This group ended up in a spartan camp on the fringes of nearby Hoai An, packed in with six thousand other refugees. One week after Laurence had first encountered the little group, he saw them at the camp. “About thirty people shared each room. The insides of the buildings smelled of stale food and urine and wood smoke from cooking fires. Many of the people were sick. Some had wounds from shrapnel and bullets. Children cried. The stench was so strong it stayed in our noses when we left the building.” The people were getting medical care, but they did not have enough food. By and large, they were sullen and deeply depressed.
This was the typical plight, at least in the short term, for many Masher/ White Wing refugees, and it was emblematic of two major problems with the war effort. First, commanders were primarily concerned with operations—finding main force enemy units and destroying them. They were neither trained nor equipped for relief work. “I’m a soldier and my job is to beat the enemy,” Colonel Moore told a reporter during the operation, and his colleagues would have readily agreed. They went into the operation believing that their main job was to sweep the enemy from the area, so that the Saigon government could then come back and reassume permanent control. Once they had done the hard part—fighting and dying—it was then up to someone else to take care of the population. So, in big-unit operations like Masher/ White Wing, the Army apportioned comparatively few resources to care for refugees.
Second, the job of relief, resettlement, and pacification fell to a Saigon government that could not begin to handle it. Nor did the South Vietnamese authorities coordinate their efforts with Kinnard or other American commanders. Owing to Westy’s strategy, commanders simply focused on the conventional war, often at the expense of pacification, which was, ultimately, the key objective. The result was a serious refugee problem, not just during Masher/White Wing but in nearly all the major operations. Because of all this, some of the refugees grew to distrust, dislike, and resent (to put it politely) the South Vietnamese government and Army, as well as the Americans, who were, after all, foreigners.
Infinitely worse than these issues was the fact that Masher/White Wing did not bring real security to Binh Dinh province. Less than a week after Kinnard declared a conclusion to the operation, intelligence officers were already finding out that the NVA and VC were coming back into the Bong Son plain and the An Lao Valley. They had simply waited for the Americans to move on, and then they returned to rebuild their camps, train replacements, and carry on the war indefinitely.
In fact, the 1st Cavalry Division was only beginning its struggle for the area. Troopers from this division would fight many more battles for Binh Dinh in the days, months, and years to come. Colonel Moore’s brigade went back repeatedly in April and May of 1966, fought more battles, and lost more men. At that point, he began to lose confidence in the senior leadership, both Vietnamese and American, as well as the attrition strategy. “I want to make it very clear . . . that I was very disappointed at the end of that operation [Masher/White Wing] . . . when I’d lost all those men . . . and the enemy came back within a week or two,” Moore later said. He wondered how the war could ever be won at this rate. “If they [U.S. and South Vietnamese] couldn’t make it work in Bong Son—where the most powerful American division available had cleared enemy forces from the countryside—how could they possibly hope to establish South Vietnamese control in other contested regions where the American military presence was much weaker?” This was the key, and very troubling, question that vexed so many of the big-unit operations that followed Masher/White Wing.13
Masher/White Wing, then, was a discouraging tale. It illustrated that combat soldiers could fight, and win, battle after battle with a combination of firepower and valor, yet achieve no tangible results toward overall victory. In that respect, it truly was a microcosm of the way the United States Army fought its big-unit war in Vietnam.
CHAPTER 6
Counterinsurgency from the Barrel of a Gun: The Marine Combined Action Platoons
Westy Versus the Marines: Shoot and Scoot or Hearts and Minds?
WILLIAM WESTMORELAND AND HIS MARINE colleagues never agreed on a strategy for victory in Vietnam. As commander of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), Westy believed that mobile big-unit search-and-destroy operations, massive firepower, and the destruction of NVA and VC main force battalions was the primary way to win. The Marines favored pacification—a stationary counterinsurgency struggle at the village level to destroy the influence of the local VC cells over everyday Vietnamese. Marines argued that this would isolate the bigger communist formations while securing the loyalty of the population. The Corps had a long history of fighting counterinsurgency wars in such places as Haiti, Nicaragua, and Santo Domingo.
