Armed Humanitarians

by Nathan Hodge

  Colby may have missed a larger point. But Colby, who was CIA director from 1973 to 1976, and others saw Phoenix as a success, part of a larger set of bureaucratic tools that had proved themselves in Vietnam. In his introduction to Lost Victory, his intimate but rather self-justifying postmortem on the Vietnam War, Colby alluded to “right” lessons that could be drawn from Vietnam:

  We must distinguish the strategy, or lack thereof, from the tactics and judge them separately to find which are worthy of adding to our national arsenal and which clearly were mistaken and should be rejected. We must sort out the optional from the inevitable aspects of our effort there, the choice of strategy and arms from the certain side effects of the presence of a large military force in an ethnically and culturally foreign community.4

  With the military groping for the “right” approach to Iraq, that reading of the Vietnam War was deeply appealing. In 2005, General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, wrote a foreword to the paperback edition of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, a book first published in 2002 by Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, an Army officer who had recently served in Iraq as the operations officer of the First Battalion of the Thirty-fourth Armor Regiment. Coming from the highest-ranking general in the Army, the foreword was a top-level endorsement. “The organizational culture of the U.S. Army, predisposed to fight a conventional enemy that fought using conventional tactics, overpowered innovative ideas from within the Army and from outside it,” Schoomaker wrote of the experience in Vietnam. “As a result, the U.S. Army was not as effective at learning as it should have been, and its failures in Vietnam had grave implications for both the Army and the nation.”5

  Schoomaker could as easily have been talking about Iraq in 2005. In a new preface to the 2005 edition of his book, Nagl wrote about the “searing” experience of fighting insurgents in Iraq’s Anbar Province. “The task force was built around a tank battalion that had been designed, organized, trained and equipped for conventional combat operations. The enemy we confronted was implacable, ruthless, and all too often invisible.”6

  As Nagl learned, Phoenix-like human intelligence collection was essential to success. “Understanding tribal loyalties, political motivations, and family relationships was essential to defeating the enemy we faced, a task more akin to breaking up a Mafia crime ring than dismantling a conventional enemy battalion or brigade,” he wrote. “ ‘Link diagrams’ depicting who talked with whom became a daily chore for a small intelligence staff more used to analyzing the ranges of enemy artillery systems.”7

  Equally important, Nagl argued that the chores of stability operations were a central part of the mission, not just a helpful adjunct to the overall mission. Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) money was crucial for building the trust of the Iraqi people. Nagl’s reading of the Vietnam War was shared by others. Lieutenant General David Petraeus, in Iraq as the head of Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq, had written his Ph.D. dissertation on the military’s failure to absorb the lessons of Vietnam.8 Andrew Krepinevich, the author of another influential book, The Army in Vietnam, had argued that the Army had failed to learn the “right” lessons, stubbornly clinging to large-unit operations and heavy firepower instead of adopting the practices of counterinsurgency.

  The rediscovery of the lessons of Vietnam was spreading to Afghanistan as well. A few months earlier, when I had visited a German-run Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kunduz, northeastern Afghanistan, I met a young U.S. Foreign Service officer who was detailed to the team. He told me that the military was considering whether the PRT experiment might work in Iraq. “This is a test case—we’ll have to see if the PRT concept brought any added value to reconstruction,” he told me. “There’s no reason not to try. This is the first time this has been done since the CORDS program in Vietnam.”

  He was referring to Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support, a Vietnam-era pacification program whose principles were now being revived for the twenty-first century. The main lesson being drawn from Vietnam had more to do with what was referred to during the Vietnam as “the other war.” In Iraq, the U.S. military and the rest of the national security establishment were painfully relearning lessons about armed nation building that had been discarded after Vietnam, even though they were reluctant to use the term “nation building.”

