In January 1969 General Abrams told his commanders that pacification was the “gut issue.” He said that “if we are successful in bashing down the VC and the government can raise its head up, the villages and hamlets can maintain their RF/PF [militia] units and keep a few policemen around and people are not being assassinated all the time, then the government will mean something.”7 Indeed, the period 1969 to 1972 witnessed steady progress in pacification.
What made the new approach, called the Area Security Concept, special was its focus on one objective: population security. Also unique to this concept was the way it maintained its focus by dividing the two trial provinces in I Corps into geographic regions (border, unpopulated hinterland, contested villages, secure villages), assigned appropriately tailored forces to each region, and maintained coordination between the forces. By early 1969, every statistical indicator showed significant improvement in rural security. By year’s end, the campaign was successfully separating the main-force units from the populated areas. South Vietnamese militia and police, along with marine CAPs, had established a permanent presence in more than 90 percent of the populated areas. For the first time, the enemy could not routinely slip between allied outposts. Captured documents revealed that the enemy was having great difficulty maintaining morale. Both American and South Viet namese leaders had signed on for the Area Security Concept. In 1970 they applied it to the entire I Corps. Unable to recruit sufficient replacements from the local population, the Communists increasingly had to commit regulars from North Vietnam against the allied pacification efforts. This was enormously costly, in part became urban North Vietnamese youth were no more at home in rural South Vietnam than were urban South Vietnamese or Americans. Consequently, the Communists were reduced to assassination and terrorism to maintain any hold over the people.
Triumph of the Old Guard
The success in I Corps hinted at what might have been. But entrenched U.S. Army interests resisted. One typical general reacted to proposed changes in tactics and strategy with the comment, “I’ll be damned if I permit the United States Army, its institutions, its doctrine, and its traditions, to be destroyed just to win this lousy war.”8 Indeed, although Abrams had intended the “one-war plan” to apply countrywide, he was unable to convince his subordinates.
Back during the early bloom of the marine CAP program, the supervising Colonel considered a “good night” to be one in which “not a round was fired in one of our 114 CAP villages.”9 But such peacefulness did not please promotion-conscious line combat officers. Quite simply, battalion commanders did not view their six-month tour in Vietnam as an opportunity to win the hearts and minds of the people. General Julian Ewell, a celebrated World War II paratroop veteran, commanded the army’s Ninth Infantry Division. Ewell described the conventional attitude: “I had two rules. One is that you would try to get a very close meshing of pacification . . . and military operations. The other rule is that military operations would be given first priority in every case.”10
Like all professional military officers since the dawn of time, American officers in Vietnam were keenly aware of where lay the fast path to promotion. In Vietnam, the path ran atop a statistic called “body count.” Goaded by ambitious senior generals, subordinates understood they had to produce results, measured in enemy deaths, or face career-ending poor evaluations. During 1969, the consequences included meaningless slaughters such as the notorious “Hamburger Hill” as well as the production of inflated statistics with individual army brigades reporting astronomical kill figures.
Under Ewell’s thrusting leadership, during the first half of 1969 the Ninth Infantry Division achieved the year’s highest kill ratios and body counts. Ewell relentlessly pressured his brigade commanders to obtain kills and they in turn hectored their juniors. It worked, after a fashion. The Ninth Infantry operated in the heavily populated Mekong Delta region. One of its brigades achieved the unsurpassed prize of 1,000 kills in three straight months, with an average ratio of 158 enemy killed for each American. Here was an attrition figure that could warm any general’s heart. When deconstructed, the numbers revealed highly suggestive anomalies. Many of the kills came at night, and a large percentage came from the muzzles of helicopter gunships. When tabulating enemy killed, American soldiers followed the dictum “If it’s dead, it’s VC.” However, for every fifteen people killed, soldiers found only one weapon. When addressing this discrepancy, the division’s after action report explained that many Viet Cong operated without weapons. How many civilians were killed is unknowable, but, as a divisional officer expressed it, “We really blew a lot of civilians away.”11 What is certain is that during the time the Ninth Division wreaked such carnage, by the army’s own measures population security did not improve. Regardless, Ewell received promotion to corps command and later contributed to the crafting of the Army’s new counterinsurgency doctrine.
After the war, Abrams, best remembered among today’s warriors as the namesake of the army’s main battle tank, the Abrams M-1, received considerable credit for redirecting the army and devising a new counterinsurgency strategy. Not so, according to Robert Komer, who was present when Abrams replaced Westmoreland: “There was no change in strategy whatsoever.”12 Although Komer underestimates Abrams’s influence, a large set of factual data shows how hard it was to change a conventional army into a counterinsurgency force. For example, during 1969, artillery support alone cost over five times as much as the cost of supporting the South Vietnamese Territorial Forces who provided physical security for villagers. Overall, about 30 percent of American funding went directly to paying for ground combat operations with another 19 percent paying for the logistical tail that supported these operations. Only 2 percent supported the National Police and militia.
