The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  The Army began a policy of rotating troops midway through the Korean War, in 1951, on the humane grounds that men should not be left in combat indefinitely. This tactic also allowed seasoned soldiers to move into other units where they would be useful should war break out with the Soviet Union. Yet this policy carried a surprisingly high price for the people it supposedly was helping: It likely led to the deaths of many American soldiers, and also undercut larger military aims. Under the rotation policy, the performance of combat units in Korea began to decline. By late 1952, most of the younger officers with World War II experience had gone home, replaced by green men with “little or no acquaintance with the battlefield,” records an official Army history. “Most of the troops sent over from the United States lacked field training and had to learn the hard way. By the time the new men became proficient soldiers, they had amassed enough points to qualify them for rotation and the process had to start all over again.” Patrolling by frontline units, an all-important function for keeping troops on their toes and commanders aware of enemy moves, especially suffered. If a patrol is ordered to go forward five hundred yards to see whether an enemy machine gun is in place, but it goes only three hundred yards and returns to state that it went the entire distance and saw nothing, troops may well die. In a surprising report for someone in a semi-official position, S. L. A. Marshall, the Army historian, noted in a memoir that by late in the Korean War, “patrol leaders had learned to lie with some proficiency.”

  The effect of rotation on the 65th Regiment late in the Korean War was a case in point. “Stripped of its experienced leadership and spirited volunteers, the 65th sank into a gradual decline that was to result, finally, in a scandalous bugout [soldiers running away from an attack in October 1952], after which the Army court-martialed 92 of its men,” noted Clay Blair. Paul Gorman, later a general but then a young lieutenant, was surprised to find soldiers in the 65th smoking marijuana “every night.” The regiment’s commander blamed its weakness on excessive rotation. In the first nine months of 1952, the 3,500-man unit had a total of more than 9,000 men among its ranks. (That is, 1,334 lost as casualties; 3,963 rotated; and 3,825 replacements.) That is a level of turbulence that destroys cohesion and trust, and so undermines combat effectiveness.

  It might not have seemed possible to come up with a worse method of rotation than the Army had used late in the Korean War, but in Vietnam it found a way. In a new wrinkle, under a system devised in 1964 by Gen. Johnson, the Army chief of staff, officers were given a break. Enlisted soldiers would continue to spend a year fighting, as they had in the Korean War, but their officers would spend six months in staff positions followed by six months leading a unit, or vice versa. The Army’s leaders argued that commanders were worn out after six months of sustained combat, but evidence indicates that this was a fatuous argument. First, as historian Adrian Lewis, himself a former Army officer, noted, “few units were in sustained combat,” and most support units, such as those providing logistics, were not in combat at all. Also, dispositive data, when collected, disproved the assertion: After the war was over, a survey of officers at the Army Command and General Staff College found that only 8 percent reported “burnout” at the end of their six months of command. Rather, the authors of the survey, Maj. Arnold Daxe Jr. and Capt. Victor Stemberger, found that “the major deterrent to true professionalism was that an officer did not stay in the same job in the same place long enough to become knowledgeable in the specifics of their situation.” Another Army personnel expert, Walter Ulmer, agreed, saying later that “the problem with six-month or twelve-month command tours is that you can do some really dumb things and they don’t come back to haunt you until after you are gone. . . . It is easy to be a spectacular commander for six months. It is tougher to be a spectacular commander for eighteen months.”

  Even less considered was how changes in personnel policies—promotion, relief, and rotation—altered the long-term rules governing military careers and so changed combat behavior. Explicit or not, there is always an incentive structure built into such policies. What gets an officer ahead? What does the organization expect, and what does it flatly reject? What is deemed intolerable behavior? For example, there tends to be a connection between rotation and risk aversion. If one is in a war for the duration, and the road home goes through Berlin and Tokyo, as the World War II saying had it, then there is a clear incentive to take some risks. In such a situation, inaction not only postponed the inevitable but also gave the enemy a chance to rest, recover, and build up his defenses. By contrast, if everyone rotates home at a set time regardless of the state of the war, and there is little relationship between one’s performance in a tour of duty and subsequent promotions, there is less incentive to take risks and there is every incentive to simply serve the time, protect one’s people, and move on. Even if a commander does not succumb to that logic, but his peers do, then his risk taking will be easier for the enemy to counter and so more likely to fail, because the foe is not being challenged by risk taking elsewhere along the front. Rotation thus tends to push commanders toward the average, as the incompetent are tolerated along with the excellent. Whatever their performance, everyone simply rotates, and combat tours become a matter of “ticket punching.”

