The combined action Marines had become rice roots infantry. Curiously, they no longer thought of themselves as grunts, since they associated that term exclusively with the standard infantry mission of closing with and killing the enemy. They were wrong. They were the ultimate grunts. They were the tangible expression of everyday human will—defeating the enemy not just through combat power but through ingenuity, diplomacy, flexibility, decency, tact, practical know-how, and very basic cultural understanding. They carried out the mission as only human beings, not machines, could do it. They did it imperfectly, but effectively enough to make a positive contribution.
General Walt understood all too well what was happening. In January 1966, with the concurrence of his I Corps opposite in the South Vietnamese army, Lieutenant General Nguyen Chanh Thi, he expanded the combined action program. By the end of that year, there were fifty-seven combined action platoons (commonly known as CAPs) serving under various infantry battalions in the Marine areas of operation. In 1967, the combined action program became an independent command, separate from the infantry battalions. Eventually, by 1970, the program grew to 114 platoons, organized into twenty companies sprinkled throughout I Corps, under the control of four battalion-sized groups. At that point, the four combined action groups consisted of over two thousand Marines and Navy corpsmen plus, of course, thousands of PFs. Typically, Marine CAP squads were commanded by a sergeant, a corporal, or even, in some instances, a lance corporal. A squad normally contained anywhere from half a dozen to fourteen Marines, augmented by a corpsman.3
How to Get into a Combined Action Platoon
According to official program guidelines, CAP Marines were all supposed to be volunteers with at least two months in country, six months left on their tour of duty, combat experience, no disciplinary record, and a mature, open-minded attitude. Only the best Marines could be considered, especially the NCO squad leaders, whose personal responsibilities and daily autonomy were considerable. “The men I wanted to come into the Combined Action Program had to . . . know what it meant to take another human being’s life, and how to shoot, move and communicate,” Lieutenant Colonel William Corson, who ran the program in 1967, said. Such experiences would give them tactical proficiency, a proper understanding of war’s tragedy, and an appreciation for human life. Corson was a counterinsurgency expert and a vocal proponent of the CAP concept. He had prior service in Vietnam dating back to the French war. He had also served in World War II and Korea.
As a Chinese-speaking intelligence officer with considerable field experience in Asia, Corson was adamantly opposed to Westy’s search-and-destroy attrition strategy. He believed that the CAPs represented the best approach to victory. In order to succeed, he knew his program must have men who could, and would, kill the enemy but who also saw the Vietnamese as people, not “gooks,” “slopes,” or “zipperheads,” to list just a few of the racist slang terms common at the time. “If they entered the job with an ethnocentric attitude, they would not succeed. They had to think on their own, be proud, loyal, and brave. And they had to have open minds to a new experience.” In a squad, even one person who was prone to insensitivity, selfishness, racism, or offensive comments could undo the hard work of his entire team in winning the trust of the Vietnamese. So, Corson wanted the elite.
In practice, though, these lofty standards were difficult to maintain. Most of the time, the CAPs’ manpower came from other in-country Marine units, especially rifle companies. Often, battalions were required to give up about twenty or thirty men per month to the CAPs. The commanders of these units obviously had no wish to lose their best Marines and receive nothing in return. They found ways to shunt men they perceived as misfits, rather than their most reliable people, into the program. Near the end of the war, men who were fresh out of training in the States were even assigned directly to the program.
The result was that men took a variety of paths, not all of them ideal, to their CAP. Private John Akins had the reputation of being a loner in his rifle company. When he got into a fight that he claimed another Marine provoked, his commanding officer immediately transferred him to a combined action company. “Ever heard of ’em?” the captain asked Akins. “They’re those small teams that get overrun most of the time.” Private First Class David Sherman’s platoon got orders to give up several of its men to the CAPs. “There was a lot of hemming and hawing and maybe half of the needed men volunteered.” Like several others, Sherman did not want to go because he liked the security of a larger unit. Nonetheless, his sergeant “volunteered” him. With no preamble, all of a sudden he and the other chosen ones became CAP Marines. “No school, no indoctrination, no nothing. Gather a bunch of Marines, stick us outside a hamlet, and we were a CAP.”
Staff Sergeant Calvin Brown was assigned, seemingly out of the blue, to head up CAP-Alpha 3 when he got to Vietnam. “This was a relatively new program to me. I had no idea what it was going to consist of.” Most of his previous training and experience did not apply to the job at hand. “I had to change my whole way of thinking. I was not really prepared for what I saw when I first went to the village” near Phu Bai. When Private First Class Thomas Flynn’s battalion was scheduled to rotate out of Vietnam in 1966, his company commander arbitrarily assigned Flynn and several other men with little time in country to a combined action company. The young rifleman had never even heard of such a unit. “That night, as I lay on my cot, I kept wondering what [it] was all about.” Some men in rifle companies, like Private First Class Jackson Estes, volunteered for the program because they were looking for a way to get out of combat, and they incorrectly perceived the CAPs as a soft deal. “I heard C.A.P. units are a lot easier,” he wrote his wife as he awaited word of his potential transfer. “It would be safer too.” Others simply wanted to escape close supervision and operate in a more autonomous environment.