  In the late summer of 1972, Army Captain John Morris received a call from his boss: A very important man would be paying him a visit, and he expected Morris to prepare a briefing. Morris was an Army senior district advisor in Binh Son, the northernmost district in South Vietnam’s Quang Ngai province; his small advisory team was responsible for an area that ran from the coast to the southern border of the Chu Lai combat base. About twenty kilometers southeast of the district center where Morris lived was My Lai hamlet, the site of the 1968 massacre of Vietnamese civilians by soldiers of the Army’s Americal Division.

  His advisory team had seen its fair share of visitors from Saigon, and Morris prepared his usual briefing. The colonel mentioned a name, Sir Robert something, but it didn’t ring a bell for Morris. “What should I tell him?” Morris asked the colonel. “He works for the president, tell him everything!” the colonel barked.

  The visitor arrived in a helicopter escorted by four heavily armed Cobra helicopter gunships. That’s unusual, Morris thought. I’ve never seen that. This must be an important guy!

  Morris’s guest was Sir Robert Thompson, a renowned British counterinsurgency guru and an expert in guerrilla warfare and colonial policing. At the time, Thompson was known as one of the architects of the successful campaign by the British colonial government against Communist guerrillas during the Malayan Emergency of the late forties and fifties. It was considered a textbook example of how to fight insurgents. Even though thousands of British and Commonwealth troops were deployed, the strategy was not primarily military. The British retrained the corrupt and unprofessional Malayan security forces, reached out to disaffected ethnic Chinese to reconcile them with the government, and undertook a vigorous program of “civic action”—essentially, rural development projects—in parallel with hunting guerrillas in the jungle. The British also imposed emergency regulations (a form of martial law) and in some cases resettled parts of the rural population in fortified “new villages.” They drew heavily on criminal investigative techniques, using informants and link analysis to map out the guerrilla “infrastructure”—its leadership network—and empowered police with special counterterrorism authority. It was the remedy to counter Mao Zedong’s prescription for revolutionary war, in which the guerrilla is described as a fish swimming in the sea of the peasantry.9

  Thompson was also something of a Vietnam hand. In 1961, he had gone to Saigon as the head of the British Advisory Mission to South Vietnam, a small team of Malayan Civil Service veterans who provided counterinsurgency advice and guidance to the Saigon government.10 In the mid-sixties, as the U.S. military involvement deepened, he published trenchant critiques of U.S. policy, arguing that the both the U.S. government and its critics had failed to understand the nature of the war as a political, not a military, struggle.11 In October 1969 Thompson was named a special consultant to President Richard Nixon and sent to South Vietnam to give a candid, firsthand appraisal of the situation; he traveled extensively through South Vietnam on a series of fact-finding visits.12

  Thompson’s visit to Quang Ngai in 1972 was part of an assessment of the progress of “Vietnamization”: the Nixon administration’s plan for a gradual exit from Vietnam. The plan hinged on continued pacification of the South Vietnamese countryside, containment of the invasion threat by North Vietnam, and the withdrawal of U.S. ground combat troops. Small advisory teams stayed on to provide a crucial on-the-ground link between the U.S. military and the government of South Vietnam. They supervised training of regular South Vietnamese units and local and regional militias, coordinated air strikes and artillery fire, and collected intellig
ence. Combat advisors had preceded the entry of U.S. conventional forces in 1965, and they would be a key part of the exit strategy.

  Morris had arrived in South Vietnam in November 1971. First assigned to the 101st Airborne Division at Da Nang Air Base, he had the unglamorous job of running a wash rack: preparing vehicles to be shipped back to the United States or to be scrapped. It was a dismal chore. Most of the other officers were “short-timers” preparing to rotate home, and the enlisted men, who would be going back to the field after they were done washing trucks, weren’t particularly motivated. At that point, for infantry officers there were few open assignments with regular units, as U.S. ground forces were starting to withdraw. Morris, a West Point graduate, was able to pull some strings. With some persistence, he landed an assignment with Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), which ran the advisory mission to South Vietnam.

