Jungle of Snakes (27 page)
Authors: James R. Arnold
Triumph of the Old Guard
The success in I Corps hinted at what might have been. But entrenched U.S. Army interests resisted. One typical general reacted
to proposed changes in tactics and strategy with the comment, “I’ll be damned if I permit the United States Army, its institutions,
its doctrine, and its traditions, to be destroyed just to win this lousy war.”
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Indeed, although Abrams had intended the “one-war plan” to apply countrywide, he was unable to convince his subordinates.
Back during the early bloom of the marine CAP program, the supervising Colonel considered a “good night” to be one in which
“not a round was fired in one of our 114 CAP villages.”
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But such peacefulness did not please promotion-conscious line combat officers. Quite simply, battalion commanders did not
view their six-month tour in Vietnam as an opportunity to win the hearts and minds of the people. General Julian Ewell, a
celebrated World War II paratroop veteran, commanded the army’s Ninth Infantry Division. Ewell described the conventional
attitude: “I had two rules. One is that you would try to get a very close meshing of pacification . . . and military operations.
The other rule is that military operations would be given first priority in every case.”
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Like all professional military officers since the dawn of time, American officers in Vietnam were keenly aware of where lay
the fast path to promotion. In Vietnam, the path ran atop a statistic called “body count.” Goaded by ambitious senior generals,
subordinates understood they had to produce results, measured in enemy deaths, or face career-ending poor evaluations. During
1969, the consequences included meaningless slaughters such as the notorious “Hamburger Hill” as well as the production of
inflated statistics with individual army brigades reporting astronomical kill figures.
Under Ewell’s thrusting leadership, during the first half of 1969 the Ninth Infantry Division achieved the year’s highest
kill ratios and body counts. Ewell relentlessly pressured his brigade commanders to obtain kills and they in turn hectored
their juniors. It worked, after a fashion. The Ninth Infantry operated in the heavily populated Mekong Delta region. One of
its brigades achieved the unsurpassed prize of 1,000 kills in three straight months, with an average ratio of 158 enemy killed
for each American. Here was an attrition figure that could warm any general’s heart. When deconstructed, the numbers revealed
highly suggestive anomalies. Many of the kills came at night, and a large percentage came from the muzzles of helicopter gunships.
When tabulating enemy killed, American soldiers followed the dictum “If it’s dead, it’s VC.” However, for every fifteen people
killed, soldiers found only one weapon. When addressing this discrepancy, the division’s after action report explained that
many Viet Cong operated without weapons. How many civilians were killed is unknowable, but, as a divisional officer expressed
it, “We really blew a lot of civilians away.”
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What is certain is that during the time the Ninth Division wreaked such carnage, by the army’s own measures population security
did not improve. Regardless, Ewell received promotion to corps command and later contributed to the crafting of the Army’s
new counterinsurgency doctrine.
After the war, Abrams, best remembered among today’s warriors as the namesake of the army’s main battle tank, the Abrams M-1,
received considerable credit for redirecting the army and devising a new counterinsurgency strategy. Not so, according to
Robert Komer, who was present when Abrams replaced Westmoreland: “There was no change in strategy whatsoever.”
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Although Komer underestimates Abrams’s influence, a large set of factual data shows how hard it was to change a conventional
army into a counterinsurgency force. For example, during 1969, artillery support alone cost over five times as much as the
cost of supporting the South Vietnamese Territorial Forces who provided physical security for villagers. Overall, about 30
percent of American funding went directly to paying for ground combat operations with another 19 percent paying for the logistical
tail that supported these operations. Only 2 percent supported the National Police and militia.
WANING PUBLIC SUPPORT for the war influenced tremendously the political decision to transfer the burden to the unsteady hands
of the South Vietnamese. Toward this goal, in 1969 President Richard M. Nixon announced the new policy of “Vietnamization”
and American combat soldiers began returning home. The marines had been first ashore in Vietnam as the vanguard of the American
ground intervention. As the last marines left I Corps in May 1971, there were many signs indicating that the mission had been
accomplished. Most metrics pointed positive: a functioning and expanding economy, much greater village security, the absence
of large-scale North Vietnamese attacks, the comprehensive weakening of both the main-force Viet Cong and their village level
infrastructure. Yet some things remained to darken this rosy glow. Statistics from the Hamlet Evaluation Survey showed that
almost half of the rural villagers in I Corps lived within one kilometer of a recent terrorist incident. Nationwide, Communist
terrorists inflicted an average of 26,000 civilian casualties in both 1969 and 1970. While rural people no longer actively
supported the Viet Cong, neither did they support the South Vietnamese government. The decline in Viet Cong support was not
matched by an increase in progovernment attitudes. The villagers had been through too many changes of control to become confident
that this latest shift was permanent. And of course it was not.