More commonly, though, men did volunteer for the program because of a genuine desire to make a meaningful contribution to the war effort. Estes may have wanted a safer billet, but he also liked the idea of working closely with the Vietnamese. He wanted “a chance to live with [them] and get a clearer idea of what this war is all about.” Lance Corporal Barry Goodson volunteered because, after several weeks of service in a line company, he liked the idea of getting to know the Vietnamese as people and helping them. “[I] signed up immediately, without question, and without going through proper military channels.” Edward Palm was so eager to escape his boring rear echelon job and do something important that he embellished his service record during an interview with a gunnery sergeant who was recruiting for the CAPs. Impressed, the gunny accepted him on the spot. “I couldn’t believe my good fortune, having just talked the Marine Corps into throwing me into the briar patch of my choice,” Palm later wrote. Nineteen-year-old Sergeant Mac McGahan started his tour with a rifle company, fighting the NVA along the 17th parallel that divided the two Vietnams. He volunteered for a CAP because he liked the idea of improving the lives of ordinary Vietnamese. “We can see the progress being made,” he told an interviewer. “Eight out of the fourteen men here [on the CAP] have extended for another six months. In a line company you’re in a lot of combat and you’re always tired. I went a month and a half averaging three hours sleep a night. You don’t really care about the people. You just want to put in your time and get out. Here with the CAP you’re not just killing the VC, you’re helping people and you can see the progress you’re making.”
One of Corson’s successors, Colonel Edwin Danowitz, personally checked the background and service records of potential CAP members, whether they were in-country volunteers or were assigned to the program directly from the States. “We scanned them to make certain the individuals had good proficiency and conduct marks.” Anyone with disciplinary problems or the wrong kind of medical problems (for example, venereal disease) was out. Often he conducted personal interviews with the applicants. Danowitz claimed that he rejected about 30 to 35 percent of the interviewees. “We did have occasions
where first sergeants would submit lists of people who were not volunteers and had no idea what the program was about; they were getting rid of their dead wood. However, once these people were interviewed, this was quickly determined and we sent them back to their units immediately.”
With the expansion of the program, General Walt established a CAP school that most of the selectees went through before joining their new units. The training was similar to the indoctrination Lieutenant Ek had given his original combined action Marines, mostly language and culture classes mixed with small-unit tactics and patrolling. Under the circumstances, this worked fairly well. Commander Richard McGonigal, a naval officer who actually visited every single CAP, marveled at how well the training, and service in the villages, changed the mind-set of the Marines. “When you take a group of civilians and transform them into Marines and get them to kill . . . and then somehow re-transform them into people that can kill discriminatingly and can go through some kind of identification with the people . . . to the point where they’re willing to risk their lives to protect them . . . that’s an amazing psychological trick.” He believed that only the Marines, and not even the Army, could have pulled this off. “I’m quite certain the Navy couldn’t, and the Air Force had no need to. They fought their war from thirty thousand feet. They never had to be accountable for blowing a hootch away.” The CAP Marines were on the ground at the most basic level, though, and thus accountable for everything they did. Needless to say, substandard Marines did not usually last long in this demanding environment.4
Swimming in the Village Seas
Mao Tse-tung once famously said that guerrilla warriors must move among the people as a fish swims in the sea. The combined action platoon Marines were American fish in a vast Vietnamese sea. As the program grew, CAPs began popping up all over I Corps. “Marine members of the CAPs live in the same tents, eat the same food, and conduct the same patrols and ambushes as their Vietnamese counterparts,” a 1967 report for General Krulak explained. The job was as much diplomatic as military. To the locals and the PFs, these Marines were the very face of America. The CAP members soon found that very little if anything they did escaped the notice of the Vietnamese. “They see everything we do—how we shave, how we dress, the way we talk to each other, the way we work,” Corporal Joseph Trainer, a team leader in Thuy Phu village, told an interviewer. “If we give them a bad impression, that’s the impression they’ll get of all Marines, and Americans.”
When Gunnery Sergeant John Brockaway established a CAP at a village in Quang Nam province, he found that the area had been under VC control for many months. The insurgents had told the villagers that U.S. Marines would rape their wives and daughters, steal their property, and kill their children. “When we first got there, you couldn’t get within a hundred meters of these people without some of them going in the opposite direction.” It took many weeks, and much good behavior, to loosen them up. Another Marine estimated that it took him about a month before he knew what was happening in his team’s village. “When you first come here, it’s hard, but then you begin to learn the customs and how the people operate . . . and pick it up eventually.”