  The nine-man team he joined lived in a small compound inside a larger compound manned by South Vietnamese Regional Forces troops—sort of a rural Vietnamese version of the National Guard. Serving as an Army advisor was an unconventional job for a regular infantry officer. Leading indigenous forces traditionally was a more of a job for Special Forces. It was closer to colonial policing than serving in a Cold War army that had been designed primarily to fight the Soviets in Europe. Even for someone from the “can-do” culture of the Army and West Point, the advisory job required something of a cultural adjustment. Over the bar in the team house, someone had posted a quote from T. E. Lawrence’s “Twenty-seven Articles,” wisdom Lawrence imparted to British liaison officers leading Arab irregulars battling against the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The quote read: “Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.”

  One of Morris’s main jobs was flying over the area to do surveillance and observation; he usually could find an available helicopter about twice a week. Another task for the advisors was filling out the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES) reports, detailed monthly surveys whose purpose was to measure both the level of security in the countryside and the progress of development. Security was graded on an A to E scale: A, B, and C represented varying degrees of government control; D and E representing “contested.” Another grade, V, meant full Viet Cong control.13 Morris thought the HES reports were a pain. It was a time-consuming process, and required answering what seemed to be inane questions such as “How many people in your village have a TV set?” In Morris’s rural district, the nearest television station was well out of broadcasting range.

  Morris rolled back the yellow covers on the classified maps and launched into a discussion of security in his district. He pointed to the map to show Thompson the progress of the South Vietnamese government’s accelerated pacification campaign, how much territory the government controlled, and how much was in the hands of the Communists. The government controlled pretty much everything between the north–south highway and the South China Sea; to the west of the highway, things were also reasonably secure; a bit further inland, security was a bit more tenuous. Out toward the mountains was pretty much Indian country. Thompson stopped Morris for a moment. “What time of day are you talking about?” he asked.

  “During the day,” Morris replied.

  “Well,” said Thompson, “What if I asked you, how much of that map you control after two A.M?”

  Morris pointed to the thin line of the north–south highway, bounded on one side by rice paddies and by the old French railroad on the other. “See that line there—Highway 1?” Morris said. “That’s questionable—how much we control and how well we control it.”

  By that point in his tour, Morris thought he was pretty familiar with the local picture. He recounted a favorite anecdote for Thompson. One night, Morris’s Vietnamese interpreter had roused him from his bunk: A remote observation post near a bridge was under attack. Morris, still groggy, bumped his head as he walked inside the South Vietnamese tactical operations center, which was built by the much shorter Vietnamese. His counterpart wanted to request U.S. naval gunfire, and Morris got on the radio to a destroyer off the coast. After being obliged to listen to a short lecture on naval gunfire—the shipboard Navy officers, Morris noticed, tended to treat Army officers with condescension—he got the target cleared. The naval gun hit the target; a couple of guerrillas were killed, and a few friendlies were wounded. During the attack, Viet Cong sappers had destroyed one of the supports to the bridge.

  Morris went out to survey the scene the following morning. He found the destroyed bridge, but interestingly enough, he also discovered that local commerce had not been interrupted. The truck drivers who were hauling the rice harvest were driving over a culvert that was a well-established bypass. The Viet Cong had surely seen the culvert when they got there, but, strangely, they hadn’t destroyed it. The bridge was rebuilt shortly thereafter, and the outpost came under attack. The next time, Morris found, the guerrillas knocked out the culvert and not the bridge. It was an illuminating moment for Morris. The insurgents they were fighting were locals who needed the bridge as much as the Government of South Vietnam and its allies did. And they didn’t want to destroy the route for that rice crop.

