The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  The conventional North Vietnamese Army moved in large numbers into the South, but the new Northern troops who replaced the Viet Cong were largely inexperienced. “The NVA were tenacious but not very successful against U.S. forces,” said Al Santoli, who served with the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam in 1968–69. “They suffered needless mass casualties attempting frontal assaults on U.S. positions and, in most cases, where they used concealment of terrain for ambush, they were unable to sustain initiative beyond immediate surprise against U.S. infantry.” By the spring of 1970, military mail intercepted en route from North Vietnam “was pleading with the units and the party cadre not to get engaged in military ground action at all,” recalled Maj. Gen. Elvy Roberts, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge who commanded the 1st Cavalry Division in 1969–70. “They realized they couldn’t sustain it. They were too weak. The letters said, ‘We’re winning the war at the conference table in Paris, so don’t fight the Americans.’”

  On the other side, South Vietnamese forces were increasingly seasoned, but they were not much respected by their American allies. The Americans also brought many of their own problems to the battlefield. Despite serving the most powerful nation on earth, U.S. troops at this point in the war often were short on combat experience and led in the field by similarly green sergeants and platoon leaders, largely because of shortsighted and inept personnel policies that had their origin in a fateful decision by President Johnson. In mid-1965, the Army, its eye on Vietnam, had written plans to call up 100,000 reservists for two years of active duty and also extend the enlistments of active-duty personnel. But President Johnson had vetoed that plan and instead, on July 28, 1965—a key date in the history of the war—publicly stated that he had “concluded that it is not essential to order Reserve units into service now.” It is difficult to overstate how damaging that decision was. The Army was not designed to go to war without the reserve forces. Their absence was felt in Vietnam, where the Army lacked logisticians, but perhaps even more in the United States, where reservists normally would have performed many of the tasks of training new recruits. The president’s refusal to activate the Army Reserve meant that the Army would use up its active-duty sergeants and lieutenants quickly in the following three years, with some killed and others leaving the military after their tours of duty or moving to less hazardous positions in rear-echelon units. Ironically, by not mobilizing the reserves, LBJ forced the Army to rely on involuntary conscripts much more heavily, which ultimately intensified political opposition to the war much more than a reserve call-up would have done.

  Often in warfare, it is the first year of fighting that seasons forces, which become more effective as those who survive gain skill, good leaders rise to the top, and units become more cohesive over time. Counterintuitively, as the Vietnam War progressed, the American frontline force weakened. In 1966, remembered Paul Gorman, the battalion he commanded had fourteen senior sergeants who had been in the unit for more than ten years, all of them trained by a legendary sergeant major who had landed at Normandy with the Big Red One. By contrast, he said, five years later, when he was commanding a brigade in the 101st Airborne, good sergeants who could provide the backbone of units, especially by maintaining standards and enforcing discipline, were hard to find. “I didn’t have the NCOs [non-commissioned officers]. The NCOs were gone.” By 1969, draftees made up 88 percent of the infantry riflemen in Vietnam. Another 10 percent was made up of first-term volunteers, meaning that the fighting force was almost entirely inexperienced and often led by novice first-term NCOs and officers. In one company in 1970, of two hundred men, only three—the captain, one platoon sergeant, and one squad leader—had been in the Army for more than two years. In addition, because of the rotation policy, units not only arrived green but stayed that way. “After only two months in Vietnam, I had more experience than half the men in Vietnam,” recalled one sergeant. There were plenty of career soldiers in Vietnam, but they disproportionately served at higher headquarters, not in line units doing the fighting. Small units in the field were “appalling,” agreed Donn Starry, who took command of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment at the end of that year:

  There would be a lieutenant as the company commander—he might be a captain, but if he was a captain he was a two-year captain, and he didn’t have a long tour as a lieutenant. Then you had some very junior sergeants. . . . You had absolutely no experienced leadership, and there they were out there groping with a problem of some enormity. As a regimental commander, you just had to look at the situation and say, “What have we done to ourselves? It’s not fair.” And it wasn’t their fault. It was the Army’s fault. We did that to ourselves.

