since his West Point days, when he was appointed first captain of cadets and won the coveted Pershing Trophy for leadership. In World War II he achieved a distinguished record as commander of an artillery battalion during the North African Campaign and later as chief of staff for the Ninth Infantry Division. His qualities impressed the paratroop general James Gavin, who invited Westmoreland to transfer to the airborne forces after the war. Westmoreland performed very well in a succession of prestigious postings, including commander of the elite 101st Airborne Division and superintendent of the U.S. Mi
litary Academy, where he introduced counterinsurgency into the West Point curriculum. In keeping with the military’s burgeoning emphasis on scientific management, he also completed a course of study at the Harvard Business School.

  Before assuming command in Vietnam, Westmoreland had traveled to Malaya to study how the British had dealt with their insurgency. Robert Thompson escorted him. Westmoreland found the trip interesting but not particularly relevant. He concluded that there were simply too many differences: the British had commanded both their own and the entire civilian military and government apparatus, the ethnic Chinese insurgents were easily distinguished from the population, and there were no cross-border sanctuaries for the Malayan insurgents. Westmoreland decided that “we could borrow little outright from the British experience.”1

  As he gazed across Vietnam’s strategic chessboard, Westmoreland saw a valuable fighting asset, the marines, hunkered down within their enclaves. In Westmoreland’s mind this represented waste. Indicative of his attitude was his reaction to a marine report regarding promising results from a civic action program called Country Fairs. Westmoreland responded that this was all well and good, but he did not want any dissipation of American strength “to the detriment of our primary responsibility for destroying mainforce enemy units.”2 He made it abundantly clear that he wanted the marines out searching for the main-force Communist units in order to bring them to battle. Henceforth the counterinsurgency effort took place against a background of conventional combat between American and Communist main-force units, most notably including North Viet namese regulars.

  As the dominant military partner in this effort, the U.S. army acted according to its limited-war doctrine, which called for rapid restoration of peace achieved by decisive combat with the enemy. This doctrine played to the army’s strengths: its massive firepower and tremendous mobility conferred by a heli copter armada. The army would conduct a war of attrition utilizing the weapons and tactics designed to defeat the Soviet Union in a conventional conflict. It would grind down the Communists until they gave up. The “Other War,” the counterinsurgency campaign, would always be subordinate to this war of attrition. When asked at a press conference what was the answer to insurgency, Westmoreland gave a one-word reply: “Firepower.”3

  THE SO-CALLED BIG-UNIT war hugely complicated the counterinsurgency without changing some of its basic dynamics. While the U.S. military provided a security shield, U.S. civilian agencies continued working to implement social and economic reforms in order to win popular support for the Saigon government. This popular support would both legitimize the government, thus depriving the Communists of a crucial plank in their antigovernment rhetoric, and delegitimize the guerrillas.

  At the same time, the U.S. Army participated in pacification. Its involvement included civil affairs, which were efforts to improve rural living conditions, and direct provision of village security, a task absorbing only a small portion of the army’s combat strength. In spite of Westmoreland’s initial skepticism, the army particularly touted its involvement in Country Fair operations that combined civic affairs projects with cordon-and-search operations. The intent was to tackle one village at a time, root out the Viet Cong infrastructure, and build Popular support for the government.

  Thirteen miles north of Saigon was the village of Tan Phuoc Khanh. Because of its strategic location in the notorious and Communist-dominated War Zone D, the region had been the focus of numerous allied military campaigns. In June 1966 they tried again when a joint force of South Vietnamese and American regulars entered Tan Phuoc Khanh to conduct a Country Fair. Over succeeding days the Americans provided security while Vietnamese teams organized local elections, conducted a census, and began small construction projects. Meanwhile, a joint task force spent three days trying to uncover Viet Cong agents. Given that the Viet Cong had spent years establishing themselves deep inside Tan Phuoc Khanh, this was far too little time. The regulars departed—the villagers missed the Americans, who had actually provided real albeit too-brief security, and were happy to see the backs of the South Vietnamese soldiers, who had preyed on them—and the local militia took over security duties.

  Sensing weakness, the Communists began probing. In November 1967, some seventeen months after the Country Fair, a Viet Cong company overran Tan Phuoc Khanh’s central watchtower. The next month a hamlet chief resigned for fear of his life. At year’s end two American field evaluators visited the village and correctly concluded that the official rating that labeled Tan Phuoc Khanh “secure” was wrong.

