Jungle of Snakes (22 page)
Authors: James R. Arnold
Lastly, the British who lived in Malaya enjoyed established ties with the local community while those in the colonial service
had deep understanding of the Malayan political and social system. Their counsel and advice helped inexperienced officers
and men contend with an alien environment.
In contrast to Vietnam, the insurgents in Malaya never became militarily formidable. By the time American ground troops intervened
in Vietnam, Communist units of up to battalion size were conducting ambushes and assaults. As a Malaya veteran, General Richard
Clutterbuck, observed, “If we had lost the battles of 1950 and 1951, this is what our war would have been like; but we did
not lose them.”
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All of these essential differences disguised the difficulties of applying the British strategy in Malaya to the American counterinsurgency
in Vietnam.
THE FEDERATION OF Malaya merged with Singapore and the colonies of British North Borneo to form Malaysia in 1963. Three years
later, the hardcore remnants of the Malaya Liberation Army, numbering fewer than 500 men, showed they still had teeth. A guerrilla
band, unimpressed by the British 1960 announcement that the Emergency was over, ambushed and annihilated a fifteen-man Thai-Malay
motorized patrol near the border. They continued sporadic operations until 1989. Twenty-nine years after the official end
of the Emergency, they signed a peace accord with the Thai and Malaysian governments and ended military activities.
In 2004, after three years of escalating violence that the Thai government tried to pin on “bandits,” Thailand declared martial
law in its provinces bordering Malaysia. The former enemy, Communist “bandits” from Malaya, were no longer the culprits. Rather
the government blamed a Muslim separatist movement dedicated to evicting its “colonial oppressors” and regaining control of
lands it claimed had been “illegally incorporated” by Bangkok some 100 years ago.
In default of knowing what should be done, they do what they know.
—Eighteenth-century German general Maurice de Saxe on conventional leadership
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A Nation of Villages
THE SOUTH VIETNAM OF THE 1960s was a nation of villages. The original written Viet namese character for “village” came from
a Chinese character that signified “land,” “people,” and “sacred.” Ninety percent of the population of 16 million lived in
one of the nation’s 2,500 rural villages. Most were poor peasants who supported themselves by working nearby rice fields or
fishing in adjacent waters. They spent their lives within a few miles of their birthplaces, insulated from the outside world
by the structure of family and village life. The village was the heart of Vietnamese social and economic relationships.
An ancient Vietnamese edict said, “The emperor’s rule ends at the village wall.” Rural people greeted outsiders, which meant
anyone not from the village, and particularly foreigners, with deep suspicion. During a century of colonial rule, villagers
learned to think of the government as a remote body that collected taxes, demanded unpaid labor, and conscripted young men
for the military. They cherished a tradition of resistance against distant authority and memories of successful war against
foreign invaders. For as long as most villagers could recall, there had been fighting—against the Japanese in the 1940s, against
the French in the 1950s, and now against a government based in Saigon.
The Communist leaders of this current conflict possessed the esteem, or at least the grudging respect, of many Vietnamese
because they held claim to the great victory over the French imperialists in 1954. In contrast, the anti-Communists in the
Saigon government possessed little popular support because of their association with the French imperialists. The fact that
the government’s strongest support came from 850,000 northerners who had moved south in 1954 to escape Communist rule further
alienated South Vietnam’s villagers.
Roots of Insurgency
On May 7, 1954, the climatic battle of the First Indochina War ended when Communist Viet Minh soldiers captured the last French
strongholds at Dien Bien Phu. Later that summer diplomats in Geneva negotiated the terms of the French withdrawal along with
a cease-fire and a provisional military demarcation line at the seventeenth parallel. The so-called partition was supposed
to be a temporary measure, a compromise leading to elections and a unified Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Communists in the north
and the anti-Communists in the south organized separate states. The United States, in turn, viewed Indochina through the lens
of the Cold War. American political leaders and the Eisenhower administration regretted what the French had lost and thought
that they could do better. However, according to the terms of the Geneva agreement, Vietnamese representatives from the north
and south were to meet in July 1955 to arrange the mechanics for a general election. The voting would follow one year later.