The Marines had to be very careful not to arrogantly foist American values and cultural norms on their new Vietnamese acquaintances. This took patience and tact. The rural Vietnamese did not share American ideas of time, labor, or money. They did not think in punctual terms of having to be somewhere at a certain time. They did not adhere to a time schedule for getting jobs done. They especially did not conform to American hygiene standards. Their personal bathing and dental standards were not to the levels that Americans took for granted. Moreover, many Marines were shocked, and nauseated, to see the people publicly defecate “right outside their homes, or right outside the street in front of their homes,” in the recollection of one man. Quite commonly, the people also defecated in their rice paddies, combining waste disposal with fertilization. The Marines sometimes did, with local permission, build latrine facilities, but more commonly they had to accept such local customs or fail in their mission. For their part, the Vietnamese were a bit taken aback with the American penchant for using handkerchiefs. The idea of blowing one’s nose into a cloth and putting it back into one’s pocket was disgusting to them. “They wiped their noses on a banana leaf or just blew it on the ground,” John Daube, a corpsman, recalled.
Sexual mores were markedly different, too. In rural Vietnam, sexuality was almost puritanical. Sex before marriage was forbidden. However, mutual masturbation by two men was widely accepted. The Americans could not begin to understand this concept (especially on the occasions when they caught PFs indulging while on guard duty). Among the Vietnamese, two men often held hands as a sign of friendship. Thus, if a Vietnamese man attempted to take a Marine by the hand, he was offering a significant gesture of trust and friendship. But the Americans saw hand-holding among men as homosexuality, at a time when American popular culture greatly frowned on same-sex relationships.
Hailing from a youth-centered culture, the Americans were slow to understand the importance of elders to the Vietnamese. So the Marines tended to interact with children—who were generally friendly and exuberant—more than adults, particularly elderly people. “With kids being kids, and Marines being Marines, you get attached to them,” Lieutenant Thomas Eagan, commander of a combined action company named Delta-1, told an interviewer in 1967. Like many other Marines, he believed that making inroads with the kids would help the long-term effort in Vietnam. “They’ll have a good many Americans that they can remember . . . this I think is definitely going to sway them to an attempt to hang on to the country as they know it.” Perhaps, but this preoccupation with kids at the expense of elders sometimes cost them credibility with the average Vietnamese villager, until the Americans learned to reach out to everyone.
CAP squad leaders especially learned to cultivate village chiefs and district chiefs since both types of leaders were generally influential. Those who were not in league with the VC were usually in danger, so the security of a Marine CAP could be attractive to them. The mere act of sitting down, drinking tea with a chief, asking him how the Marines could help his people often held great sway. At times, it also yielded information on the VC or facilitated civic action projects for the village. Making this kind of headway with local leaders raised the status of the CAPs, and perhaps even legitimized them, in the eyes of villagers. Such on-the-ground support was, after all, a key objective of the combined action mission. When a CAP leader forged these relationships, it hardly guaranteed success, but he had little chance of accomplishing much without them.
Other cultural issues came from the unfortunate fact that some of the CAP Marines were boors who had no business being in the program. They dealt with people harshly, used racial slurs, broke squad rules about refraining from drinking and whoring, or just generally projected ill will. Most of these types did not last long on a team. Far more often, cultural problems resulted from simple American ignorance about local customs. CAP Marines, like most Americans, tended to pat kids on the head until they found out that many villagers believed this infested them with evil spirits. So, too, they had to learn to avoid crossing their legs or pointing their heels at their hosts when sitting in someone’s home. To the Vietnamese, the pointed heel meant that the person at whom it was pointed would die the next day. Lieutenant Eagan found, to his chagrin, that he committed a gratuitous cultural insult one day. “All I had done was to walk into a hootch and said something to one of the old men in the ville and I turned my back on his family altar without paying any sort of respect to it.” In a culture that was centered around ancestor worship, this was a grave offense indeed. It was no small matter tactically, either, because such an insult could easily cause the offended party to cast his lot with the VC, putting more American lives at risk.
CAP members also had to deal with the loss of face that resulted from errant firepower or damage inflicted by conventional units. When people got hurt or killed,
it could unravel months of excruciating effort on the part of the CAP. Even when the damage was only material, tension was often high. Staff Sergeant David Thompson had to smooth over some very hurt feelings when a line unit carelessly destroyed a vase and several other sacred items in his village’s temple one night. “Whatever the troops do . . . goes back on the American government, and this does not make for good relations [with] the people.” These were the vagaries, and immense challenges, of operating in so alien a cultural environment.
Although some CAPs were aloof from their villagers, most did form some sort of relationship, many of which even culminated in strong ties of friendship. Generally, this happened quite gradually if the Marines behaved well and made an effort to insinuate themselves into the local customs and culture. The average Vietnamese peasant was caught in the middle of a vicious struggle that raged among the PFs, ARVN, the NVA, the VC (many of whom he probably knew), and the Americans. This meant that most of the people simply wanted the security to be left alone and live their lives in peace. “It’s not that so many people in Vietnam are Viet Cong,” one CAP leader explained as the combined action program was just starting to grow. “It’s that most of them will swing with . . . whoever’s got the strength. Because they don’t have anything to lose by going over to the Viet Cong when the VC are in their village; or going back to the government when the government comes in the village. But now you’ve got a ville that’s got khaki [a CAP] in it; it’s got medical attention there, it’s got people that care and people that show some friendliness and some interest. So the villager like any other human being begins to develop loyalties.”5
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