Grunts (29 page)

CHAPTER 5

Operation Masher/White Wing: Air Mobility, Attrition, and the Big-Unit Grunts of Vietnam

Westy’s Strategy

IN A SENSE, THE FIGHTING never really ended. World War II begat the Cold War. The Cold War begat limited, but costly, wars in Korea and Vietnam for the United States. Korea was predominantly a conventional struggle to prevent communist North Koreans and Chinese from taking over noncommunist South Korea. In that war, American infantrymen fought with largely the same weapons and tactics they had used in World War II. In 1953, the war ended in stalemate, which, for the Americans, was a victory of sorts because South Korea did not fall to communism.

Vietnam was quite different. By the mid-1960s, the United States was desperately trying to stave off a major communist insurgent effort to destroy the shaky noncommunist regime in South Vietnam. Communist North Vietnam, led by the charismatic nationalist Ho Chi Minh, was infiltrating large amounts of war matériel and thousands of well-trained North Vietnamese Army (NVA) soldiers into the South, where they made common cause with indigenous antigovernment insurgents commonly known as the Viet Cong (VC). Both China and the Soviet Union were surreptitiously aiding the communist effort in Vietnam with weapons, food, equipment, medical supplies, technical support, and even, in China’s case, some soldiers.

President Lyndon Johnson wanted only to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam. He did not want the conflict to provoke World War III. He would bomb North Vietnam but he would not invade it. Nor would he authorize wide-scale invasions of neighboring Laos and Cambodia, where the communists maintained infiltration routes and built large base complexes in ostensibly neutral countries. For him, the endgame was a Korea-like stalemate that would secure South Vietnam for the foreseeable future. Thus, in his own words, he sought to do “what is enough but not too much” to win the limited war in Vietnam. In early 1966, that amounted to a dramatic escalation of the war, with more than two hundred thousand American troops in the country and more arriving every day (the communists were escalating just as furiously). Only this infusion of American soldiers had prevented a communist victory over the corrupt, hard-pressed South Vietnamese regime in 1964 and 1965. Having “stemmed the tide,” in the words of one U.S. officer, the Americans in 1966 now went on the offensive.

General William Westmoreland, the American commander in Vietnam, concocted a strategy to achieve the limited victory that President Johnson so badly wanted. Nicknamed “Westy,” the general’s pedigree was second to none. A graduate of the West Point class of 1936 (where he had been first captain of the corps of cadets), he had served as an artillery battalion commander in World War II. After the war, he changed his branch specialty to infantry, became a paratrooper, and commanded the 187th Airborne Brigade in Korea. He made two-star general by the age of forty-two. In the late 1950s, he commanded the 101st Airborne Division. Later, he was superintendent of West Point and commanding officer of the XVIII Airborne Corps. He was a graduate of the Harvard Business School. Like so many other high-ranking Army officers in the 1960s, he was equal parts a commander, a leader, and a manager. A journalist who spent many years covering the war in Vietnam once wrote of him: “Westy was a corporation executive in uniform.” Indeed, he was a classic example of a modern war manager. To Westy, victory in war was mainly a question of mobilizing resources for the proper application of overwhelming firepower and force.

True to form, in Vietnam, General Westmoreland’s strategy for victory was attrition. He planned to launch big-unit operations, employing multiple infantry battalions, supported by copious amounts of artillery, air, and sea power to secure the countryside of South Vietnam. In this way, he would find the elusive NVA and VC insurgents, force them to do battle, and annihilate them with American firepower. “I elected to fight a so-called big unit war not because of any Napoleonic impulse to maneuver units and hark to the sound of cannon, but because of the basic fact that the enemy had committed big units [NVA and main force VC] and I ignored them at my peril,” Westy wrote.