From the American perspective, the problem with any general election was that the wrong side would probably win. Eisenhower’s
secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, began casting about for means to thwart the election. Simultaneously, South Vietnamese
president Ngo Dinh Diem spoke out against any election on the ground that fair elections in Communist-dominated areas were
impossible. Diem’s public utterances interfered with a variety of more devious American plans. An American diplomat in Saigon
cabled the U.S. State Department, “Vietnam Government must agree [to] play the game at least in appearance and cease repudiating
[the Geneva] Agreement.”
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While most everyone in the U.S. government endorsed the strategy of checking Communist expansion by supporting anti-Communist
governments in South Vietnam, the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned that any political maneuvering that prevented the victory the
Viet Minh had earned on the battlefield risked a strong Communist military reaction. Indeed, in 1956 Diem declined to hold
the elections called for in the Geneva declaration. The Communist political underground in South Vietnam understood that Diem’s
decision denied them a path to victory via the ballot box. Their response came in 1957 when a terror campaign began against
local officials of the Diem regime. Assassination squads chose their victims carefully, targeting men “who enjoyed the people’s
sympathy” while leaving “bad officials unharmed in order to . . . sow hatred against the government.”
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Three years later, Communist leaders formed the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF). It was a classic
Communist front organization designed to disguise its true roots in order to acquire support from non-Communist South Viet
namese nationalists. At the vanguard of the NLF were southern Communist guerrillas who would be labeled by the South Vietnamese
government with the derogatory term Viet Cong.
To conquer the south, the NLF followed a policy that closely integrated tactics and strategy into a unified whole—a whole
that in contrast to Western military strategy recognized the interplay of military, political, and social dimensions. Unlike
most military forces, the Viet Cong emphasized organizational learning and adaptation. Candid self-criticism sessions occurred
at all command levels. Meaningful after-action reviews led to new tactics. They were also willing to learn from foreign experience.
The Viet Cong experimented with tactics and doctrine, latched on to what worked, and then rapidly spread the lessons. Adaptation
and change were hallmarks of the Communist Vietnamese way of war.
Long before 1960 and long before the South Vietnamese government understood that it faced a significant insurgency, Communist
propaganda teams had laid the foundation for the NLF campaign. Many of the personnel were recruited from the most gifted village
youth. Some had traveled north for training and then returned to join like-minded people and speak about the corruption of
Saigon government officials, the inequity of land ownership, and the promise of a brighter future under Communist rule. The
propaganda teams explicitly set about changing the way rural people viewed their lives and future prospects in order to motivate
village youth to fight and to inspire the balance of the village to assist them. By convincing peasants that they were able
to address peasant grievances, the Communists made impressive strides toward building a dedicated base of popular support.
Then in 1960 the insurgency exploded into violence.
“If Freedom Is to Be Saved”
The insurgents held an enormous advantage: a powerful ally, North Vietnam, that had access to every inch of South Vietnam’s
land borders. The American ally, the South Viet namese, was a weak reed dominated by an elite minority that was corrupt, inefficient,
and badly frightened. During the years prior to the outbreak of violence, American advisers had trained the South Vietnamese
army for conventional warfare to repel a direct, Korean War–style invasion across the demilitarized zone along the seventeenth
parallel. When instead Communist insurgents committed to guerrilla warfare emerged as the prime threat, the American military
mission in Saigon prepared a Counterinsurgency Plan. It called for expanding the South Vietnamese military and increasing
American assistance. In return, President Diem was to broaden political support for his government.
On the eighteenth anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1962, President John F. Kennedy spoke to the newly minted army lieutenants
at West Point and described the special challenges posed by insurgents:
This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin—war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins,
war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the
enemy instead of engaging him. It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what has been strangely called “wars of liberation,”
to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved. It preys on economic
unrest and ethnic conflicts. It requires in those situations where we must counter it, and these are the kinds of challenges
that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved, a whole new kind of strategy.
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The president’s remarks were designed to underscore the administration’s commitment to create an effective counterinsurgency
strategy. However, in spite of the increased flow of American assistance, the erosion of South Vietnamese government authority
continued. Regardless, the U.S. Army resisted mightily all proposals for new doctrine, organization, and training aimed at
combating insurgents. However, as trouble in Southeast Asia increased, numerous people in and out of government warned that
the situation required measures well beyond a conventional military response. An American colonel serving as an adviser in
the Mekong Delta echoed Templer’s formulation in Malay in an essay for the prestigious service journal
Army
, entitled “Fighting the Viet Cong”: “Most of us are sure that this problem is only fifteen per cent military and eighty-five
per cent political.” The solution was not just killing Viet Cong but instead “coupling security with welfare.”