  Westmoreland, in his new role as chief of staff of the Army, would compound the problem in 1969 by insisting that the most experienced soldiers be allowed to leave Vietnam first, further stripping the force of much-needed field knowledge. “Individual personnel redeployments destroyed unit integrity, increasing turbulence in units remaining,” wrote Starry. “In the end, it caused leaders to go forth to battle daily with men who did not know them and whom they did not know. The result was tragedy.”

  Abrams takes command

  In 1968 and 1969, three personnel changes at the top resulted in a major shift in the American conduct of the war. In mid-1968, Gen. Westmoreland was replaced by Gen. Abrams. Six months later, President Johnson was succeeded by Richard Nixon. Robert McNamara, meanwhile, had left office earlier in the year, replaced at the Pentagon by Clark Clifford, who would then be replaced, under Nixon, by Melvin Laird.

  There has been a running battle for decades among American military historians about whether in late 1968 and 1969, with the shift from Westmoreland to Abrams, the conduct of the war really improved. The Army itself probably has overemphasized the change, elevating it to mythic importance. At one low point in the war in Iraq, for example, commanders were recommending that subordinates read Lewis Sorley’s A Better War, a history of Abrams’s time in command in Vietnam, as evidence that things could get better in Iraq. In fact, there were more continuities between Westmoreland and Abrams than not—most units continued to do pretty much the same things in pretty much the same ways. Even so, there were significant changes in what Abrams chose to emphasize about those operations, with less talk of “body counts” and bringing the enemy to battle and more of pacification and protecting the population. More important, the nature of the war began to change, and this led to some changes in American tactics. Walter “Dutch” Kerwin, who had been Westmoreland’s chief of staff, perceived a sharp difference between the two U.S. commanders:

  The way Westy ran the organization was just the opposite from the way General Abrams would have run it. . . . [It] was quite evident that almost immediately after General Westmoreland left, we pulled out of Khe Sanh. General Abe did not believe that was the way to run a war. . . . He changed the tactics, techniques and methods of handling the corps commanders.

  Abrams put aside Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition. “In the whole picture of the war, the battles don’t mean much,” Abrams told subordinates in a comment that would have been heresy to Westmoreland, DePuy, and other generals earlier in the war. Nor, he said, did he care to be briefed on tallies of enemy killed. “I don’t think it makes any difference how many losses he takes.”

  Instead, in his meetings and briefings, Abrams expressed more interest than Westmoreland ever had in the nuts and bolts of pacification, especially about programs that supported security in the villages. What a commanding general emphasizes will ripple throughout his organization—indeed, on a day-to-day basis, the subjects he chooses to focus on might be the most important thing he can do. Abrams was using more of the approach the Marines had advocated years earlier, which was one reason he got along better with the Marines than Westmoreland had.

  It was a good time to change the emphasis, for there was a new opportunity emerging in rural areas. “Hanoi had pushed most of the best Viet Cong c
adre into the cities during Tet, and so the Tet Offensive really destroyed the flower of the Vietnam insurgency,” said Robert Komer, who was overseeing the rural pacification program. “I argued there was a vacuum in the countryside.”

  But the biggest change was over Abrams’s head and was made by the new president. By early 1969, the American priority was no longer winning the war but getting out of it. This shift was felt down to the front lines. “When Johnson rolled out and Nixon came in, the emphasis was black and white from where I sit,” said Lt. Col. Gary Riggs, who was in Vietnam from 1966 to 1970. “The emphasis became, ‘Let’s get the damn thing over. Let’s close it out, with as much dignity as we can, but let’s just back off and come home.’” This became known as the “Vietnamization” of the war. And while Westmoreland “was very aggressive, ‘We’re going to win this mother,’” Riggs said, Abrams “came with a different message, which was, ‘Contain, pacify.’”