  Rotation also reinforced the disinclination of the Army in Vietnam to relieve failing officers and instead encouraged simply micromanaging them. If someone was going to go home in a few months, why go to the trouble of moving him out and finding a replacement? By the time a commander became certain a subordinate was unfit for his position, the time to rotate that officer often was approaching. Thus, it frequently was easier simply to bypass the problem and wait for the rotation. This could be done by pulling the officer’s unit back from frontline combat or by relying heavily on the executive officer (the commander’s deputy) or, most commonly, by simply monitoring the officer closely, watching his every move—that is, relying on micromanagement. The new policies represented a triumph of management over leadership, making it easier to run the organization but not necessarily making the organization more effective. In other words, the Army would be easier for bureaucrats to manage on a day-to-day basis, but it was not being developed to prevail in combat. Historian Keith Nolan, author of eleven books about the Vietnam War, judged that the rotation policy “cast an amateurish quality over the war effort as a whole and resulted in needless casualties.”

  Intentionally churning personnel was one way to run an Army, but it was no way to win a war. In Vietnam, as in Korea, the Army seemed more interested in taking care of its own officer corps than in winning. DePuy said as much: “With regard to having six months in command and trying to rotate everybody through, I’ve always said that was running the war for the benefit of the officer corps.”

  Sometimes an odd or stressful personnel policy can be justified on the grounds of combat effectiveness, but here the opposite was the case. A 1968 Pentagon study, “Experience in Command and Battle Deaths,” found that units operating under experienced commanders had roughly two-thirds the death rate of units with less experienced leaders. Also, American soldiers fighting in Vietnam were more than twice as likely to die in the first halves of their yearlong tours than in the second halves: Some 18,991 Army soldiers were killed during their first six months, while 6,759 were killed in their second six months.

  Rotation also left tactical commanders unfamiliar with some basic facts about the country. For example, noted Thayer, the Pentagon analyst, over the years a seasonal pattern emerged in which fighting peaked in May and subsided in the last quarter of the year. This may have contributed to the waves of optimism that occasionally swamped American analyses. “Major offensives or waves of communist activity did not occur during the last three months of the year and this was when the year-end reports of progress were being written.” He added that he had never met an American who had fought in Vietnam who was aware of this predictable yearly cycle.

  The rotation of Ame
ricans also would prove dangerous to the Vietnamese population. One of the root causes of the 1968 My Lai massacre of villagers by American troops, the Army’s official investigation would find, was personnel turbulence created by rotation and the policy of six-month command tours for most officers. “This inquiry found that the resulting lack of continuity and the problems created with the personnel replacement process were detrimental to unit effectiveness,” Lt. Gen. William Peers wrote.

  The policy also strained relations with the Vietnamese military, observed Lt. Gen. Truong: “The relatively rapid turnover of advisers at battalion level had a definite adverse effect on the advisory program.” During the course of the war, tactical commanders in the South Vietnamese military typically went through a total of twenty to thirty American advisers, noted a study conducted after the war by former South Vietnamese officers.

  The short-tour policy for officers even hurt the very people it was supposed to help by corroding the professionalism of the officer corps. Lt. Col. David Holmes charged in an Army publication that it probably reinforced what he called “the ‘ticket-punching’ careerist syndrome still visible in today’s officer corps.”

  It also might have encouraged the risk-averse tendencies of the Army’s officer corps. By the end of the Vietnam War, retired Army Lt. Col. Wade Markel concluded, the Army had stumbled into a

  culture of insecurity that engendered a general predilection for prudence and caution. That general predilection for prudence found its expression in the adoption of the perimeter defense as battalion and brigade commanders’ preferred form of maneuver in Vietnam. . . . Thus an Army whose pre-WWII traditions and wartime practice inclined its members to seek enemy weakness reflexively and to exploit that weakness relentlessly became an Army obsessed with covering its own weakness, an Army that avoided error rather than exploited opportunity.

  Combat ineffectiveness

  Given all this, it should not be surprising that, while Americans often fought hard in Vietnam, it is not clear that they fought well on the whole. For all its firepower, the American military was less intimidating to its enemy than might be expected. Army commanders actually tended toward “excessive caution” in waging their war, one Army historian noted. This was measurable: Pentagon studies found in 1967 that more than 90 percent of company-size firefights were initiated by the foe. “The great majority of all ground battles were at the enemy’s choice of time, place, type and duration,” noted historian Guenter Lewy. The enemy also tended to decide when to break contact, and generally was not followed far. “Pursuit became a forgotten art,” observed retired Army Lt. Gen. Dave Richard Palmer. “No sizable communist force was ever hounded to its lair and wiped out.”

  Americans also showed a lack of professionalism in the field, tending, for example, to disclose too much information while talking over their radios, said Air Force Maj. Gen. George Keegan, an intelligence specialist: “Our ground, naval and air forces have paid an enormous price for their near total lack of communications discipline. The enemy always knew where we were, what we intended to do, and when.” Overall, conceded Lt. Gen. Davidson, the top American military intelligence officer in Vietnam at that time, U.S. communications security was “atrocious,” with even senior officers routinely discussing plans and troop movements over unsecured radios. There were, he added, “all sorts of other things that were dead giveaway indications of American operations,” all the way down to when units did their laundry.

