Our Year of War

by Daniel P. Bolger

  The predilection for firepower led to the second characteristic of U.S. tactics in country: “maneuver and fire.” This varied from the practice of “fire and maneuver” taught in both world wars and Korea. In the standard version of fire and maneuver, at the small-unit level, American infantry relied on a base of fire, usually machine guns or Browning automatic rifles, to suppress the enemy with a high volume of bullets while the rest of the riflemen maneuvered, which is to say advanced by alternate rushes, ducking from cover to cover and crawling when necessary, as it often was. Attacks culminated in an infantry assault, man to man, with grenades, bayonets, and gut-shots in the heart of the hostile position.

  In Vietnam, dense vegetation often made it very tough to get right on top of the VC. In addition, close combat negated U.S. firepower, as the explosive radii of 105mm artillery shells and 500-pound bombs proved indiscriminate on the ground. Clever VC commanders taught their men to “hug” the Americans to frustrate the supporting U.S. gunners and pilots. When the Americans tried to back away to use howitzers and air strikes, the VC broke off and escaped. So the more enterprising U.S. colonels reversed the usual formula and taught their men to maneuver up to the enemy, make contact, then try to hold the bad guys in place by rifle and machine gun fire. When the big stuff rolled in, the Americans ducked their heads and brought down the scunion.25 There was no classic infantry assault, just a sweep of the shattered wreckage of the VC position, policing up any prisoners, tending to the foe’s wounded, and counting the enemy dead.

  Of course, reliance on supporting air and artillery firepower and stopping when in contact gave the VC yet another immediate option to engage or leave. Even the best American artillery fires, prearranged and ready to go, took a few minutes to begin impacting on the ground; as an area weapon, the big shells had to be “walked” onto a furtive foe half seen at best in the scrub brush. And artillery came in relatively quickly. Helicopters and jet fighter-bombers took even longer to come on station. As no U.S. squad, platoon, or company had unlimited bullets, after the initial high-volume exchange, the firefight often petered out a bit. All too often, the VC and NVA used that breather to get away.26 This came atop the already preponderant enemy capacity to avoid or accept battle in the first place.

  To take away that hostile initiative, the Americans preached “pile on.” Colonel George S. Patton III, son and namesake of the World War II great, commanded the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment from July of 1968 to April of 1969. He explained piling on as “literally throwing forces together from all directions in order to first encircle or fix, then compress and finally destroy the enemy.”27 It sounded good, but rarely worked out. Even with tanks, tracks, helicopters, and a cascade of artillery, rockets, and bombs, the Americans were just too slow and too ham-handed to pull it off. The trap never quite closed, and a lot, if not most, of the enemy always seemed to wriggle free.

  The 2-47th firefight on January 31, 1968, at Widows Village showed these tactical ideas in execution. Having figured out they had enemy in the houses, the Americans, including PFC Chuck Hagel, searched for their hidden opponents, covered by their track-mounted .50-caliber heavy machine guns. When the VC made contact—they opened up first, as usual—the Americans responded with all they had. No artillery was permitted, and that was a deviation from the typical solution, but armed helicopters participated with both rockets and machine guns. Company B/4-39th Infantry landed by helicopter to pile on. And despite a good number left dead, most of the VC got away.

  Why?

  Ewell though he knew the answer. By his reckoning, he had the big guns and attack helicopters to kill VC. What he needed were more riflemen—more beaters—to find his prey.

  When Ewell ran the numbers for his new division, the result stunned him. At any particular time, of 16,000 or so troops assigned, about 1,000, including Chuck Hagel, were actually out in the bush hunting Charlie. Some of the rest guarded base camps, protected construction sites, defended a petroleum tank farm, and secured a radio relay site. Although the army filled divisions to 102 percent of their authorized strength, most rifle companies ran with about 65 to 70 men in the field, less than half their paper strength of 164. The other infantrymen existed on the rolls, but were not out on patrol. These 11Bs filled headquarters billets, attended unit schools (including training for young NCOs), recovered from wounds and illness (malaria and immersion foot predominated in the 9th Infantry Division), and came and went from rest and recreation (R&R) leave. At any one time, about a sixth of each company (one-twelfth in, one-twelfth out) processed to and from Vietnam, yet another curse of the individual replacement system.28 Each base camp sucked in 11B manpower like a stellar black hole pulling in matter and light itself.

