Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces sic-3

by Tom Clancy

  Over the next five years, this force structure changed considerably. Under MAAG's direction, the ARVN evolved to a conventional force that mirrored the structure and methods of operation of the U.S. Army. In 1955, the National Security Council raised ARVN's manpower allocation to 150,000; MAAG then scrapped the three territorial divisions in favor of six new light infantry divisions, which were similar to American divisions and no longer regionally oriented. Another field division was also added, bringing the total number to ten (six light and four field). By 1959, the light divisions had been further transformed into standard heavier infantry divisions, and the field divisions had become armored cavalry regiments.

  Meanwhile, the Viet Cong insurgency in South Vietnam continued to grow. Civil authorities were increasingly overwhelmed, and the ARVN was more and more called upon to assist in counterinsurgency. MAAG's mission, once simply to design and train the ARVN, now included recommending a strategy for employing those forces against the insurgents.

  In 1960, Lieutenant General Lionel C. McGarr assumed command of MAAG. Faced with the formal establishment of the National Liberation Front that year, and the activation of the Peoples' Liberation Armed Forces, McGarr and MAAG began to develop a counterinsurgency plan for 1961. The plan focused primarily on offensive operations designed to destroy guerrilla forces in the field. The objective was to "find, fix, and destroy the enemy." This was even before President Kennedy blessed other, more unconventional approaches to counterinsurgency.

  In spite of the growing involvement of MAAG and the ARVN in counterinsurgency operations, the guerrillas continued to gain strength, and Viet Cong infrastructures and control increased rapidly, especially in rural areas where the government had little presence or influence.

  In response to the worsening situation, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to upgrade MAAG. In November 1961, they proposed the creation of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, and on February 8, 1962, MACV was activated under the command of General Paul Harkins.[12] MACV's mission was the same as its predecessor's: to "assist the government of South Vietnam in defeating the Communist insurgency"; and it took the same operational approach: to destroy the enemy's field forces through large-scale operations. MACV doctrine and tactics were also conventional: making extensive use of helicopters and air mobile operations to attempt to surprise and "fix" guerrillas.

  The MACV approach was not totally conventional, however. During that time MACV also attempted a pacification program (a kind of heavy-handed civil affairs operation), and in January 1962, the "Strategic Hamlet Program" was initiated. This program grew out of two distinct plans: The first had been proposed by MAAG before the activation of MACV; the other (the one preferred by the regime of South Vietnam's President Diem) had been proposed by the British Advisory Team, headed by counterinsurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson.

  At that time, the insurgency had been building for approximately six years, and the six provinces near Saigon had become Viet Cong strongholds with well-established infrastructures — an obvious threat to the capital. In MAAG's view, the government had little choice but to start clearing the areas closest to home. Thus, the MAAG plan would begin with the pacification of the six provinces closest to Saigon.

  MAAG's target date for the pacification of these provinces, as well as Kontum Province (approximately twenty miles to the north), was the end of 1961. Once that was accomplished, the priority would shift to the Mekong Delta and the Central Highlands; the rest of the country would follow. The target date for the pacification of the entire country was the end of 1964.

  The plan proposed by Thompson and the British was based on the successful British counterinsurgency in Malaya and was focused on the implementation of strict security measures by the civil guard and the self-defense corps. They proposed to launch it initially in an area of weak VC activity, not the insurgent strongholds in the provinces surrounding Saigon, and with the ARVN playing a supporting rather than a leading role.

  The final result, the Strategic Hamlet Program, was a compromise between the two plans. It consisted of three phases:

  In the first phase, intelligence would be gathered concerning the area targeted for pacification, and the political cadre expected to administer the area would be trained. The second phase called for large-scale ARVN sweep operations in the target areas, aimed at driving out Viet Cong guerrillas. In phase three, the ARVN would hand over control of the areas to the civil guard and the self-defense corps, who would establish permanent security. At the same time, much of the local population would be forcibly resettled in fortified villages, where they could be presumed to be safe from attack.

  MACV hoped that all this would somehow win over the hearts and minds of large numbers of rural Vietnamese.

  On March 19, 1962, the Strategic Hamlet Program began with an ARVN sweep, code-named "Sunrise," through Binh Doung province north of Saigon. The operation was not a rousing success. The area of the sweep was close to Viet Cong support bases and heavily infested with VC. That wasn't a problem for the ARVN troops, but it turned out to be very difficult for the civil forces whose mission was to follow up and root out the VC infrastructure. After the ARVN forces conducted the sweep, the troops left, but the sweep operation had neither destroyed nor neutralized the existing VC infrastructure. This job was left to the civil forces, who simply could not do it.

  Meanwhile, the local peasants were taken from their homes and the land they farmed for a living and forced into tin huts in euphemistically named "strategic hamlets," that were in reality refugee camps. The population resettlement left these people feeling more alienated from the regime, rather than less.

