As foreigners, the Americans aroused a great deal of suspicion but also curiosity among the villagers. When the Vietnamese saw that the CAP Marines were willing to stay with them permanently, provide security, and blend in as best they could, they usually softened. One major indicator of this was when they invited Marines to share meals with them. This was such an important aspect of village culture that no American could turn down the opportunity. Thus, every CAP Marine had to be an adventurous eater. Corporal Michael Cousino found this out one day when a respected elder butchered a goat, drained its blood into a bowl, took a sip, and then offered it to Cousino. “I pretended to drink it by bringing the bowl up to my mouth and letting some blood form up around my lips. This way I wouldn’t offend him. He accepted me into his family.”
One time, the locals who lived near Thomas Flynn’s CAP at Cam Hieu honored the Marines with an elaborate feast. With great fanfare, they arranged pots and baskets full of rice, with boiled chicken alongside trays of pig brains, intestines, jellied blood, and raw fish that still had their heads and scales. Flynn, a meat-and-potatoes Irish kid from New Jersey, was a bit reluctant to dive into the spread but he knew he had no choice. “As I picked up a piece of the pig brain, the people watched with anticipation. When I swallowed it and smiled, they clapped their hands and laughed. I wondered if they were happy because they thought I really liked their food or if they were laughing because they were thinking that this dumb bastard is really eating this shit!” These meals sometimes resulted in invitations to weddings, funerals, family gatherings and the like, for even more eating. The Americans learned to always leave something on their plates because, in Vietnamese culture, if a guest cleaned his plate, it meant that the host had not prepared enough food and he or she lost face.
Most of the Marines grew to like the local fare, especially the Nuoc Mam sauce with which Vietnamese flavored so many dishes. Corporal Barry Goodson made a point of buying sauce-soaked pork and fish sandwiches from nearby merchants whom he befriended over time. At times, a sandwich could be bug-infested, but Goodson hardly cared. “Eating it was a simple way to strengthen my bond with our Vietnamese counterparts.” Sometimes, during day patrols, people invited the Marines to join them for lunch. Other times, they sat down together for full-fledged dinners of rice, fish, watermelons, and carrots. “After they eat they will sit and watch us, and laugh at the way we use their [chop]stick and eat their food,” Sergeant Alexander Wert, a squad leader, said in early 1967. “It’s all good natured. We laugh at them and they laugh at us, it’s always a lot of fun.”
Most commonly, the two peoples exchanged or mixed their foods. This was especially true among the Marines and PFs. The Marines were not shy about dispensing C rations, soda, and chocolate to their allies. When Sergeant Jim Donovan, who headed up a squad in Tuy Loan village, found out that his PFs liked Salem cigarettes and Orange Crush soda, he passed out these products as a reward for good behavior. He also loved Vietnamese food and enjoyed many mixed meals with the PFs. “I like rice and soup with the noodles. I ate at least one meal a day with a Vietnamese.” They would mix C ration chicken and noodles with the local version. “They [PFs] would take the noodles and throw ’em away. Then they would make their own noodles and they’d eat the [C ration] chicken.” Donovan was amazed that the PFs actually liked ham and lima beans, the most despised C ration meal for practically all Americans in Vietnam.6
The single biggest cultural problem was the language barrier. Even among the CAP Marines very few could speak Vietnamese with any semblance of fluency. Most knew only common phrases, slang expressions, and the odd word or two. Lance Corporal Richard Wildagel had thirty days of language training in Danang before joining his CAP, and the course was useful, but his communication with the people was still so limited that he often relied on hand signals and gestures. He found that he had to make a daily effort to be conversant. “Just by being in the ville, you can pick up a lot, just by listening to the people, or asking what something is.” Corporal Dukin Elliot went to language school in the States for nearly a year. He was well ahead of his colleagues in his ability to communicate with people, but even he had troubles. “It’s a difficult language to learn, because you can write a word the same way and it has different meanings.” Only one man on David Sherman’s team had any linguistic training and it was practically useless in Ky Hoa, their remote village. “His instructor was Saigonese. Vietnamese as spoken in Saigon is much different from what is spoken in the countryside. Out there dialects can change considerably in 10 miles.”
Sergeant Donovan’s squad even had an ARVN interpreter assigned to it. Of course, this yielded tremendous influence to this individual since he literally controlled the vital power of communication (a phenomenon familiar a generation later to many small-unit leaders in Iraq who also relied far too heavily on their interpreters). This meant he had to be reliable. Unfortunately, Donovan’s ARVN was not. A visiting Special Forces major who knew some Vietnamese eavesdropped on the man as he questioned the locals and found he was feeding Donovan bad information. The interpreter ended up getting drunk and deserting. Fortunately for Donovan’s team, he was replaced with a South Vietnamese Marine Corps sergeant who was loyal, courageous, and who spoke excellent English. “He gave me a lot of history of Vietnam. He got a lot out of people. They really liked him.”