The Dirty War
The new pacification strategy that began in the summer of 1968 included the American-inspired Phoenix Program. The launch
of the Phoenix Program represented belated recognition of the crucial role of the Viet Cong infrastructure. If the war was
to be won, the enemy’s ability to recruit, receive intelligence and food, spread propaganda, and terrorize had to be thwarted.
The Phoenix Program was the first comprehensive effort to identify the estimated 70,000 people who belonged to the village-level
Viet Cong infrastructure. Toward this goal it sought to coordinate all American and South Vietnamese intelligence in order
to eliminate Viet Cong operatives by targeted killings and arrests. The U.S. role was supposed to be strictly advisory. This
role proved extremely frustrating, leaving American intelligence officers chafing at their inability to get the Vietnamese
to perform according to American notions.
The program was controversial from the start, hampered by ineffectual Viet namese leadership and police corruption. It was
all well and good for American management specialists to prepare flow charts showing lines of authority and areas of responsibility,
but these efforts ignored the reality that in addition to acting as a national defense force, the Vietnamese military and
police served as “a political cabal whose first priorities were to perpetuate the system and to protect the safety, livelihood,
and future prospects of those who controlled it.”
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Consequently, the military and police assigned low-level personnel, misfits, and discards to the Phoenix Program. Official
indifference and corruption caused Phoenix advisers to estimate that only 30 percent of the suspects arrested in 1969 actually
served jail terms.
In keeping with time-honored practice, Vietnamese officials responded to American pressure to achieve results by telling the
Americans what they wanted to hear. When a raw but earnest American intelligence officer asked his more experienced sergeant
what was wrong, the sergeant replied that the Vietnamese “just go through the motions to please the Americans, sir.”
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But, driven by a mandate to achieve results, the Phoenix Program did produce. While statistics remain controversial, between
1968 and 1971 the Phoenix Program received credit for capturing, convincing to desert, or killing more than 74,000 enemy.
What then and thereafter was unclear is how many of the killed were actually enemy operatives. What is certain is that the
program generated extraordinary negative press. The antiwar press convinced many that it was merely a cover for an assassination
bureau. At the time an American official ruefully observed, “I sometimes think we would have gotten better publicity for molesting
children.”
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At the end of the day, regardless of how effective the Phoenix Program was at killing, killing was not enough. Phoenix created
holes in the Communist infrastructure. It needed to operate in conjunction with policies that planted something in the holes.
The Contest for Hau Nghia
Hau Nghia Province, just west of Saigon, was widely regarded as having the best anti–Viet Cong infrastructure program anywhere
in South Vietnam. But even here, the Saigon government was unable to capitalize on Communist weakness to develop support for
itself. Consequently, everyone, from the people manning the bureaucracy to the militia guarding the village wire, was an outsider.
An American adviser described the fundamental reason South Viet namese government pacification efforts faltered in Hau Nghia:
“The people who grew up in Hau Nghia didn’t want anything to do with the Government of Vietnam. So all of the officials and
the RD [Revolutionary Development] Cadres were from the outside. Nobody in their right mind wanted anything to do with Hau
Nghia. Officials were sent there as punishment.”
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A Phoenix intelligence officer wrote about how a Viet Cong defector enabled him to almost destroy a village’s Viet Cong infrastructure.
But, in spite of considerable effort to protect the defector, the Viet Cong struck back and assassinated him. Henceforth there
was “an unmistakable chill in the people’s attitude toward me.” The people had trusted the Americans and the government security
forces and they had failed. In this way, “a single cell of determined guerrillas had made a mockery of the government’s efforts
to provide security for the people.”
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In 1971 the long contest for Hau Nghia Province seemed to have ended with the eradication of the enemy. The Saigon government
regarded the province as secure. Run by dedicated and intelligent American officers with enormous assists from Viet Cong and
North Vietnamese defectors, the Phoenix Program in Hau Nghia Province almost crippled the Communist infrastructure. But the
Communists had prepared for this moment beginning back in the late 1950s when they had started their operations by focusing
on building village-level support. The Communist cadres were well schooled in the ebb and flow of protracted revolutionary
warfare. A dedicated handful stayed with their tasks, undercover, hidden, but still deeply embedded within the fabric of Hau
Nghia village life. In some villages only two or three survived, but they were just enough to instill fear. Even when Hau
Nghia was judged most secure, not a single government official in the province would risk sleeping outside the barbed wire.