  And what of those brave few who did go out? Chuck and Tom Hagel could have told Ewell the way it went, but the restless general found out for himself. The units took turns, as would be expected in a lengthy war characterized by days and days of routine, unopposed patrolling. While one company walked out in the woods, the other rifle companies operated from a firebase, flying out every other day on airmobile missions. Every night, each company sent out an ambush patrol.29 The battalions kept a schedule, sharing the burden. Given the hot, humid weather and lack of worthwhile targeting intelligence, it made sense.

  Ewell didn’t agree. For him, to get the VC required “excruciating pressure” 24/7, day patrols and night ambushes. He couldn’t get more men. So he elected to make those he had work harder, much harder, as both Hagel brothers would find out. He thought he increased “paddy strength” by demanding to see daily roll-ups at rifle company level.30 Well, he certainly increased reporting. But hounding from a major general, even one as insistent as Ewell, didn’t change the institutional inertia of individual replacements, R&R, base camp defense, and individual one-year tours.31 The numbers went up some, but never enough to suit Ewell.

  The division commander did more. He reorganized the leg battalions to add a fourth rifle company, then demanded that each lieutenant colonel keep three of four companies in the field day and night. The VC still refused contact almost 90 percent of the time. To his endless consternation, Ewell couldn’t change that. But he could increase the number of his own units finding the VC 10 percent of the time, a brute force solution for sure. By flooding the zone with patrols, Ewell generated more contacts.32 And that led to more kills.

  Ewell ordered day and night “constant pressure,” with few stand-downs. One of the reasons the major general didn’t care for Chuck Hagel’s 2-47th involved their M113s, which required regular maintenance to keep running. So he made them work without tracks on many occasions. The mechanized infantry battalions only had three rifle companies. Ewell kept at least two in the bush, and it galled him to think a third of the battalion wasn’t out there.33 It ensured that 2-47th stayed in the commanding general’s doghouse.

  As helicopters also needed a lot of maintenance, Ewell went after them, too. He recognized that airmobile insertions, like Company B/4-39th at Widows Village, and helicopter gunship attacks, also seen in that engagement, both greatly increased the effectiveness of combat actions, doubling or even tripling enemy casualties inflicted. So aviation mattered. To get more flying time out of his helicopters, Ewell insisted on night maintenance work in lit hangers—the threat of VC mortar barrages notwithstanding—more tools, more spare parts, and, of course, direct reports to him on progress or lack thereof. By his hounding, Ewell squeezed an extra 30 percent of flying hours out of the division’s fleet of Hueys, Cobras, and OH-23s.34 The division’s aviators contributed their share to the constant pressure mantra.

  He preached it. He enforced it. “You operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every day, and you just kept grinding the enemy down.”35 Aboard his command chopper, Ewell ranged far and wide, day and night, making a lot of it happen exactly as he prescribed.

  He also prevailed on II Field Force to reduce his area of operations and thus allow him to focus his effort. The 9th Infantry Division got r
id of Bien Hoa and Long Khanh east of Saigon and shifted fully to the upper Mekong Delta. The division kept Long An (334,000 people) and Dinh Tuong (548,000) and added Kien Hoa (531,000) and Go Cong (173,000). This permitted Ewell to hand over the Bear Cat base to the Thais and move the division headquarters to Dong Tam, squarely in Dinh Tuong Province, and previously held only by the riverine 2nd Brigade and the sedentary ARVN.36 Why did Ewell go there? In the new commanding general’s estimate, that’s where the VC had been most active. And he was all about hunting VC.