WANING PUBLIC SUPPORT for the war influenced tremendously the political decision to transfer the burden to the unsteady hands of the South Vietnamese. Toward this goal, in 1969 President Richard M. Nixon announced the new policy of “Vietnamization” and American combat soldiers began returning home. The marines had been first ashore in Vietnam as the vanguard of the American ground intervention. As the last marines left I Corps in May 1971, there were many signs indicating that the mission had been accomplished. Most metrics pointed positive: a functioning and expanding economy, much greater village security, the absence of large-scale North Vietnamese attacks, the comprehensive weakening of both the main-force Viet Cong and their village level infrastructure. Yet some things remained to darken this rosy glow. Statistics from the Hamlet Evaluation Survey showed that almost half of the rural villagers in I Corps lived within one kilometer of a recent terrorist incident. Nationwide, Communist terrorists inflicted an average of 26,000 civilian casualties in both 1969 and 1970. While rural people no longer actively supported the Viet Cong, neither did they support the South Vietnamese government. The decline in Viet Cong support was not matched by an increase in progovernment attitudes. The villagers had been through too many changes of control to become confident that this latest shift was permanent. And of course it was not.
The Dirty War
The new pacification strategy that began in the summer of 1968 included the American-inspired Phoenix Program. The launch of the Phoenix Program represented belated recognition of the crucial role of the Viet Cong infrastructure. If the war was to be won, the enemy’s ability to recruit, receive intelligence and food, spread propaganda, and terrorize had to be thwarted. The Phoenix Program was the first comprehensive effort to identify the estimated 70,000 people who belonged to the village-level Viet Cong infrastructure. Toward this goal it sought to coordinate all American and South Vietnamese intelligence in order to eliminate Viet Cong operatives by targeted killings and arrests. The U.S. role was supposed to be strictly advisory. This role proved extremely frustrating, leaving American intelligence officers chafing at their inability to get the Vietnamese to perform according to American notions.
The program was controversial from the start, hampered by in
effectual Viet namese leadership and police corruption. It was all well and good for American management specialists to prepare flow charts showing lines of authority and areas of responsibility, but these efforts ignored the reality that in addition to acting as a national defense force, the Vietnamese military and police served as “a political cabal whose first priorities were to perpetuate the system and to protect the safety, livelihood, and future prospects of those who controlled it.”13 Consequently, the military and police assigned low-level personnel, misfits, and discards to the Phoenix Program. Official indifference and corruption caused Phoenix advisers to estimate that only 30 percent of the suspects arrested in 1969 actually served jail terms.
In keeping with time-honored practice, Vietnamese officials responded to American pressure to achieve results by telling the Americans what they wanted to hear. When a raw but earnest American intelligence officer asked his more experienced sergeant what was wrong, the sergeant replied that the Vietnamese “just go through the motions to please the Americans, sir.”14 But, driven by a mandate to achieve results, the Phoenix Program did produce. While statistics remain controversial, between 1968 and 1971 the Phoenix Program received credit for capturing, convincing to desert, or killing more than 74,000 enemy. What then and thereafter was unclear is how many of the killed were actually enemy operatives. What is certain is that the program generated extraordinary negative press. The antiwar press convinced many that it was merely a cover for an assassination bureau. At the time an American official ruefully observed, “I sometimes think we would have gotten better publicity for molesting children.”15
At the end of the day, regardless of how effective the Phoenix Program was at killing, killing was not enough. Phoenix created holes in the Communist infrastructure. It needed to operate in conjunction with policies that planted something in the holes.
The Contest for Hau Nghia
Hau Nghia Province, just west of Saigon, was widely regarded as having the best anti–Viet Cong infrastructure program anywhere in South Vietnam. But even here, the Saigon government was unable to capitalize on Communist weakness to develop support for itself. Consequently, everyone, from the people manning the bureaucracy to the militia guarding the village wire, was an outsider. An American adviser described the fundamental reason South Viet namese government pacification efforts faltered in Hau Nghia: “The people who grew up in Hau Nghia didn’t want anything to do with the Government of Vietnam. So all of the officials and the RD [Revolutionary Development] Cadres were from the outside. Nobody in their right mind wanted anything to do with Hau Nghia. Officials were sent there as punishment.”16
A Phoenix intelligence officer wrote about how a Viet Cong defector enabled him to almost destroy a village’s Viet Cong infrastructure. But, in spite of considerable effort to protect the defector, the Viet Cong struck back and assassinated him. Henceforth there was “an unmistakable chill in the people’s attitude toward me.” The people had trusted the Americans and the government security forces and they had failed. In this way, “a single cell of determined guerrillas had made a mockery of the government’s efforts to provide security for the people.”17
In 1971 the long contest for Hau Nghia Province seemed to have ended with the eradication of the enemy. The Saigon government regarded the province as secure. Run by dedicated and intelligent American officers with enormous assists from Viet Cong and North Vietnamese defectors, the Phoenix Program in Hau Nghia Province almost crippled the Communist infrastructure. But the Communists had prepared for this moment beginning back in the late 1950s when they had started their operations by focusing on building village-level support. The Communist cadres were well schooled in the ebb and flow of protracted revolutionary warfare. A dedicated handful stayed with their tasks, undercover, hidden, but still deeply embedded within the fabric of Hau Nghia village life. In some villages only two or three survived, but they were just enough to instill fear. Even when Hau Nghia was judged most secure, not a single government official in the province would risk sleeping outside the barbed wire. During 1971, assassination teams killed a government official or Communist turncoat every few days in Hau Nghia.
