Jungle of Snakes (25 page)
Authors: James R. Arnold
Therein lay a flaw. Even in areas of heaviest concentration, the CAPs and their supporting reaction forces could not prevent
the enemy from massing to attack a vulnerable garrison. In essence, like the garrisons of the larger strongpoints and firebases,
the marines on CAP duty owned only the ground they occupied. Aided by thorough local intelligence, the Viet Cong usually navigated
between the American and South Viet namese positions to attack when and where they wanted. Thus the CAPs failed to provide
the villagers with the security that was the necessary precursor to everything else the Americans hoped to achieve.
At its best, the CAP program attracted brave, dedicated men who over time took the goal of helping their village to heart.
In spite of the manifest hardships and dangers, in 1967 60 percent of the 1,100 marines assigned to CAP duty volunteered to
extend their tours. They knew that the progress they had achieved was precarious and that much depended on the personal relationships
they had forged and the local knowledge they had acquired. They wanted to see the job through.
However, as the CAP program expanded, the quality of its marine participants declined. For some marines, the transition from
regular combat duty to CAP duty proved too difficult: “We’ve been up in the mountains for months where it’s been kill, kill,
kill; now we come down here and are told we’re supposed to love them all. It’s too much to ask.”
4
Combat officers were understandably reluctant to release their best men for CAP duty. Instead, they had every motive to send
their misfits. As one Colonel recalled, “Although the requirement states that they should be volunteers, it doesn’t demand
volunteers.” So he followed a rule of thumb that “if a man doesn’t object he is a volunteer.”
5
Other participants came from combat service support units.
As time passed the selection process increasingly paid mere lip service to official requirements. One bored supply clerk who
applied for CAP duty recalled his five-minute interview. It was clear to him that the clinching question was a hypothetical
query about how he would respond if a militiaman stole his camera. “The right answer was self-evident, and I laid it on with
a trowel.”
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By demonstrating his “cultural sensitivity,” the clerk, who had no combat experience and spoke only a few words of pidgin
Viet namese, aced the entrance exam.
But passing the exam and actually being effective in the field were two different things. During indoctrination, instructors
had told the CAP marines that the Viet namese people would perceive that they were better than the French and would grow to
like them. Arriving in his assigned village, one volunteer soon learned that this was not so: “We could read it in the studied
indifference of the people as we passed, the way they ignored us even as we searched their homes and property.”
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It was plainly evident that the villagers considered the marines as just another species of foreign barbarian.
A marine colonel complained that the two teams in his tactical area lacked ground combat experience and skills as well as
knowledge of Viet Cong tactics and “were unfamiliar with the social and religious customs of the people they were living with.”
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Equally distressing, the PFs with whom the two inexperienced teams worked were not local villagers. The local men were absent,
having been drafted into either the South Vietnamese army or the Viet Cong, or having gone into hiding to evade service with
either side. In a society where village identity was everything, these CAPs “kept themselves aloof from the villagers they
were supposed to be helping.”
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Needless to say, neither team accomplished anything useful, failing to capture a single enemy combatant, let alone dismantle
the embedded Viet Cong infrastructure.
The marine presence in Vietnam swelled from the initial two battalions to a peak strength of 85,000 men in 1968. However,
the CAP never reached its benchmarks, although it expanded to 57 units in 1966 and 79 in 1967. In 1967 CAP employed a mere
1,249 marines and 2,129 militia. Even at its height, CAP operated in only some 20 percent of the villages in I Corps. A major
obstacle was the reluctance of South Vietnamese leaders to commit manpower to the program. Marine planners had envisioned
a ratio of one marine to three Popular Forces. This ideal was never met. By 1970 the actual ratio fell to one marine to one
and a half PF.
Even at this diminished ratio, advocates pointed to some undeniable statistics indicating the effectiveness of the CAP approach.
Consequently, senior marine commanders continued to promote the program. The officer who first supervised training for CAP
duty, Lieutenant Colonel William R. Corson, described it as “a specific and unique response to the challenge posed by the
Communist doctrine of Wars of National Liberation.”