During 1971, assassination teams killed a government official or Communist turncoat every few days in Hau Nghia.
Meanwhile, in remote strongholds in the hinterland and particularly in sanctuaries just over the Cambodian border, North Vietnamese
regulars rested and refitted, confident in the knowledge that because of Nixon’s Vietnamization policy, time was on their
side. Most rural villagers, and many South Vietnamese officials and soldiers, shared their view that the hard-won security
would not persist after the Americans departed. They rightly suspected that what ever success pacification had achieved rested
on the firm might of superior American military force. So as the American tide went out, government control of rural villages
collapsed like a castle built of sand. And the Communist cadres returned to rebuild their shadow governments and prepare for
the next offensive.
In addition, the ever-adaptive Communists changed tactics. By 1972 an estimated two thirds of Hau Nghia’s Communist infrastructure
were disguised as loyal citizens. To uncover them required patient police detective techniques. To thwart such work, North
Viet namese regular formations from sanctuaries just over the Cambodian border raided into Hau Nghia to “bolster revolutionary
morale.” As a Phoenix officer recalled, “As long as we were up to our ears in sapper attacks and the like, it was difficult
to find the time to root out the village political cadre and guerrillas.”
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Looking back, the years 1969 to 1971 could be seen as the high-water mark for the pacification of rural Vietnam, a time when
“the Americans and their South Viet namese allies came as close as they would ever come to winning the war for the countryside.”
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Indeed, by 1971 Hau Nghia was relatively quiet. But it was not secure. Government supporters continued to live under the
cloud of terror. North Vietnamese attacked at will from their cross-border sanctuaries. Consequently, the night still belonged
to the Communists and, as the province’s senior American adviser recalled, “that’s all the enemy needed.”
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The Finger of Blame
AS THE LAST AMERICAN ADVISERS DEPARTED Vietnam in 1972, CORDS officials were cautiously optimistic. By their measures pacification
had made steady progress for the past three years. Many provinces appeared free of violence while enjoying unprecedented economic
prosperity. The Viet Cong seemed to have abandoned former strongholds and were reduced to forcible recruitment to replenish
losses. In the minds of CORDS officials, the fact that the enemy was using conventional military operations featuring North
Vietnamese regular divisions proved the success of the counterinsurgency against the guerrillas. In 1972, the Communist Easter
Offensive, a conventional ground invasion, collapsed beneath American aerial bombardment. This too seemed to vindicate the
wisdom of the allied pacification campaign. When the 1975 invasion secured victory for the Communists, a photo of a Russian-built
tank battering down the gate of the Presidential Palace in downtown Saigon reinforced the notion that South Vietnam had fallen
to a conventional military invasion. This notion, which overlooked the Viet Cong flag flying atop the tank’s turret and ignored
the fact that the Viet Cong provided more than half of the invasion’s administrative and service personnel and also performed
key combat functions, eclipsed most discussion about the American counterinsurgency record.
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Furthermore, by then the blame game was already well under way, with most fingers pointing to the top.
Westmoreland emerged from the war a lightning rod of criticism for his unimaginative, orthodox tactics and strategy. In fact,
he had been a model soldier, employing the doctrine taught by his nation’s foremost military schools and observing the limitations
imposed by his commander in chief. It was not purely his fault that his nation mistakenly supposed that insurgents could be
defeated by conventional forces employing conventional tactics according to a strategic doctrine devised to defeat the Russians
on the plains of Eu rope. Perhaps a military mind of the foremost class would have perceived that nothing in the historical
record supported this belief, but America’s founding traditions work against the emergence of a military genius. It could
be observed in Westmoreland’s defense that President Johnson expected decisive results within a time span tolerable to the
American public. Consequently Westmoreland perceived that he did not have time for pacification. In his mind decisive results
could be obtained only through large-scale battle. This thinking was completely in accord with the U.S. bureaucratic bias.
In spite of President Kennedy’s call for a new approach to combat Communist revolutionary warfare, both the civilian and military
components of the government remained wedded to conventional approaches. The marines notably tried to adjust their methods
but they were the exception.
Neither senior American military nor political leadership had ever understood the Communist protracted-war strategy. North
Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap explained the challenge: “The enemy will be caught in a dilemma: he has to drag out the
war in order to win and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long drawn out
war.”