Most of the CAPs were on their own, though. The language barrier would have been a challenge even if the American preparation for it had been barely adequate. As it was, the Marines learned to get by as best they could. Those who at least made an attempt to speak Vietnamese tended to get along well with people. Of course, many of the Vietnamese, particularly the PFs, spoke some English. A surprising number of militiamen could converse to some extent. Children, always so adaptable, sometimes picked up English with stunning alacrity, and acted as vital go-betweens.
Even so, for most CAP Marines and their Vietnamese partners, everyday communication—such a crucial component of human understanding, empathy, and cooperation—was basic and tentative. The Marines and their PFs communicated by hand signals, common phrases, and even facial expressions. Given these constraints, it is remarkable how well they usually worked together.
Nonetheless, the inability to communicate in any kind of depth was a real hindrance for most of the CAPs. It limited how much intelligence they could pick up from locals. It intruded upon their cultural understanding. It curtailed the amount of in-depth joint operations or planning they could conduct with the PFs. It led to misunderstandings that could only be worked out through substantive conversation, as when someone from one group accidentally shot someone from the other, or when the PFs stole American property (as they often did). This language failure was a direct symptom of the flawed American approach in Vietnam—in a war whose outcome would be determined by cultural literacy, grassroots influence, and the local dominance that could only be forged by agile formations of light infantry, American strategists instead relied upon the bigness inherent in technology, material superiority, and firepower.7
With such deficient language skills among the CAPs, the team member most capable of bridging the cultural chasm was usually the Navy corpsman. “I think our Corpsmen, pound for pound, were some of the most important men we had,” one commander asserted. Invariably known as “Doc” or “Bac si” (the Vietnamese word for medic), the corpsmen served as the on-the-spot medical face of the United States. Most of them were all of nineteen or twenty years old. In general, they worked with a PF who had been designated as a medic, either by his sergeant (“Trung Si”) or the district chief. Quite often, the American corpsmen conducted medical civic action projects (MEDCAPs) for the villagers, treating everything from headaches to serious war wounds and contagious diseases. The corpsmen conducted close to two million MEDCAPs during the war. “Invariably surrounded by children, he seeks to advise and empirically treat whatever he encounters,” Lieutenant Commander Lawrence Metcalf, who served as medical coordinator for the combined action program, w
rote. “Identifying communicable disease and reporting it, acquiring intelligence information, and selecting for medical evacuation those patients whose conditions most warrant medical referral . . . are all part of the CAP Corpsman’s routine.”
By most accounts, they were even more effective than trained physicians. There were two reasons for this. First, they were less condescending with people and infinitely more patient. Second, unlike almost all the doctors, they lived among the people and developed some level of comfort with them. “Intestinal worms were endemic, and ringworm was common as well,” David Sherman recalled. “Our corpsmen got the people disinfected, taught them rudimentary sanitation, cleared up some other minor medical problems, and introduced them to soap.” Versatility, patience, and a true sense of compassion were qualities that all corpsmen had to possess. “I treated everything—boils, bunions, rashes included,” corpsman John Daube explained. During his regular MEDCAPs, Jack Broz treated more babies than he could count. In many cases, their heads were covered with oozing sores from jungle rot and parasites. “I took some Furacin ointment and smeared it liberally all over the baby’s head. Then I wrapped my own special bandage that I devised around its head, complete with chin strap.” On one such MEDCAP, Wayne Christenson treated a boy who had severely lacerated his forearm in an accident. “I’d never sewed up anyone before. I injected the area with novocaine and sewed up the wound. This kid did not even whimper. The Vietnamese are a very stoic people.”
For the corpsmen all of this was, of course, in addition to carrying out their primary responsibility of dispensing medical care to their Marine comrades. The worthy task of saving the lives of their friends, and caring for the Vietnamese, led to a high level of job satisfaction for the corpsmen. “I began to see myself less and less as a Navy corpsman and more and more as a Marine,” Christenson said. Another corpsman came to think of the locals as part of his personal circle of friends. “There’s a great deal of satisfaction in working with these people,” he told an interviewer who visited his CAP one day. “I have gotten to know them all very well. There isn’t one person in this ville I haven’t treated yet.” This corpsman, and dozens of others like him, were the cutting edge of the combined action program, particularly in relation to civic action. They helped break down barriers between the Marines and the Vietnamese. They also saved many lives.8
Turf Battles
Establishing ties and personal rapport with the Vietnamese villagers was of paramount importance for every CAP, but so was security. The most crucial step in earning the people’s confidence was to provide them security. Without that, nothing else mattered. Defeating the VC, then, was the primary job of each team. Theirs was a war of wits and continuous tension, stalking and being stalked by shadowy groups of Viet Cong. Since the CAPs were so small in number, they were vulnerable (this was a major reason why Westy was always suspicious of them). Each team dealt with the constant danger that a large enemy unit, VC or NVA, might attack and destroy the entire CAP before nearby friendly conventional units could intercede.