This disagreement stemmed largely from genuine philosophical differences and not interservice rivalry. Westmoreland was too practical to indulge in such internecine silliness. His personal character leaned toward tolerance and broad-mindedness. His abiding love for the Army did not diminish his high regard for the other services. He understood the importance of cooperation and teamwork among the various branches of the military. He held the Marines in especially high esteem. He admired their bravery and resourcefulness. In the immediate aftermath of the Korean War, he had even briefly served with the 3rd Marine Division. A decade later, in Vietnam, that unit, along with the 1st Marine Division, was under his command. He deeply respected Lieutenant General Lew Walt (of Walt’s Ridge fame on Peleliu), who, as commander of III Marine Amphibious Force, was the senior Marine in Vietnam. He also held a favorable, if not quite affectionate, opinion of Walt’s superior, Lieutenant General Victor “Brute” Krulak, who, as commander of the Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, was responsible for all Marines in that part of the world. Their disagreement was professional, not personal or institutional.
The Marines were responsible for the five provinces that comprised I Corps, the northernmost section of South Vietnam. The area bordered North Vietnam and Laos. The terrain ranged from mountains and thick jungle to coastal flats, rice paddies, and coastline. Much of the population was clustered into various villages and hamlets, most of which were within a few miles of the coast.
Krulak, whose nickname derived from his habit of speaking bluntly—one of his fellow Marine officers even went so far as to describe him as “abrasive”—took the lead in arguing for a pacification-centered strategy in Vietnam. He did this in his own inimitable way, bending Westy’s ear every chance he got. “I kept insisting to Westmoreland . . . and to anybody else who would listen, that . . . first and foremost, we had to protect the people,” Krulak later said. In his opinion, General Westmoreland’s attrition strategy was a recipe for failure. “I saw [it] as wasteful of American lives, promising a protracted, strength-sapping battle with small likelihood of a successful outcome.”
In a 1965 strategic appraisal he wrote: “The conflict between the [NVA]/ hardcore VC on the one hand, and the U.S. on the other, could move to another planet today, and we would still not have won the war. On the other hand, if the subversion and guerrilla efforts were to disappear, the war would soon collapse, as the VC would be denied food, sanctuary, and intelligence.” He estimated that even if the Americans and South Vietnamese could kill the enemy at a ten-to-one ratio, which they almost certainly could not, the war would still be prohibitively costly, with no promise of victory. “The Vietnamese people are the prize. If the enemy cannot get to the people, he cannot win.”1
Westy was not necessarily opposed to pacification, but he saw it as subordinate to the more vital job of destroying NVA and VC main force units. These were the “bully boys” (to reiterate his metaphor mentioned in the previous chapter) who threatened to destroy the shaky “house” that was South Vietnam. The local VC who dominated many villages were like termites eating away at the house. In essence, Westy and Krulak were arguing over whether the bully boys or termites were the mortal threat.
Although most home owners would probably opt for termites as the greater pe
ril, Westy saw it differently. In his judgment, the Marines’ pacification, kill-the-termite-first approach was not aggressive enough. “They . . . established beachheads at Chu Lai and Danang and were reluctant to go outside them,” he later wrote. This was not from lack of courage, but instead from “a different conception of how to fight an anti-insurgency war.” Westy thought the Marines did not appreciate the potency of helicopters or mobile warfare in general. “I believed the marines should have been trying to find the enemy’s main forces and bring them to battle, thereby putting them on the run and reducing the threat they posed to the population.” He argued that this aggressive approach was especially important because of the close proximity to the Marine enclaves of NVA supply trails and infiltration routes.