2
When planning its counterinsurgency strategy, American leaders failed to understand the insurgent strategy with its emphasis
on the seamless interplay between political and psychological factors and military actions. The Vietnamese Communist generals
had a clearer comprehension of one of the Western world’s most famous strategic dictums, Clausewitz’s statement “War is a
mere continuation of policy by other means.”
3
The National Liberation Front viewed their armed forces as tools to gain political goals. American generals saw their armed
forces as tools to destroy the enemy military forces. Moreover, in the words of a sen-ior Viet Cong official, the Americans
“seriously exaggerated their own ability to inflict damage relative to their opponents’ elasticity and durability.”
4
American intervention resulted from a strategic analysis shared by three presidential administrations that likened Vietnam
to the first in a row of dominos. If the Communists successfully toppled the first, the rest would inevitably fall. When North
Vietnam finally conquered South Vietnam in 1975, the domino theory received its acid test. Instead of triggering a chain reaction
of collapse, the fall of the first domino caused the others to turn inward on themselves. Viet namese fought Cambodians, who
defended themselves with Chinese help. China attacked Vietnam. The glue that had bonded Communist solidarity, Western occupation,
dissolved after the United States departed. There was unspeakable suffering in the killing fields of Cambodia and in the “reeducation
camps” of the former South Vietnam, but Communist expansion through Southeast Asia did not occur. The domino theory proved
a fallacy.
This strategic blunder cost the lives of 58,193 Americans. Precise Vietnamese losses are unknowable. South Viet namese military
fatalities were probably close to a quarter of a million. According to a 1995 North Vietnamese government announcement, Communist
military losses between 1954, the end of the First Indochina War, and 1975, the end of the Second Indochina War, totaled 1.1
million dead. Two million North Vietnamese and 2 million South Viet namese civilians perished during this period.
The Question of What Might Have Been
After the war Robert Komer observed, “The greatest problem with pacification was that it wasn’t tried seriously until too
late.”
5
The inability of the Marine Corps and the U.S. Army to agree about an appropriate pacification strategy did impair the counterinsurgency
fight. The relationship was so strained that in 1967, after two years of war, the marines felt it necessary to issue a formal
“Clarification of Terms” simply in order to define what pacification meant. It was no wonder that South Vietnamese officials,
who were supposed to be the lead actors in the pacification fight, remained confused about how to proceed.
A catalogue of program names readily indicates the erratic course of pacification in Vietnam: Reconstruction, Civic Action,
Land Development Centers, Agglomeration Camps, Agrovilles, Strategic Hamlets, New Life Hamlets, Hoc Tap (Cooperation), Chien
Thang (Victory), Rural Construction, Rural Reconstruction, Revolutionary Development. Until the implementation of CORDS in
1967, pacification in Vietnam was a confusion of agencies, programs, and strategies that were underfunded, uncoordinated,
and often in competition. Thereafter pacification became a highly bureaucratized program groaning under the weight of management
assessment tools. The resultant focus on program management had the unforeseen consequence of losing touch with South Vietnam’s
real social, political, and military problems.
While American pacification efforts focused on improved efficiency, reorganization, and the application of more resources,
American-sponsored civic action and civil affairs efforts were highly biased toward engineering projects such as opening roads
and waterways and building service infrastructure. By emphasizing management and engineering solutions, the Americans were
doing what they did well. However, because underdevelopment was not the foundation of the insurgents’ strength, development
was not a relevant response.
The two most promising approaches to pacification were the Special Forces’ Civilian Irregular Defense Group and the Marine
Corps’ Combined Action Platoon. The CIDG program developed effective militia who could defend their homes and find enemy forces
better than conventional American forces. The focus on the big-unit war sucked in the CIDGs to the detriment of their original
purpose of providing local security and intelligence. Yet, just as had been the case in Malaya or in all other counterinsurgencies,
intelligence was the key. The departing commander of the Fifth Special Forces reflected in June 1966 that “the single greatest
U.S. shortcoming in Vietnam is our lack of timely, accurate intelligence. Soldiers’ complaints about their repeated ‘walks
in the woods’ without contact give evidence of this problem.”
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American leaders never had the patience to develop their own intelligence networks and dismantle the Viet Cong infrastructure.
Instead, they flung even their Special Forces and their loyal CIDG units into the effort to find and destroy the enemy’s big
units. Between 1965 and 1968 the CIDGs operated more like mobile mercenaries than local defense teams. They were good at it,
but it was an unwise use of their potential.
As with the CIDG forces, so with the marines; in Westmoreland’s mind, elite American soldiers were being wasted in passive
village security missions and he could not stand it. At the time and during the subsequent, ongoing refights of the war, the
marines’ CAP approach to counterinsurgency offered an appealing alternative to what actually transpired. As Robert Thompson
declared at the time, the CAPs were “quite the best idea I have seen in Vietnam.”