10
Proponents cited the fact that in 1966 there were about 110 villages in the Marine Corps area of responsibility. Less than
one quarter of them were considered government-controlled. Within this cohort, villages where a CAP operated for six months
or more achieved a 60 percent secure rating or better, a rise of 20 points since the arrival of the teams and a rating judged
to indicate that the government had established “firm influence” in the village. Notably, the performance of the Popular Forces
in the CAP villages was far superior to militia elsewhere. In the entire I Corps, only 12 percent of all PFs participated
in CAPs, but they accounted for almost 29 percent of all enemy killed by the popular Forces. Overall, the kill ratio, a statistic
much beloved by MACV, was fourteen Viet Cong to one marine or PF, as contrasted with a three-to-one ratio for popular Force
units not serving with CAP marines. Armed with such statistics, marine leaders tried to persuade MACV to adopt the Combined
Action Program for all of Vietnam.
However, the North Vietnamese main-force threat, a threat of unique gravity in I Corps because of its shared border with North
Vietnam, compelled the marines to trim their goals for expanding the rural pacification program. Then in January 1968 the
Tet Offensive exploded on the ground in Vietnam and on the television sets of a stunned American nation.
BACK IN 1966, thunderous congressional applause had greeted President Lyndon Johnson’s State of the Union address when he
said, “I believe that we can continue the Great Society while we fight in Vietnam.”
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Johnson’s decision to wage war in Vietnam with minimum disruption of domestic life remained both publicly and politically
Popular until the human and financial cost of the war rose. However, as the months passed, and in spite of a large and steady
escalation of American troop strength and firepower, there seemed to be little progress. The beginning of the large search-and-destroy
missions in 1967, with their attendant increase in American casualties, coincided with a large increase in racial and civil
unrest in the United States. During the first nine months of 1967, public antiwar protests, ranging from minor demonstrations
to full-scale riots, occurred in 150 cities. Public skepticism about the war’s final outcome caused Johnson to worry privately,
“This thing is assuming dangerous proportions, dividing the country and giving our enemies the wrong idea of the will of this
country to fight.”
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Two major factors fed this skepticism: a lack of candor about the American policy in Vietnam that extended throughout the
Johnson administration from the president to the military spokesmen in Saigon, and immensely skillful North Viet namese and
Viet Cong manipulation of public opinion. Far better than anyone in the Johnson administration, the Viet namese Communists
understood the link among international opinion, American public opinion, and battlefield outcomes. This understanding informed
the Communist conduct of what became known as the Tet Offensive, a surprise, nationwide offensive that coincided with the
traditional Vietnamese celebration of the lunar new year.
On the night of January 30, 1968, as revelers swarmed Saigon’s streets to celebrate the Year of the Monkey, the explosions
of thousands of traditional firecrackers rocked the air. Slowly, as some of the 67,000 Viet Cong committed nationwide to the
first assault moved from their safe houses into attack position, the sounds of combat replaced the sounds of festival. The
ensuing synchronized ferocity brought fighting into previously untouched urban centers and surprised every allied commander
in Vietnam and in Washington. To achieve this feat, the Communist leadership concentrated its forces. The act of concentration
exposed the Communists to American firepower and they suffered terrible losses. By the time the offensive ended, the Communists
had suffered 40,000 to 50,000 battlefield deaths while killing between 4,000 and 8,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and inflicting
about 4,000 American casualties.
By any conventional calculation, Tet was an enormous Allied military success. Instead, the American public perceived it as
a complete debacle. It shattered their confidence in official statements regarding the war’s progress. The public’s perception
astonished many combat soldiers. Standing next to enemy corpses stacked like cordwood outside his headquarters, one American
cavalry officer mused, “To our complete bewilderment in the weeks that followed, nobody ever publicized this feat of battlefield
triumph. Instead, we read that we had been defeated.”
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Quite simply, the American public had witnessed on television an unprecedented scenes of bloodshed and concluded that the
Communists remained much stronger than American political and military leaders had led them to believe.