  Oddly, the Americans were starting to leave just as their years of struggle were paying off. It was not really seen by the American public at the time, but there is little doubt now that the Communists were rapidly losing control of large parts of the South Vietnamese countryside in late 1968 and for the following three years. At the end of 1964, only 40 percent of the population had been under government control, Komer said. By the end of 1971, he noted, about 97 percent of the population was considered to be in “relatively secure” areas.

  The change in the American stance took the enemy by surprise and led to one of the most difficult phases of the war for the Communists. Hanoi’s official history of the war drops its triumphalist tone for several pages as it grimly relates how this period unfolded. “During late 1968 the enemy discovered our vulnerability in the rural areas,” the history stated. It continued:

  Because we did not fully appreciate the new enemy schemes and the changes the enemy had made in his conduct of the war and because we underestimated the enemy’s capabilities and the strength of his counterattack, when the United States and its puppets began to carry out their “clear and hold” strategy our battlefronts were too slow in shifting over to attacking the “pacification” program and we did not concentrate our political and military forces to deal with the enemy’s new plots and schemes.

  In a startling change of tone, the Communists’ history seems almost admiring of the effectiveness of the new approach:

  The political and military struggle in the rural areas declined and our liberated areas shrank. . . . The enemy built thousands of new outposts, upgraded puppet forces, drafted new troops, and expanded the puppet army, especially local forces and people’s self-defense forces used to oppress the population. They blocked our entry points and attacked our supply routes from the lowlands to our base areas. The enemy also collected and tightly controlled the people’s rice crops in order to dry up local sources of supply for our armed forces.

  That paragraph is a very good summary, through the eyes of an adversary, of how to carry out an effective counterinsurgency campaign.

  The Hanoi history mentioned in a footnote that, in one region, the Communists lost all but three or four of their forty-two rice collection points, a loss that had grim consequences for Communist forces. Some units were reduced to eating less than one hundred grams of rice a day. Hungry and dismayed, Communist soldiers began defecting in greater numbers. “The enemy’s horrible, insidious pacification program and his acts of destruction created immeasurable difficulties and complications for our armed forces and civilian population,” the history dolefully observed.

  This official history conceded that during 1969, North Vietnamese main-force units had retreated from the lowlands, and American soldiers, working with local South Vietnamese security units, had begun to push the Viet Cong out of large parts of the South. By the end of that year, it stated, “the population of our liberated areas had shrunk to 840,000 people,” while “the enemy established 1,000 new outposts and gained control over an additional one million people.” Recruitment began to dwindle, starting a vicious cycle of decline for Communist control of the countryside. In 1968, some sixteen thousand new Viet Cong had enlisted in the lowlands of the South. But in the same area in all of 1969, the Hanoi history related,

  we recruited only 100 new soldiers. . . . Our liberated areas were shrinking, our bases were under pressure, and both our local and strategic lines of supply were under ferocious enemy attack. We had great difficulty supplying our troops. . . . Some of our cadre and soldiers became pessimistic and exhibited fear of close combat and of remaining in the battle zone. Some deserted their units to flee to rear areas, and some even defected to the enemy.

  Hanoi’s official account is consistent with those given by Viet Cong veterans. “There’s no doubt that 1969 was the worst year we faced, at least the worst year I faced,” recalled Trinh Duc. “There was no food, no future.”