7
It is useful to reflect that by the summer of 1969, the program total peaked at 114 CAPs, just under the goal of 120 originally
envisioned as a starting point back in the heady days of 1966. In other words, after years of effort, the CAP program was
stuck near the number from where the “ink blot” spread of pacification was supposed to begin. By then, as Komer noted, it
was too late.
The CAP approach was based on the clear-eyed analysis that defeating an insurgency required patience and a long-term commitment.
In 1965 the Johnson administration was unwilling to accept such a commitment. It made no effort to persuade the American public
that a protracted effort was required. So the question of whether the American public would have tolerated an ongoing expenditure
of blood and treasure associated with an open-ended commitment to Vietnam is unknowable. What is certain is that if faced
with the marine approach nationwide, the inventive foe would have altered his tactics and strategy.
The largest segment of the South Vietnamese population, the rural peasantry, simply never supported the South Vietnamese government.
Since the arrival of the Japanese in 1941, villagers had seen outsiders representing different governments and political views
come and go. They perceived the American-supported South Viet namese government to be a continuation of rule by an alien elite
little different from the French colonial administration. They considered it aloof, corrupt, inefficient, and totally lacking
in legitimacy, a viewpoint widely shared by those Americans who lived among the villagers. At best, in places where enough
American or South Vietnamese soldiers occupied the ground, the rural people acquiesced to Saigon’s rule. Genuine, deeply held
support was rare. Within the time span that American politicians gave themselves to win the war, no amount of American sacrifice
would alter this fact.
THE UNITED STATES and its Vietnamese allies defined security as freedom from enemy attack. Both South Vietnamese and American
generals complained that they lacked the manpower to protect rural areas. American manpower was unavailable for this mission
because of the focus on the big-unit war. Robert Komer claimed, “While many initiatives, experiments and even programs were
undertaken at one time or another, none was on a scale or in a manner to have sufficient impact and all were overshadowed
by the big-unit war.”
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According to MACV strategy, the relentless pursuit of enemy main-force units would provide a shield behind which the South
Vietnamese government would pacify the villages. In 1969 a marine officer challenged this concept: “The rationale that ceaseless
U.S. operations in the hills could keep the enemy from the people was an operational denial of the fact that in large measure
the war was a revolution which started in the hamlets and that therefore the Viet Cong were already among the people when
we went to the hills.”
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Indeed, back in 1967 a district adviser serving in I Corps complained that the security situation was terrible. An army Colonel
replied he did not see it that way: his division was in the hills killing the enemy at a fantastic rate. The adviser replied,
“Colonel, that’s your war, not mine.” That night a Viet Cong sapper team infiltrated district headquarters and killed the
adviser. Months later, his replacement reported that the situation had not improved; the Viet Cong still dominated the villages,
bitterly adding that the same American “division was still out in the hills bringing them security.”
10
In the postwar debate, veterans and military analysts alike spilled a great deal of ink about what had gone wrong. Some, like
Marine Corps commandant General Leonard Chapman, were quite willing to dismiss bluntly the entire war as an aberration: “We
got defeated and thrown out, the best thing we can do is forget it.”
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Most attention focused on the war’s best-known features: the conduct of the air war, the efficacy of large-scale search-and-destroy
operations, and the wisdom of a strategy of gradual escalation. When specialists examined the actual design and conduct of
pacification programs, interservice rivalry—the historic tension between the army and the Marine Corps—tended to produce more
heat then light.
Advocates of the so-called enclave strategy argue to this day that the marines’ Combined Action Program provided a winning
model. Critics maintain that as long as North Vietnam was able to send reinforcements, any pacification program could not
succeed. Still others said that absent real political reform, the South Vietnamese government was never going to enlist enough
popular support to defeat the Viet Cong military-political infrastructure.
One conclusion is unavoidable: in Vietnam the insurgents employed a deft blend of propaganda and terror to control enough
of the population to maintain the fight. Regardless of a variety of American assistance programs and promises from the South
Vietnamese government, most civilians never felt secure from Communist reprisal. Before U.S. combat troops arrived, villagers
experienced a variety of poorly conceived and poorly executed pacification programs. After 1965, they saw American and South
Vietnamese forces routinely occupy and then abandon their villages. They learned to believe Viet Cong propaganda teams who
delivered the not so veiled threat that the government and American forces would soon leave but “we will be here forever.”
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