Meanwhile, in remote strongholds in the hinterland and particularly in sanctuaries just over the Cambodian border, North Vietnamese regulars rested and refitted, confident in the knowledge that because of Nixon’s Vietnamization policy, time was on their side. Most rural villagers, and many South Vietnamese officials and soldiers, shared their view that the hard-won security would not persist after the Americans departed. They rightly suspected that what ever success pacification had achieved rested on the firm might of superior American military force. So as the American tide went out, government control of rural villages collapsed like a castle built of sand. And the Communist cadres returned to rebuild their shadow governments and prepare for the next offensive.
In addition, the ever-adaptive Communists changed tactics. By 1972 an estimated two thirds of Hau Nghia’s Communist infrastructure were disguised as loyal citizens. To uncover them required patient police detective techniques. To thwart such work, North Viet namese regular formations from sanctuaries just over the Cambodian border raided into Hau Nghia to “bolster revolutionary morale.” As a Phoenix officer recalled, “As long as we were up to our ears in sapper attacks and the like, it was difficult to find the time to root out the village political cadre and guerrillas.”18
Looking back, the years 1969 to 1971 could be seen as the high-water mark for the pacification of rural Vietnam, a time when “the Americans and their South Viet namese allies came as close as they would ever come to winning the war for the countryside.”19 Indeed, by 1971 Hau Nghia was relatively quiet. But it was not secure. Government supporters continued to live under the cloud of terror. North Vietnamese attacked at will from their cross-border sanctuaries. Consequently, the night still belonged to the Communists and, as the province’s senior American adviser recalled, “that’s all the enemy needed.”20
NINETEEN
Lessons from a Lost War
The Finger of Blame
AS THE LAST AMERICAN ADVISERS DEPARTED Vietnam in 1972, CORDS officials were cautiously optimistic. By their measures pacification had made steady progress for the past three years. Many provinces appeared free of violence while enjoying unprecedented economic prosperity. The Viet Cong seemed to have abandoned former strongholds and were reduced to forcible recruitment to replenish losses. In the minds of CORDS officials, the fact that the enemy was using conventional military operations featuring North Vietnamese regular divisions proved the success of the counterinsurgency against the guerrillas. In 1972, the Communist Easter Offensive, a conventional ground invasion, collapsed beneath American aerial bombardment. This too seemed to vindicate the wisdom of the allied pacification campaign. When the 1975 invasion secured victory for the Communists, a photo of a Russian-built tank battering down the gate of the Presidential Palace in downtown Saigon reinforced the notion that South Vietnam had fallen to a conventional military invasion. This notion, which overlooked the Viet Cong flag flying atop the tank’s turret and ignored the fact that the Viet Cong provided more than half of the invasion’s administrative and service personnel and also performed key combat functions, eclipsed most discussion about the American counterinsurgency record.1 Furthermore, by then the blame game was already well under way, with most fingers pointing to the top.
Westmoreland emerged from the war a lightning rod of criticism for his unimaginative, orthodox tactics and strategy. In fact, he had been a model soldier, employing the doctrine taught by his nation’s foremost military schools and observing the limitations imposed by his commander in chief. It was not purely his fault that his nation mistakenly supposed that insurgents could be defeated by conventional forces employing conventional tactics according to a strategic doctrine devised to defeat the Russians on the plains of Eu rope. Perhaps a military mind of the foremost class would have perceived that nothing in the historical record supported thi
s belief, but America’s founding traditions work against the emergence of a military genius. It could be observed in Westmoreland’s defense that President Johnson expected decisive results within a time span tolerable to the American public. Consequently Westmoreland perceived that he did not have time for pacification. In his mind decisive results could be obtained only through large-scale battle. This thinking was completely in accord with the U.S. bureaucratic bias. In spite of President Kennedy’s call for a new approach to combat Communist revolutionary warfare, both the civilian and military components of the government remained wedded to conventional approaches. The marines notably tried to adjust their methods but they were the exception.
Neither senior American military nor political leadership had ever understood the Communist protracted-war strategy. North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap explained the challenge: “The enemy will be caught in a dilemma: he has to drag out the war in order to win and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long drawn out war.”2 When planning its counterinsurgency strategy, American leaders failed to understand the insurgent strategy with its emphasis on the seamless interplay between political and psychological factors and military actions. The Vietnamese Communist generals had a clearer comprehension of one of the Western world’s most famous strategic dictums, Clausewitz’s statement “War is a mere continuation of policy by other means.”3 The National Liberation Front viewed their armed forces as tools to gain political goals. American generals saw their armed forces as tools to destroy the enemy military forces. Moreover, in the words of a sen-ior Viet Cong official, the Americans “seriously exaggerated their own ability to inflict damage relative to their opponents’ elasticity and durability.”4
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