  Thompson’s visit underscored how U.S. military advisors like Morris had learned by experience. By November 1972, when Morris’s one-year Vietnam tour ended, the United States seemed to have turned a corner in Vietnam. Cease-fire talks with Hanoi were under way, the South Vietnamese army had repelled a major conventional offensive by the North Vietnamese Army earlier in the spring, and security throughout the country had significantly improved. By that time, however, the war had cost $150 billion (over three quarters of a trillion dollars in today’s dollars), and the American public was weary of a costly and frustrating intervention on behalf of the corrupt and ill-formed regime in Saigon.14 This was the fundamental flaw of the nation-building approach: Creating stable, accountable, and effective local institutions took years. That kind of involvement required an extraordinary commitment in money, manpower, and resources, and the outcome was not guaranteed. Still, counterinsurgency experts like Thompson were optimistic. They felt that the war was winnable and that the United States and South Vietnam had essentially come to grips with South Vietnam’s domestic insurgency. In 1974, a year before the final humiliating collapse of the Saigon government, Thompson wrote: “The greatest myth, widely accepted in the United States and elsewhere, was that the war was unwinnable. Certainly it was unwinnable in the conventional sense but then this was not a conventional war. It was also unwinnable by the United States. It was winnable only by South Vietnam with American assistance.”15

  In Malaya, preventing a revolutionary takeover had hinged to some extent on addressing some of the basic grievances of the local population: allowing some degree of political participation and paving the way to eventual independence. After years of failure and setbacks in South Vietnam, U.S. policymakers and their counterparts in Saigon had settled on a new approach. Success would not depend on overwhelming U.S. military force, but on a hybrid of development work, military action, intelligence gathering, and political reform. Armed social work would save South Vietnam, not firepower.

  The turning point, at least for the U.S. military, was the appointment of General Creighton Abrams, who succeeded General William Westmoreland as MACV commander in June 1968. Distilled to its essence, Westmoreland’s approach had been “enemy-centric.” He directed his subordinates to undertake large-unit “search and destroy” missions to find enemy forces and kill them. Abrams’s approach was the opposite of attrition. His mantra was “Clear, hold, and build.” The focus was on providing security to the population in safer areas, winning the population over with development work, and then gradually spreading security outward to less secure areas, like ink on a blotter.

  This experiment was not new. In addition to borrowing from the British experience in Malaya, the Americans were consciously re
aching back to an idea attributed to Marshal Hubert Lyautey, a French general who managed the colonial administration of Morocco earlier in the century. Some tache d’huile (“oil spot”) concepts had been tested early by the Americans in South Vietnam. The Marine Corps Combined Action Program sent squads of Marines to rural hamlets to live and patrol alongside local militia. Serving in a Combined Action Platoon was a dangerous job: the Marines lived in small, isolated villages, essentially cut off from the umbilical cord of larger units. But Thompson praised them as a model for the “successful ‘strategic hamlet’ defended by its own people.”16 But the Combined Action Program was a piecemeal experiment in counterinsurgency that the Americans essentially shunted aside in favor of firepower-intensive, large-unit action.17

  The most sweeping reorganization of the U.S. mission in Vietnam began in 1967, during Westmoreland’s command, with the creation of CORDS, a hybrid civil-military organization that was created to back the government of Vietnam’s “new model” pacification program. CORDS merged the U.S. Embassy Saigon’s Office of Civilian Operations with the military’s Revolutionary Development Support staff, bringing together for the first time the military and civilian nation-building effort under a single umbrella.* As early as 1966, the U.S. government recognized that the “other war,” the nation-building effort, was being given short shrift.18 But before CORDS, there was little unity of effort given to the problem, and the military paid little attention to it. The State Department was largely focused on traditional diplomacy and intrigue in the capital, USAID was off pursuing its development projects and paid little attention to the larger issues of counterinsurgency strategy, and the military was focused primarily on finding and killing the enemy. The agencies had different bureaucratic agendas and cultures. To lash together the various agencies of government more effectively, President Lyndon Johnson tasked Robert Komer, a career intelligence official and talented national security bureaucrat, with the job of running CORDS. Colby was Komer’s deputy.