  The commanding general also put paid to the escapades of the vaunted Mobile Riverine Force. Before Ewell’s time, the army-navy contingent managed six operations a month, way below anything that the new commander would tolerate. Plus, the VC avoided the slow-moving armored watercraft or, worse, nailed them on terms favorable to the enemy. So the 2nd Brigade got new orders. “It was put into Kien Hoa Province—a real Viet Cong bastion,” said Ewell, “taken off its boats, and buckled down to work.”37 There were still some riverine missions, but for the most part, the three battalions of 2nd Brigade worked on foot, slogging through the rice paddies and marshes.

  To keep track of all of these tactical actions, Ewell insisted on regular, detailed reports, and woe to those who did not measure up. The general’s investment in statistics bordered on mania. He looked hard at the kill ratio, “a very good measure of skill.” Ewell put his finger right on the key question: how many U.S. soldiers killed did it take to kill X number of communists? Well, that sure cut to the chase. What was a dead American worth? Ewell proposed to settle on a value.

  He then developed criteria, rating unit performance by kill ratio: one to fifty, highly skilled; one to twenty-five, fairly good; one to fifteen, low but acceptable, good for ARVN; one to ten was the historical U.S. average; one to six was the historical ARVN average. “We wouldn’t wipe our shoes with one to ten in the Ninth,” concluded Ewell. He claimed to run at one to eighty, with up to one to a hundred at times.38 It was amazing what a determined man could wring out of the division.

  And wring it he did. Everything came down to killing VC. Captain Ronald Bartek, a West Pointer, remembered an early briefing with the new division commander: “He wanted to begin killing ‘4,000 of these little bastards a month’ [Ewell’s words] and then by the following month wanted to kill 6,000.” To a struggling commander, Ewell barked: “Jack up that body count or you’re gone, colonel.”39

  This driven man drew his fair share of detractors in 1968 and in the years to follow. One perceptive officer wrote that “he is a superb Division commander—for the infantry or armored infantry war in Europe in the 1940s. He fights in Vietnam using the methods that would have made him a successful and popular commander with his superiors and with the public in World War II.”40 Many made that charge, less eloquently but no less forcefully, and it matches nicely with the old saw that generals always fight the last war. But it misses Ewell’s true achievement.

  Very much a creature of America’s Vietnam War, Julian J. Ewell figured out how to get the most out of his division. Some generals—George Casey of the 1st Cavalry Division and Keith Ware of the 1st Infantry Division, both killed while in command—were more beloved. Ewell wasn’t. Others—Olinto Barsanti of the 101st Airborne Division and Bill DePuy of the 1st Infantry Division—were tough on subordinate colonels. Ewell was tougher. And a few—Lew Walt of the 3rd Marine Division and Fred Weyand of the 25th Infantry Division—showed a lot of tactical acumen. Ewell outdid even them in the narrow sphere of killing Cong. He, above all division commanders who served in country, understood exactly what Westmoreland wanted. And Ewell sure delivered it. There was only one problem. He showed up three years too late.

  ABOUT THE SAME TIME Julian J. Ewell began wrestling with his tactical situation in the upper Mekong Delta, General William C. Westmoreland decided to follow up what he saw as the successful pummeling administered to his NVA/VC opponents in their failed Tet Offensive. Working closely with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the MACV commander sought to exploit his perceived gains. He asked for another 108,000 troops, with a marine regiment and a brigade from the 82nd Airborne to deploy immediately, a down payment on the big reinforcement to come. He actually had ideas of invading Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail.41

  The Joint Chiefs, running out of draftees, saw the MACV request as their chance to replenish America’s strategic reserve, the troops held in the homeland for other emergencies. A week before Tet erupted, the North Koreans had gone off the rails, sparking firefights in the demilitarized zone, seizing the surveillance ship USS Pueblo and its eighty-two sailors, and launching a special forces raid to kill South Korea’s president. In Europe, the Soviet army continued to build up its armored regiments in and around Czechoslovakia, where a reforming government’s days seemed numbered, with unknown repercussions for NATO. Israel, Egypt, and Syria remained locked in a simmering conflict that threatened to go hot at any time. The Cubans stirred the pot in the Caribbean and Latin America. And who knew what the election year of 1968 might bring to America’s restive inner cities and college campuses. So the Joint Chiefs saw Westmoreland’s request and added to it, topping out at 206,000. This would require President Lyndon Johnson to call up the National Guard and the service reserves. It would fully commit the nation.