  Despite complaints from U.S. advisers, not only were these failures repeated as the program grew, but no serious attempts were made to fix them. MACV's focus was on military operations to destroy the guerrilla forces, not on long-term pacification, the program's supposed purpose. Thus the Strategic Hamlet Program never had a unified command structure; and MACV, always primarily interested in the military sweep operations, continued to provide little support to the civil guard or the self-defense forces, whose mission was long-term security.

  The South Vietnamese government, meanwhile, blatantly falsified reports: Less than a month into the program, for example, the government claimed more than 1,300 operational fortified hamlets; six months later, the number was 2,500; and when Diem was assassinated in November 1963, less than two years into the program, the total number of hamlets reported was more than 8,000. Most of these were fortified on paper only.

  MACV made no serious attempt either to challenge the Vietnamese assertions or to correct the situation on the ground.

  THE CIA AND ARMY SPECIAL FORCES

  The Strategic Hamlet Program was not the only attempt at pacification. In late 1961, Army Special Forces began to implement the CIA-conceived Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) Program, whose goal was to deny the VC access to food, supplies, recruits, and intelligence in the Central Highlands of Vietnam — and, it was hoped, to block or at least severely hinder NVA access into Vietnam from the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  The Highlands were inhabited primarily by an assortment of minority groups and primitive tribes going under the collective name of Montagnards — Mountain People (the name was supplied by the French) — though other minority groups and tribes lived in other out-of-the-way parts of the country, having long ago been driven out of the more fertile lowland plains by the Vietnamese (many of these other groups also participated in the CIDG). As in Laos with the Meo and the Kha, the Montagnards and other such groups were held in contempt by the Vietnamese, who thought of them as savages. The Vietnamese government was never enthusiastic about turning Montagnards into a counterinsurgency force, since such a force might casily turn against any Vietnamese.

  Because of these tensions, the CIDG program was at first run solely by Americans — specifically the CIA and Special Forces — and was only loosely connected to the Strategic Hamlet Program. Although the program was
conceived and funded by the CIA, the task of designing a specific strategy and implementing it fell to Special Forces. In November 1961, two Special Forces A-Detachments were deployed from the 1st Special Forces Group in Okinawa to begin the program.

  The strategy developed by the SF, called the Village Defense Program, was simple and defensive in nature:

  The A-Detachments would locate themselves in an area, win the trust of the people and local villages, and begin to prepare simple defenses. They would meanwhile recruit and train men from local villages with the aim of forming a small paramilitary "strike force" designed and trained to provide the villages with a full-time security force. They would provide reinforcements to villages under attack, patrol between villages, and set ambushes for the VC.

  Once the SF had established an effective strike force, they would begin to organize and train "village defenses." These groups received basic training in weapons handling, were taught to defend and fortify their own villages, and fought only when their own village was under direct attack. Each village was provided with a radio, which allowed them to contact the SF teams and the strike force for reinforcement in the event of trouble.

  Once the village defenders were established, the SF teams supervised programs to improve the quality of life for villagers. They established infirmaries and provided minor medical treatment, constructed shelters, improved sanitation, and generally helped in any way they could. As soon as a mutually supporting cluster of villages had been established, the process began all over again, and the perimeter was pushed out farther to include other villages.

  The success of the two A-Detachments was extraordinary, and by April 1962, forty villages in Darlac Province had voluntarily entered the program. In May 1962, eight more teams were sent from Okinawa to Vietnam, and the success continued. In July, the CIA requested sixteen more SF teams, and by August, approximately two hundred villages were participating in the program. Overall, the Special Forces defensive strategy, focused on denying the Viet Cong access to the indigenous population and the resources they could provide, was working very well.

  It differed markedly from the Strategic Hamlet Program in that it was able to provide an effective presence, and it involved no forced resettlement.

  MACV TAKES CHARGE

  As the size, scope, and effectiveness of the CIDG continued to grow, it became doubtful whether the CIA had the personnel and resources to manage the number of SF troops involved. Washington therefore decided to switch control of SF operations from the CIA to MACV. The transfer (called Operation SWITCHBACK) was completed in July 1963. Once MACV was in command, both the missions assigned to Special Forces and the execution of the CIDG program began to change.

  The change was for the worse. MACV understood neither the nature of special operations nor the special requirements of counterinsurgency.

  For starters, MACV viewed SF involvement in the CIDG program as "static training activities," and felt the Special Forces would be better used in more "active and offensive operations." As a result, Army SF were largely removed from their role in administering and expanding the CIDG Program and were instead assigned to provide surveillance along the Cambodian and Laotian borders and to conduct offensive, direct-action missions against Viet Cong bases.

  This mission change began in late 1963, and was completed near the end of 1964. On January 1, 1965, Colonel John Speers, the commander of the newly organized and established 5th Special Forces Group, issued a letter of instruction outlining the mission assigned to the group by MACV. These were "border surveillance and control, operations against infiltration routes, and operations against VC war zones and base areas." All of these missions clearly reflected MACV's offensive strategy and focused on finding, fixing, and destroying the enemy forces in the field.