  Veterans of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army agreed with that assessment. One reason for their superior intelligence was a focused infiltration program that in part capitalized on the Americans’ eagerness to have sex with Vietnamese women. “We placed our own girls in the various hotels and offices to service” the Americans, said Nguyen Thi Dinh, a woman who was the deputy commander of the Viet Cong and later a major general in the regular Communist army. She explained:

  When it became necessary for us to attack the Americans, these women would be the ones to place the bombs and the mines. We even had people in the High Military Command of the Americans. In fact, we had people in every enemy office and we were able to have a firm grasp of the enemy’s situation as a result. And whenever we decided to attack, our targets were always very significant targets. We never hit the ordinary American targets.

  As a result, some Communist veterans would recall a confidence about attacking Americans, especially as the U.S. Army began to deteriorate rapidly in 1968–69. “The U.S. soldier is very poor when moving through the terrain,” one Communist fighter told his interrogators. This assessment of the Americans might reflect a bit of resentment, given that captured fighters complained in interrogations that every time they got close to American lines, the Americans would pull back and call in artillery fire and air strikes. That same fighter added, “An American unit cannot take or destroy a machine-gun position in a properly prepared bunker except by calling for air or artillery.” Huong Van Ba, an NVA artillery colonel, said, “Their idea was to surround us with ground forces, then destroy us with artillery and rockets, rather than by attacking directly with infantry. Usually we could get away from that, even when they used helicopters to try and surround us, because we knew the countryside so well and we could get out fast. That happened at Soi Cut, where they destroyed three villages while they were trying to catch us.”

  Communist veterans also came to doubt the tenacity and adaptability of American forces, especially later in the war. “They had a lot of bombs and shells, they were very powerful as far as war materials were concerned, but they did not fight very well at all,” said Nguyen Van Nghi, a Northerner who fought as a member of the Viet Cong from 1967 to the end of the war. “They were very slow in moving around, they were not really that mobile. In combat you have to be quick physically and mentally. But in combat the Americans were not very quick—they reacted very slowly.”

  Nguyen Thi Hoa, who as a teenage girl fought with the Viet Cong in the Battle of Hue in 1968, said she thought the Americans’ sentimentality made them vulnerable: “When the American soldiers fell down and died, three or four others would jump in to carry the body away, crying. . . . So we took advantage of the situation to kill the rest of the group.” A third VC veteran, Dang Xuan Teo, said that many of his comrades actually preferred combating the Americans: “The puppet troops were also Vietnamese and, therefore, they were quite devious in many ways. The Americans in general were quite naive. It was easy to fight them.”

  In particular, the Communists found the perimeters of American bases to be remarkably porous. A captured North Vietnamese lieutenant who had been badly wounded told his interrogators, “All the U.S. defensive positions are easy to get through. I can say that I have never encountered a tough one in my experience. We just crawl slowly through the wire, cutting the bottom strands.”

  Perhaps most important, Communist fighters seemed to have a better grasp of the nature of the conflict in which they were engaged. As the lieutenant said in his interrogation, “We know we cannot defeat the Americans, as it is almost impossible to defeat you, but the military operations exist just to back the political aspects. We will win the war politically, not militarily.” Though it was coming from a junior officer, this comment indicates a better understanding of the war than Westmoreland and other American generals possessed.

  Everyone makes mistakes, especially when operating under the extreme mental and physical stress of combat. Indeed, part of the art of combat is forcing the enemy to commit errors. But victory in war often goes to those who are able first to recognize their mistakes and then to correct them. The American generals did not seem able or even willing to do so in Vietnam. For years, American generals refused to recognize mistakes, to the point of self-deception. As historian John Gates put it, “The stubborn commitment of the high command to error defies belief, but the evidence of it would seem to be overwhelming.”

  Seemingly unable to do their own jobs,
the American generals of the Vietnam War often sought to do the work of their subordinates. One of the enduring images of the Vietnam War is that of commanders hovering over the battlefield in command helicopters. William Rindberg recalled being a platoon leader in a serious fight: “The battalion commander was almost forced off the air, and the brigade commander was on the net controlling one of the platoons, the division commander was talking with the company commander. All this was going on and the company commander was getting pretty frustrated. He couldn’t even talk to his own platoons because everybody was on his net.”

  The relatively new technology of the helicopter might have enabled generals to try to escape their roles. Instead of trying to improve strategy, generals and colonels climbed into aircraft and became what one general called “squad leaders in the sky.” They found themselves in a situation where the fundamental task of a general—to understand the nature of the fight and adjust his force to it—may have been all but undoable. When strategy becomes inexplicable, the natural tendency is to retreat into tactics. “Kill more Viet Cong” was at best a tactical imperative, but it became the mantra from the White House and the Pentagon down to the headquarters of the U.S. military in Vietnam.

  CHAPTER 19

  Tet ’68

  The end of Westmoreland and the turning point of the war