Seeing these big enemy units as the major threat to South Vietnam’s security, his goal was to destroy them first and later mop up the smaller local force of VC guerrilla units that proliferated in many of South Vietnam’s rural provinces. He often described the VC and their political subversives who were trying to destroy the South Vietnamese government as “termites persistently eating away at the structural members of a building.” The enemy’s big units were like “‘bully boys’ armed with crowbars and waiting for the propitious moment to move in and destroy the weakened building.” To him, these bully boys were a bigger threat than the termites, so they had to be destroyed first.

With major communist forces thus swept away, the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) would then occupy, and pacify, the rural villages, negating any possible attempts by the communists to return. He would therefore conventionalize an unconventional war in which the enemy made liberal use of guerrilla tactics. By exerting maximum pressure on them, Westmoreland believed that American firepower would eventually wear them down, inflicting a ceiling of irreparable losses, which he termed “the crossover point.” At that stage, they would then have no other choice but to negotiate an end to the war, with South Vietnam intact. “By the time the war reached the final phase, I expected the bulk of the people to be under government control and protection,” he later wrote. Westy’s concept, then, called for large bases, extensive firepower, and rapid maneuver. Geographic objectives were not as important as killing large numbers of enemy soldiers. Woe to any commander who did not produce large body count numbers. To the infantry, all of this meant big operations.
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Infantry on Helicopters

In a road-impoverished country that was teeming with jungles, mountains, rice paddies, and river deltas, and where the identity and whereabouts of “the enemy” were often elusive, how could a modern army hope to fulfill Westmoreland’s vision? The answer, according to many officers, was the helicopter. This new type of aircraft, first used in Korea but perfected in Vietnam, gave the Americans considerable mobility. Helicopters could shuttle troops, move heavy weapons or equipment, provide fire support, resupply units in remote areas, evacuate wounded soldiers, and even conduct reconnaissance missions. In Vietnam, the Americans seldom knew the precise whereabouts of their adversaries. Helicopters allowed the Americans to project their power wherever the enemy might eventually appear (usually by ambushing a U.S. unit) on such a nonlinear battlefield. Helicopters afforded the Americans flexibility but also mobility. This was especially true for infantry soldiers, who could be loaded aboard helicopters and moved in squad-, platoon-, company-, or even battalion-sized units. The helicopter, particularly the versatile UH-1 Huey, gave infantrymen a new dimension of air mobility that was not dependent upon parachutes or fixed-wing aircraft.

The 1st Cavalry Division was the classic expression of this new form of airmobile infantry combat. Members of the unit thought of themselves as latter-day cavalrymen riding their helicopter steeds into battle. Many of them, particularly the helicopter pilots, assumed the persona and identity of cavalry (hence the prominent horsehead on the division patch). In reality, though, once the troops were on the ground, they walked, sweated, ate, and fought as infantry. They may have belonged to battalions that called themselves “cavalry” (such as the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, or 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry), but they were really infantry.

By now, the World War II nicknames for infantry soldiers had given way to a blunt, yet respectful, term that has endured ever since—grunts. The infantry were known as grunts because they did the dirtiest and most dangerous job. In other words, they did the grunt work. The nickname had another origination, too. In Army and Marine circles, it was said that when an infantryman shouldered his heavy load of food, equipment, personal gear, and weapons, he let out an ever so audible, totally involuntary grunt.

True grunts took a perverse pride in their misery. They hated and loved their job. They disparagingly referred to outsiders as pogues (“people other than grunts”), another term that has stood the test of time. They often day-dreamed about transferring to a pogue job, but few did anything about it. Their identity was built around the idea that they were the cutting edge, the toughest, most important, yet most abused soldiers. The hope for survival dominated their thoughts, even as the ubiquity of death draped over them like a heavy, stifling cloak. They knew levels of exhaustion and fear that few humans would ever experience. Most of them agreed that only a grunt could understand what that truly meant.