The trouble was that, to some extent, search and destroy was the enemy of pacification. When Westy’s battalions swept through the countryside or populated areas in search of the enemy, they could be quite disruptive of homes, property, and people. Inevitably, innocent people sometimes got hurt, uprooted, or inconvenienced. In the hearts of some Vietnamese, this bred resentment, fear, and anger toward the Americans. This, in turn, weakened the Saigon government and the American strategic situation in Vietnam. Thus, many of the big-unit operations were a classic case of more being less.
Indeed, Westmoreland himself, in a 1965 press conference, stated that his attrition strategy presented the average person in South Vietnam with three basic choices: stay on the land and risk getting killed by U.S. or communist firepower; join the VC and become the target of U.S. firepower; or move to areas under the Saigon government’s control (in most cases, that meant a refugee camp). Quite a few, of course, chose option two. Many more took the unhappy third route. “I expect a tremendous increase in the number of refugees,” Westy admitted to the reporters. This was, of course, exactly what happened. About one in four South Vietnamese became a refugee between 1965 and 1969. To the Marines, the disruptive attrition strategy was tantamount to making war on the people themselves.
Westy was always more than willing to listen to Krulak’s ideas about this but he left no doubt whose view would prevail. “I happened to have the responsibility, not Krulak,” Westmoreland once said. “The man who’s got the monkey on his back, the man who’s got responsibility, he’s the one you got to listen to.” In the end, they compromised. Westy carried out his big-unit war of attrition. The Marines pursued pacification in I Corps, but at the expense of their own intrinsic manpower and with no reinforcement, encouragement, or support from MACV.2
Rice Roots Infantry: The Birth of the Combined Action Platoons
In the summer of 1965, Lieutenant Colonel William Taylor had a problem. His 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, was responsible for security in and around a Marine air base at Phu Bai. The base was quite vulnerable to mortar fire originating from the adjacent hamlets. Taylor’s civil affairs officer, Captain John Mullin, knew that most of the hamlets contained Popular Force (PF) militiamen. These were poorly trained and armed locals who were under the control of the village, district, or province chief. Some of the PFs were veterans of the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN). Most, though, had little experience. The typical platoon consisted of anywhere from fifteen to forty men, normally led by the equivalent of a sergeant. Whereas the average ARVN soldier was a draftee who was conscripted by an abstract national government in Saigon, trained for military service, and probably sent to fight many miles away from his home, the PF was at least defending his village and family.
Poorly paid, and looked down upon by the Saigon government, the PFs’ main job was local security against the VC. Needless to say, these militiamen were no match for the enemy (some of them were even sympathetic to, or even part of, the VC). Captain Mullin was a product of the Marine culture of pacification. Knowing full well the deficiencies of the PFs, he nonetheless wondered if it might be feasible to embed handpicked Marines with them in the hamlets around Phu Bai. Perhaps the Marines could strengthen the quality of the PFs and also benefit from their local knowledge. For all their problems, the PFs did offer one major asset—they had close ties with the people they were defending. Mullin believed that “combined action” Marine and PF units could provide security for the base and, at the same time, solidify the loyalty of the local people.
He proposed this to Taylor, who liked the idea. The colonel won approval from the local South Vietnamese authorities, and also his own superior, Colonel Edwin Wheeler. Wheeler forwarded the proposal to Generals Walt and Krulak. Naturally, they both saw the idea as a perfect way to implement their pacification strategy, so approval came fast. “Selected squads from each of the four Marine rifle companies [of 3/4] were organized into the 1st Provisional Platoon,” a Marine report explained. “The platoon was integrated with a Popular Forces Company of six platoons, which then became the Combined Action Company. Each Marine squad was assigned to work with one of the PF platoons assigned to a village.”