  To what?

  More war? Ultimate victory? Was that even possible? At what cost? Outgoing secretary of defense Robert McNamara, heartsick over doing just enough to get the United States into Vietnam, nothing to guarantee victory, and not near enough to get us out, offered his opinion. No. That’s it. Stop bombing the North. Negotiate. Turn it over to Saigon’s troops. Pull out.42

  His successor—shrewd Washington attorney, presidential counselor, and consummate DC insider Clark Clifford—probed the Joint Chiefs for answers. His account is damning indeed:

  How long will it take? They didn’t know. How many more troops would it take? They didn’t know. Would 206,000 answer the demand? They didn’t know. Might there be more? Yes, there might be more. So when it was all over, I said, “What is the plan to win the war in Vietnam?” Well, the only plan is that ultimately the attrition will wear down the North Vietnamese and they will have had enough. Is there any indication that we have reached that point? No, there isn’t.43

  With both the old and new secretary of defense skeptical, LBJ did what he did best. He equivocated. He sent the marines and paratroopers, 10,500 in all, to meet Westmoreland’s immediate request.44 But he well understood that this was the moment of decision.

  Johnson summoned the wise men, the best and brightest from Vietnam, the Cold War, Korea, and World War II. Generals Omar Bradley, Matthew Ridgway, and Maxwell Taylor (Ewell’s World War II commander) came together to offer their judicious counsel. It’s noteworthy that LBJ didn’t ask Curtis LeMay, although the retired air force four-star was certainly available. LeMay’s notoriously blunt brand of strategic thinking apparently wasn’t welcome. In any event, the approved trio of generals, well spoken and housebroken, joined the other luminaries: Dean Acheson, George Ball, McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Dean, Douglas Dillon, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, Arthur Goldberg, Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Robert Murphy, and Cyrus Vance. New secretary of defense Clark Clifford participated, too.45 The wise men would tell LBJ what to do. Then he’d do it. And this, too, would pass.

  Out on the far side of the world, Westmoreland waited. Up north, at beleaguered Khe Sanh Combat Base, marines fought and died. So did the NVA. So did soldiers on both sides all across South Vietnam. In the northeastern reaches of the Mekong Delta, Ewell and the 9th Infantry Division hunted Cong. The war hung in the balance, awaiting the word of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

  AT THE PFC LEVEL, none of this mattered much. Not yet. Up north with the marines, Tom Hagel and 3-5th Cavalry stayed busy, and not in a good way. “They were hard core NVA up there,” he remembered. “Everybody was just getting blown away constantly.”46

  Hagel wasn’t speaking idly. In two weeks spent supportin
g the 7th Marine Regiment near Dong Ha and other areas north of Quang Tri city, Troop A lost two killed, Troop C lost three more, and one man from the Headquarters Troop was killed, too. The NVA wounded nineteen troopers. It amounted to a platoon gone, a rude introduction to the new area. The marines suffered two wounded in action. In return, the Americans believed they killed four NVA and wounded an unknown number. The marines dropped five tons of bombs and assessed four “structures” and eight sampans destroyed.47 Who could know for sure?

  East of Saigon, PFC Chuck Hagel continued operations, too. After losing Captain Keats on February 2, Company B/2-47th worked through some other neighborhoods around Long Binh Post and in other hot spots around Saigon. Nervous MACV logistics and headquarters people saw a lot of VC in the weeks after Tet. Some were there. Most were not. Hagel and the other riflemen spent many days looking for Charlie, and finding him now and again.48 Once things settled down in Saigon, the company returned to Bear Cat to fix their worn-out M113s, bring in new guys, and then resume the route security mission. Routes 1 and 15 hadn’t gotten any better since Tet.