Equipped with over four hundred helicopters, the 1st Cavalry Division comprised a lethal blend of firepower, mass, and maneuver. “The helicopter allowed us to make the maximum use of the terrain and it certainly worked to our advantage,” one of the division’s company commanders later said. “We were able to approach areas from other than the direct road approach . . . or the direct trails, or networks that went into the areas.” The commander of the division, Major General Harry Kinnard, had been a paratrooper in World War II. After his division deployed to Vietnam in the fall of 1965, he quickly grew very enamored of its versatility, especially the ability to “strike over very great distances, and to do that repetitively, and to hit and hit again. I was extremely impressed at the ability that the air assault capability gave us to mass in time and space against the enemy . . . even when he had an initial preponderance of force and even when he hit by surprise.”

The birds also allowed Kinnard to expand the range of his artillery, since the pieces could be carried on slings by some of the bigger helicopters. Plus, the choppers enhanced communications throughout the division. In short, the helicopter was the perfect tool with which to implement Westy’s big-unit war. Kinnard’s outfit had suffered heavy casualties fighting the NVA at the Battle of Ia Drang Valley (of
We Were Soldiers
fame) in November 1965. Throughout December and January, the division incorporated replacements and prepared for more combat.
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At this point, General Westmoreland finally had the troops, logistical support, and aircraft to launch his large operations, commonly known as search-and-destroy efforts. The first such operation would take place in Binh Dinh province, located in the central portion of South Vietnam within the 1st Cavalry Division’s area of operations. For several years, the communists had dominated this rich, rice-producing area. The Viet Cong had strong redoubts and much influence over the people. Some of the insurgents were locals who had gone north after the Geneva Accords split the country in the mid-1950s, only to return to their homes in the early 1960s to build a powerful VC infrastructure. In 1965, two North Vietnamese regiments, the 12th and the 22nd, infiltrated into the province, strengthening communist control that much more. These two regiments combined with the 2nd VC Regiment to form the 3rd NVA Sao Vang Division. Together the NVA and VC fortified villages with interlocking tunnels and trench systems. A CIA report in 1965 declared Binh Dinh to be “just about lost.” The Americans believed that among the population of eight hundred thousand people, most either had direct ties to the VC or some degree of sympathy for them.

COPYRIGHT © 2010 RICK BRITTON

So, in January of 1966, Westy ordered the 1st Cavalry Division to sweep the communists from this troublesome but valuable agricultural province. In response, General Kinnard and his staff conceived of Operation Masher, a series of airmobile hammer-and-anvil assaults designed to find the enemy, disrupt them, and force them to move toward blocking forces that waited to annihilate them. While Kinnard’s division took the lead in attacking the suspected communist strongholds within Binh Dinh, ARVN soldiers, Koreans, and U.S. Marines would seal off the roads and escape routes that surrounded the province. This would clear the Bong Son plain, the An Lao Valley, and the Kim Son Valley, the three terrain masses that dominated the area. One 1st Cavalry Division report described Binh Dinh as “a very rich, fruitful agricultural area. The terrain is open with watery rice paddies and palm groves in the lowlands and the mountains being very dense.” According to the Army’s official history, the highlands were honeycombed with spurs that “created narrow river valleys with steep ridges that frequently provided hideouts for enemy units or housed enemy command, control, and logistical centers.” Late January was the perfect time for the operation because, by then, the Vietnamese holiday of Tet was over, as was a monsoon season that each year dumped many inches of rain on Binh Dinh.

General Kinnard chose his 3rd Brigade, under Colonel Hal Moore, to make the initial helicopter assault against the villages and rice paddies of the Bong Son plain. At Ia Drang, Moore had distinguished himself as commander of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment (otherwise known as 1-7 Cavalry). He had since been promoted to full colonel and brigade command. In Vietnam, a typical brigade contained at least three infantry battalions. Brigades generally comprised about thirty-five hundred soldiers. Thanks to attached artillery battalions, aviation companies, and engineers, Colonel Moore’s 3rd Brigade had about fifty-seven hundred men.