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The army brass wanted nothing to do with such notions. General Earle Wheeler, who would rise to serve as chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff under President Lyndon Johnson, represented the army’s position in an address in late 1962: “It is fashionable
in some quarters to say that the problems in Southeast Asia are primarily political and economic rather than military. I do
not agree. The essence of the problem in Vietnam is military.”
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Before putting such conclusions to the test, the U.S. military had to endure a protracted, British-inspired experiment.
Strategic Hamlets, Strategic Lunacy
One man who had received great credit for implementing the successful British counterinsurgency campaign in Malaya was Robert
Thompson. At Diem’s invitation, Thompson arrived in South Vietnam in 1961 as head of the five-man British Advisory Mission.
Thompson toured the countryside and concluded that Communist control of the rural population presented the gravest challenge
to the South Vietnamese government. Thompson firmly believed that Diem’s government could survive only if it protected the
rural people and they in turn began to support his government. Based on his Malaya experience, Thompson’s solution was to
build a solid base of political support by protecting rural villages with local security forces.
In detail, Thompson advocated what was called the “oil spot” strategy. The South Vietnamese government would occupy and secure
selected areas where Diem’s regime already was strong in order to deprive the Communists of their ability to recruit, tax,
gather supplies, and obtain intelligence. Over time, government control would expand, or seep outward like a pool of oil,
ultimately merging with adjacent controlled areas to create a larger oil spot. Eventually the uncommitted segments of the
population would align with the government, thereby facilitating the further spread of government control. At that point the
insurgents would be faced with the impossible choice of either engaging superior government military force or withdrawing
from populated areas. In the absence of protection from its military wing and confronted with a diminishing base of popular
support, the insurgent political apparatus would erode leading to eventual victory.
The oil spot strategy was well grounded in the historical record. It received its first Vietnam test in 1962. The Diem government
built fortified enclosures, called strategic hamlets, in order to deny the Communists access to the civilian population. In
addition, these hamlets put the villagers within the reach of the government administrative structure, allowing the government
to provide better social services such as schools and infirmaries. At the same time government propagandists tried to convince
the people that not only were the Communists morally wrong but also they were losing. However, the Diem government ignored
Thompson’s recommendations about where to build the first strategic hamlets and insisted on locating them in remote, Viet
Cong–dominated areas. Worse, Diem ignored the peasants’ fierce attachment to their native villages and transgressed the custom
of village autonomy by compelling them to relocate to the new hamlets regardless of their personal wishes. They then had to
perform “voluntary” labor to build the hamlets. They could depart to tend their fields only with permission and while accompanied
by security forces whose job was to protect them from the guerrillas. In sum, the government was forcing rural people to abandon
their traditional way of life in exchange for security and asking them to think well of the government for demanding this
upheaval.
The Strategic Hamlet Program began in March 1962 under the optimistic code name Operation Sunrise. An army detachment drove
the Viet Cong into the nearby jungle while a security force entered the village of Ben Tuong. About a third of the families
agreed voluntarily to relocate but the other two thirds accepted relocation only at gunpoint. Government forces then razed
the village to the ground. The “new” Ben Tuong consisted of a concrete infirmary and administration post and freshly cleared
ground. The families had to build their own homes while also constructing fortifications. Notably, there were very few men
of military age present in the “new” village. Most of them were serving with the Viet Cong.
Three months later, the Viet Cong conducted a near-perfect ambush in broad daylight near the model strategic hamlet. They
killed twenty-six South Vietnamese soldiers, several public works officials, and two American military advisers. The ambush
could not have been carried out without the help of the local villagers. Whether this help came from willing cooperation or
intimidation hardly mattered. The Diem government, the British Mission, and the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam
(MACV) argued about what had been done and what to do. All three actors refused to acknowledge honestly what was taking place—namely,
that a nationalist-inspired insurgency was winning a war against an unpopular, corrupt government—and instead, in the predictable
fashion of a bureaucracy under stress, all three continued to promote an unchanged policy featuring more of the same. Unsurprisingly,
the Viet Cong also continued with more of the same. A little over a year later, in August 1963, they overran Ben Tuong.