  In order to free up U.S. Special Forces for offensive operations and border surveillance, the responsibility both for administering the CIDG program and for training strike forces and village defenders was transferred to the Vietnamese Special Forces (LLDB). Unfortunately, the LLDB possessed neither the skills nor the leadership of their U.S. counterparts, and worse, they came equipped with the normal Vietnamese contempt for the minority populations on which the CIDG Program had focused. As a result, many gains made earlier in "winning" the population were lost.

  In a further change, the government of Vietnam integrated the CIDG Program's strike forces into the ARVN, and MACV began employing them in an offensive role, for which they had never been intended.

  Before long, the strike forces were being airlifted from one place to another, in support of Special Forces raids, surveillance missions, or conventional ARVN operations. In October 1963, MACV unveiled a plan to use CIDG strike forces, in conjunction with SF, to "attack VC base camps and interdict the infiltration of men and supplies from North Vietnam."

  Removing the strike forces from their local area of operations and employing them in areas unfamiliar to them drastically reduced their effectiveness. This in turn not only weakened the mutually supporting village defense system of the original CIA-SF designed program, but without detailed familiarity with the local terrain, strike forces became little more than marginally trained infantry.

  Partly to exploit the success of the program and partly to make greater military use of CIDG camps and villages, MACV tried to expand the program — and quickly. CIDG camps began to be located for strictly military reasons, without regard to political or demographic realities. For example, camps were set astride suspected infiltration routes or in areas of heavy Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Army (NVA) activity. Neither served the original purpose of population control.

  Meanwhile, in spite of the best efforts of MACV, ARVN, and all the U.S. and Vietnamese government agencies involved, the situation in Vietnam worsened. By the end of 1964, the Viet Cong were conducting coordinated regimental operations. In early January 1965, the insurgents attacked and seized the village of Binh Gia, only forty miles from Saigon. In reclaiming the town, ARVN forces suffered 201 men killed in action, compared with only thirty-two confirmed VC killed. This event, and others like it, ultimately led to the commitment of U.S. combat troops to Vietnam.

  The first U.S. division to be deployed as a whole was the 1st Air Cavalry Division. Once in country, in November 1965, it was immediately deployed to the Central Highlands, one of the areas of greatest VC strength, to begin search-and-destroy operations. They quickly encountered and attacked a large concentration of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in the la Drang Valley. The battle resulted in 1,200 enemy killed in action, with the 1st Cav losing only a comparatively small 200. This success reinforced the Army's belief that attrition was an appropriate strategy. The victory also reinforced MACV's conviction that North Vietnam was behind the insurgency (though North Vietnam troops were not actively involved until the United States itself began sending regular troops).[13]

  More U.S. troops followed, in ever greater numbers — and MACV continued its strategy of attrition, supported by the application of maximum firepower, until U.S. troops began to be withdrawn from Vietnam.

  CARL STINER

  The Army sent Carl Stiner to Vietnam in 19 e tells us about his tour there.

  Stiner:

  I completed the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in mid-June 1967, and was given a couple of weeks' leave to resettle my family (in Columbus, Georgia) before heading to Vietnam.

  Half of my class had already served there; the other half was now going. Four of us, all close friends and all majors (though one was on the list for lieutenant colonel), had been assigned to the 4th Infantry Division.

  We flew on a commercial chartered flight with something like two hundred other replacements, and arrived about dark at Long-Bin, the Army replacement center just outside Saigon. By midnight, after we'd been in-processed and issued our personal combat gear, and had received briefings on the general situation and the threat, we and over a hundred other replacements of all grades were loaded onto a C-130 and heade
d for drop-off at our respective unit locations.

  Aboard the C-130, we sat on our duffel bags and held on to cargo straps stretched across the fuselage about sixteen inches off the floor. The 130 landed three or four times before reaching Pleiku in the Central Highlands, where the 4th Infantry Division Headquarters and its main support base were located, arriving just before daylight. We continued to in-process, and we received our specific unit assignments. All four of us ended up in the 1st Brigade, located at a firebase named Jackson's Hole near the Laotian Border. We were then given detailed briefings on the tactical situation in the 4th Division area of operations, and were issued weapons and ammunition. During our brief stop at Division, we had time for a welcome hot breakfast, where we were joined by a couple of staff officers who gave us a heads-up on Colonel Richard "Zoot" Johnson, our brigade commander at Jackson's Hole. We learned that Johnson was an impressive man — part Indian, a tough warfighter, and a totally dedicated "no-nonsense" officer. We looked forward to serving under him.

  At 1500 hours, the four of us boarded a UH-1 (Hucy) and headed about twenty-five kilometers west to Jackson's Hole.

  During our in-briefing, we had been told that an intense battle was under way involving a battalion of the 1st Brigade and a suspected NVA regiment: suspected, because when the first shots are fired, you don't really know the nature and size of the enemy unit; as the battle develops, it soon becomes apparent what you are up against.