General Walt and Colonel Wheeler placed such importance on this that they personally chose the combined action commander, First Lieutenant Paul Ek, mainly because Ek could speak some Vietnamese and knew something about counterinsurgency war. The word circulated throughout the battalion, asking Marines to volunteer for this new initiative. Lieutenant Ek personally chose his people from this pool of volunteers. “Every man was handpicked,” he later said. “Because of the magnitude of the job, I picked men who were mature, intelligent, who possessed leadership capabilities and tact.” Ek felt that the latter quality was especially important because the combined action Marines would function not just as warriors but as everyday ambassadors among the people. He put his chosen group through a week of training in Vietnamese language, culture, and politics. They also brushed up on their patrolling skills. The brief training was, of course, barely adequate for this challenging mission, but it did at least give the Marines some level of preparation.
On August 1, they combined with their various PF platoons and began operations. The transition was difficult and awkward. Villagers and PFs alike were suspicious of the Marines. The Marine squad leaders had to work out tenuous command relationships with their PF sergeants. The two sides could not communicate well since most of the Americans knew little Vietnamese (a serious problem that would always plague the program and, indeed, the entire U.S. effort in Vietnam). Most of the Vietnamese doubted that Ek’s Marines would stay in the villages long enough to truly protect them from the VC. Such skepticism was well founded. When the big units conducted operations, they rarely remained in one place for long since they generally spent most of their time trying to find the enemy. For the first week of the combined action program, even Ek’s squads only patrolled their villages during the day. Soon thereafter, though, they patrolled round the clock, maintaining a constant presence.
These initial joint patrols with the PFs were an exercise in frustration. “When we first started going out on night patrols and ambushes, they [PFs] complained we made too much noise,” Sergeant David Sommers, one of the squad leaders, recalled. “By slightly revamping our equipment, we were able to meet their standards of silence.” The Marines initially saw the PFs as ill-disciplined pseudosoldiers. The Americans, for example, were shocked to see that the PFs seldom cleaned their weapons, something that every Marine was trained to do with an almost religious zeal.
Over time, though, the two sides learned much from each other, just as the program’s architects had envisioned. The PFs learned better discipline and military skills. The Americans learned to proceed with patience and diplomacy. Also, the Marines came to appreciate and better understand the local culture. At first they were shocked by the poverty and primitive lifestyle of the villagers. Such was the case for Private Hop Brown, a rifleman in one squad, who came from a disadvantaged background in Harlem. “I didn’t think I’d ever see people living in more squalid and degrading conditions than what I’d left behind,” he said. Initially he was repelled by the impoverishment of the locals and what he perceived as laziness among
the PFs. But, as time went on and the two sides formed relationships, his sympathy grew dramatically. “My attitude changed toward these people. As I got used to their way of life and started to see their customs and rituals from their point of view, I began to understand that things I took for granted as an American did not apply to this culture.”
Most of the other Marines felt the same way. As the weeks unfolded, they came to appreciate just how badly the VC had sometimes terrorized the villagers, and they were determined to protect them. The various squads also developed an intuitive understanding of VC influence within their respective villages. “We found . . . that through the attitudes of areas we could pinpoint Vietcong activity within that area,” Ek explained. “If you walk into an area and the people just go about their business and conduct normal daily routines with a fair amount of friendliness . . . things are pretty quiet.” If the people were overly friendly, or distant or hostile, then the VC were nearby.
In spite of the challenges, it was clear by the end of 1965 that this first combined action company was a success. Security in the villages around Phu Bai had improved significantly. The air base rarely came under attack. In the villages, firefights with the VC were rare. When they did take place, the Marines and PFs won. Intelligence tips on VC activity poured in from the locals, indicating a new level of trust on their part for the Marines. Many of the Americans had formed strong bonds with the PFs and some of the civilians, too. In December, when the battalion rotated home from Vietnam, forty of the sixty-six members of the combined action company opted to stay. Many sensed that they were at the leading edge of pacification. Working with the Vietnamese gave them a sense of kinship with them and awakened an obligation to protect them. In a way, they now had a kind of ownership in the war effort. It had a face and a purpose. It meant something beyond just humping around endless hills, jungles, and rice paddies, wilting under crippling heat, searching endlessly for an elusive, dangerous, faceless enemy.
Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II Through Iraq Page 26