That February, the voters of New Hampshire expressed their shock by giving dark-horse antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy almost
enough votes to defeat the incumbent president. McCarthy’s vote total underscored public disapproval of Johnson’s war management
from both the right and left. For every two voters who wanted out of Vietnam, three anti-Johnson voters believed the president
should unshackle the military and let them fight. Nationwide opinion polls showed that for the first time more than half the
people considered involvement in Vietnam a mistake. Johnson tried to stop his slide in public esteem, telling the nation that
Hanoi was trying to “win something in Washington that they can’t win in Hué, in the I-Corps, or in Khe Sanh.”
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But it was too late for Johnson to save his presidency.
After Tet
In Malaya, the Communist capacity to attack isolated police posts dramatically declined as the war progressed. In Vietnam,
the opposite occurred. Whereas prior to Tet a Viet Cong attack against a CAP compound typically involved 20 to 30 guerrillas,
beginning with Tet they featured between 150 and 200 troops backed by powerful supporting weapons. One such attack against
a compound defended by 48 marines and militia began with a mortar and recoilless rifle bombardment. Simultaneously, sappers
detonated Bangalore torpedoes to blow gaps in the defensive wire. The attackers instantly surged through the breaches and
rapidly fanned out to attack preselected objectives. They hurled grenades and satchel charges into the dispensary, command
bunker, and ammunition bunker. Intense rifle fire covered their rapid withdrawal. Only seven minutes elapsed from the time
the first mortar rounds exploded until the attackers withdrew. The assault happened so quickly that there was no time for
a reaction force to intervene, and it was delivered with lethal precision, killing four marines and four militia while wounding
nine marines and eight militia.
An assault against a CAP village in the northernmost province of Quang Tri pitted a reinforced North Vietnamese battalion
against some fifty to seventy marines and militia. The PF performance was uneven. One Vietnamese lieutenant hid in a bunker
until morning. Two PF privates fled to an ammo bunker, tossed out the ammunition to make room, and hunkered down in safety
until the fighting ended. The situation grew so desperate that the marines called in close support artillery “to save our
skins” without regard for the fact that the artillery fell on the homes of the villagers.
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Such assaults, duplicated throughout I Corps during Tet, inflicted such serious losses that the marines made a fundamental
change. As one marine captain working in the Combined Action Program observed, “The complexion of the war has changed,” with
civic action “gone by the wayside.”
16
As long as there was a menacing North Viet namese presence, CAPs had to restrict where they sent patrols. In places where
the enemy had either overrun or come close to overrunning the CAP compounds, the marines took a more draconian attitude toward
the civilian population. Homes that interfered with fields of fire were leveled. People living in hamlets that had always
been considered sympathetic to the enemy were relocated, their homes destroyed, and the area redesignated as a free-fire zone.
It seemed that fortified CAP patrol bases provided the enemy with too easy a target. A CAP marine noted, “It only takes about
three seconds to overrun a small perimeter.”
17
Henceforth, most CAP teams abandoned these bases and adopted a new approach, called a “mobile CAP.” Rather than providing
the enemy with a fixed target, during the day the marines and militia set up temporary command posts, or “day havens,” where
they rested and ate. They relocated before nightfall to set up new command posts that served as hubs from which they sent
out patrols. They carried all their food and weapons with them and moved around in an almost random way, thereby avoiding
a routine that might provide the enemy with a predictable target. The marines and PFs shared food, a few comforts, and a great
deal of discomfort.
Then and thereafter, the mobile CAP was controversial. The absence of a fixed base imposed enormous physical and psychological
strain. It was a complete departure from most of the principles underlying the original CAP strategy. The fact that the marines
did not feel safe staying put in one place sent an unmistakable message to the villagers. No longer was there a permanent
place for village officials and their people to go to seek help and security. The theory underlying a permanent CAP post held
that it served as a center for pacification and an alternative to what the Communists offered. That theory was now abandoned.