  The experience at Tan Phuoc Khanh was typical of the U.S. Army’s attitude toward pacification. A Country Fair operation might attract good publicity with its army band entertaining the villagers and civil affairs personnel running a diverting lottery. A barbecue fed people for a day. A medical team could provide inoculations lasting much longer. None of these things harmed the war effort. But by the same token, none of them was anything more than a palliative that accomplished little toward establishing lasting security or forging stronger bonds between rural villagers and their remote government in Saigon.

  The Rise of Robert Komer

  For all the blame that American planners heaped upon the South Vietnamese for their faltering pacification efforts, a hard look in the mirror showed significant American failures as well. The inability of U.S. military and civilian agencies to pull in harness impeded significant progress. After years of fighting an insurgency, many American military and civilian strategists appreciated, albeit with varying degrees of clarity, the importance of pacification. Some also perceived that existing programs were truly inefficient. While the unwillingness of a rural villager to support the government involved a host of difficult, sometimes incomprehensible cultural issues, management and organizational issues were two things Americans understood. They could be tackled by improved efficiency, re-organization, and the application of more resources—in other words, by the application of sound management practices—or so an influential group of bureaucrats claimed.

  An ex-CIA analyst named Robert Komer gained the ear of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and had himself appointed to Saigon to serve as chief of pacification. Komer was nothing if not energetic. His ability to force his solutions on an unresponsive bureaucracy earned the hot-tempered Komer the nickname “Blowtorch.” In 1967, he oversaw the hatching of a centralized pacification program called Civil Operation and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS). President Johnson invested high hopes in the program, knowing that CORDS had far more resources—funds, personnel, and equipment—than previous efforts. He recalled Komer’s prediction that after one year of operation there would be decisive progress.

  The Tet Offensive arrested progress on the pacification front. The American press described Tet as a terrible blow, particularly against the pacification program. A Washington Post columnist claimed that the Tet attacks had “killed dead the pacification program.” The Christian Science Monitor agreed, saying that “pacification has been blown sky high.”4

  Indeed, the Tet attacks inflicted enormous damage. With the notable exception of the CAP villages around Da Nang, the shield erected by American ground forces had failed to deflect main-force Communist units from moving through and attacking the rural population. More than 40,000 civilians were killed or wounded with about 170,000 homes destroyed or damaged. Some 1 million civilians fled the carnage to seek safety in squalid refugee camps. Tet significantly weakened the government’s standing in the countryside as officials abandoned rural projects and joined the exodus. A CAP militiaman described his dismay: “That attack scared everybody for years. From then, we could not be sure about the defenses of the army.”5

  However, Tet caused the Communists “agonizing and irreplaceable losses,” particularly among the best Viet Cong fighters and most skilled members of the clandestine infrastructure who had emerged to assist and even participate in the attacks.6 Because of these losses, the Tet Offensive created a vacuum of power in rural areas. It left the
NLF hugely vulnerable to a counterstroke, if the United States and its allies could deliver it.

  Pacification’s High Water Mark

  On the first day of July 1968, South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu announced a strategic response to the Tet Offensive. After years of trial and error, American and South Vietnamese planners had finally adopted an integrated pacification program that made population security the primary goal. On the same day, General Creighton Abrams replaced Westmoreland as MACV commander. Under Abrams’s direction, a purportedly new strategy, the so-called one-war plan, emerged. It explicitly recognized the dual need to keep the Communist main-force elements away from the populated areas and to root out the Viet Cong infrastructure. The test case took place in the two northernmost provinces of I Corps; Quang Tri, adjacent to the demilitarized zone separating North and South Vietnam, and Thua Thien, the location of the pi lot marine CAP villages near Phu Bai. This time, 30,000 American and South Vietnamese regulars, including most of the 101st Airborne Division, provided an active buffer to confine enemy main-force units to the remote hinterland. Reconnaissance units extended outward to the Laotian border to detect major enemy concentrations and provide early warning to the regulars. Shielded by these operations, South Vietnamese militia and most especially National Police secured the hamlets and villages along the coast.

  Around the same time, South Viet namese political changes dramatically altered the calculus of the allied pacification push. The Saigon government trumpeted a new land reform policy that when enacted in 1970 actually redistributed farmland to two thirds of the tenant farmer families in South Vietnam. The United States introduced strains of so-called miracle rice that greatly increased yields. The reopening of canals and roads allowed villagers to move their products to market. The net result brought unprecedented prosperity. Simultaneously, the South Viet namese government expanded the local security forces, including the Popular Forces and the People’s Self-Defense Force.