  Huong Van Ba, a North Vietnamese artillery officer, also had harsh memories of that time. “When the Tet campaign was over, we didn’t have enough men left to fight a major battle, only to make hit-and-run attacks on posts. So many men had been killed that morale was very low. We spent a great deal of time hiding in tunnels, trying to avoid being captured. We experienced desertions.” In mid-1969, orders from the Central Committee in Hanoi were conveyed to field commanders as “COSVN Resolution 9,” telling them to hunker down in force-preservation mode—that is, hang back, harass the Americans with sappers, and try to outlast them. “The Communists are simply avoiding contact with us,” one general said that summer. “The reasons are not clear. But there is no doubt that right now there is a very peculiar situation on the battlefield.” From 1965 to 1968, the Communists launched an average of seventy battalion-size assaults annually. In 1969 and 1970, the rate fell to twenty. This led to a virtuous cycle: Smaller and fewer operations by the enemy meant that the Americans could reduce large-scale search-and-destroy sweeps and instead conduct more small-unit patrols in the countryside, reinforcing their control.

  In addition, the Phoenix Program, aimed at rooting out the Viet Cong command infrastructure, expanded rapidly in 1968, with devastating effect. “In some locations . . . Phoenix was dangerously effective,” remembered Truong Nhu Tang, a Viet Cong official, who saw the VC network “virtually eliminated” in the province near his base area. The success of the program illustrates the point that winning over a defector is more damaging to the enemy than simply killing one of his soldiers. Nguyen Thi Dinh, the deputy commander of the Viet Cong, said in an interview years after the war ended that the Phoenix Program was greatly feared,

  because they were able to infiltrate our infrastructures, using Vietnamese to kill Vietnamese. . . . What they did was to train and organize demoralized and disenchanted people to come back into our areas and to reveal our infrastructures to the Americans. We considered this a most dangerous program for us. We were never afraid of a military operation with a full division of troops, for example. But for them to infiltrate a couple of guys deeply into our ranks would create tremendous difficulties for us.

  In a remarkable tribute to the twin policies of pacification and Vietnamization, the Communists decided to imitate the American and South Vietnamese tactics, dispersing main-force troops into villages to bolster their hold on local security.

  But for the Americans and South Vietnamese, the chimera of victory appeared too late. By the time the U.S. Army generals started getting Vietnam right—that is, operating effectively—the U.S. military had been involved in Vietnam for thirteen years and fighting there in large numbers for three. The situation had improved for the Americans tactically, but strategically they were facing an enemy force that knew they were leaving and was thus operating with the goal of simply dodging and outlasting them. “The problem was that it came too late,” Gen. DePuy later said, speaking specifically of the success of pacification and of local Vietnamese forces. “We were ready to pull out. And the North Vietnamese just kept c
oming.”

  Most important, the American people were tired of a war they had not asked for and never understood. Jeffrey Record, who served as a pacification adviser during the war, concluded, in one of the most balanced appraisals of those years, that “the United States could not have prevented the forcible reunification of Vietnam under communist auspices at a morally, materially, and strategically acceptable price.”

  Even if the American people had been willing to pay a higher price and support fighting for many more years, the Army itself was probably too weak to carry such a burden. “By ’69, it was just a joke” trying to train soldiers in the Army, recalled Herb Mock, who fought with the 25th Division in Vietnam. Charles Cooper, the Marine officer who had listened to President Johnson curse at the Joint Chiefs in 1965, was serving in Vietnam as a battalion commander in 1970. “Things were going to hell in a handbasket,” he thought. “They were just flooding us with morons and imbeciles.” Even good career officers were avoiding Vietnam, recalled William Richardson, a brigade commander at about this time. “It was very difficult to get outstanding battalion commanders to come to Vietnam. I knew one, in particular, who I tried to recruit to come to Vietnam. An outstanding officer, he didn’t want to come to Vietnam and be a battalion commander. I was distressed to see an attitude of, ‘I may damage my career.’”

  In other words, when victory was a possibility, the Army was too depleted to grasp the chance. Judith Coburn, a reporter, summarized the dilemma eloquently: “When I hear people say we could have won the war, I always think: Where were you going to get the soldiers?” As a result of Westmoreland’s and Johnson’s squandering of people and resources from 1965 to 1968, the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies were unable to take lasting advantage of the huge opportunities that emerged from 1969 to 1971.