Building a strong, defensible compound was important for the CAPs. Most constructed some sort of fortified area, complete with bunkers, concertina wire, claymore mines, and machine-gun posts. Patrolling, though, was the lifeblood of security. Patrolling is to an infantryman what skating is to a hockey player—it is the gateway to everything he does. On patrol, an infantryman gathers intelligence, projects power, assesses terrain, calms friends, intimidates enemies, outwits the enemy soldier or insurgent who would like to kill him, and, if necessary, gets into a life-and-death fight with that enemy combatant. In the CAPs, patrolling was the military version of the hometown policeman’s beat. In a way, these patrols were the ultimate expression of ground power, depending as much on mere presence and relationships as overwhelming weaponry.
In the various hamlets and villages of I Corps, the Marines and their PFs spent much of their time on such patrols. Day after day, night after night, they roamed their respective areas, PFs in tow, usually in groups of less than ten, with several meters between each man, rifles and machine guns at the ready, always looking for danger. At night, amid darkness so vast that they could hardly see more than a few feet in any direction, they chose ambush spots among the rice paddies, within the jungles, or even at times in the hamlets. They hunkered down, tried to ignore mosquitoes, ants, the heat, and the persistent tension of the unknown, while they watched and listened for the VC. Sometimes they got into firefights with the VC. The vast majority of the time, they did not. When fights did occur, they usually lasted only a few minutes. The CAPs generally inflicted more punishment than they absorbed, but casualties among the Marines and PFs tallied up, normally in ones and twos, over the course of many such firefights. Most of the combined action Marines did not realize it, but casualty rates in the CAPs were actually higher than in the conventional rifle companies. As of 1967, each CAP Marine had a 75 percent chance of getting wounded and a 12 percent chance of being killed.
Good leaders, Marine and PF, knew never to set noticeable patterns. Patrols had to avoid using the same routes at the same times or perhaps the same ambush spots night after night, anything that might betray their location to the enemy. “To protect the people from Viet Cong terrorism and physical and economic harassment, the combined action units depended on aggressive patrolling and ambushing, superior tactical skill and a detailed knowledge of the local area and the people,” a perceptive III Marine Amphibious Force report intoned. “[They] emphasized mobility, spreading their activity over thousands of meters to seek out and interdict the enemy.”9
No matter how good the Marines were at patrolling, they could not be effective if they did not work well with the PFs. For one thing, the PFs represented the local people, whose loyalty must be won for pacification to succeed. For another, even the worst PFs had unique skills that were crucial to the survival of any CAP Marine. The PFs best knew the terrain, the mood of the people, the whereabouts and perhaps even the identity of the VC. They also had an uncanny ability to sniff out booby traps. With experience, the Marines often grew proficient at all of these things, but, as foreigners, they could never know or understand the local situation like the PFs.
The Marines, of course, were much better trained and disciplined than the PFs. The Americans were physically stronger, more courageous, and they certainly took better care of their weapons. To these proud Marines, the PFs often seemed lazy, cowardly, and untrustworthy. “When we first came in,” one CAP leader recalled, “it was a fight every night to get the people [PFs] to stand guard. They wanted to stand guard for two hours and go home and go to bed.” Their reliability in showing up for patrols, as well as their noise discipline, were often substandard. Too often, they ran away when a fight loomed or even in the middle of firefights. One squad leader estimated that about 10 percent of the PFs in his combined unit were VC infiltrators who were simply gathering information on Marine weapons, procedures, and capabilities. In Edward Palm’s CAP, the relationship with the PFs was marred by the fact that the PFs were unreliable and seemed to have an understanding with the VC not to patrol in certain areas. “A typical patrol began with Sarge, our squad leader, briefing the Trung Si the day before. Sarge showed him an overlay and requested that a number of PFs, usually twelve, be ready at the appointed time and place. If four or five showed up we were lucky. Despite numerous suggestions, complaints, and threats we were never able to form integrated, cohesive patrolling teams. It was luck of the draw every time out.”
In the majority of cases, though, the PFs were good fighters. They simply lacked the formal training, good weaponry, and soldierly discipline that Marines took for granted. The Americans were often at fault for the problems that arose. For instance, Corporal Barry Goodson’s combined action company commander, from the disembodied perspective of a compound miles away, decided to send a rear echelon man to join the team for a night in the field. The man was about to rotate home. The officer wanted him to earn some medals before he left and
he could only do that in the field with the CAP. This was idiocy in the extreme. The frightened Marine was completely out of his depth. He knew none of the other men, and he posed a danger to the team because he did not know how to operate in this perilous light-infantry environment.
Sure enough, on ambush that night the rookie accidentally shot and killed a sixteen-year-old PF, thinking he was a VC. The brother of the dead PF, and many of the other militiamen, wanted to kill the Marine. Only the intercession of the Trung Si and the immediate removal of the offending Marine prevented them from doing so. The close relationship that Goodson’s team had built over many months of shared danger with the PFs eroded literally overnight, and was never quite the same. “The air was filled with tension, distrust and fear,” Goodson wrote. “During the day the villagers shunned us and refused our offers of help. They even refused our medical treatment. When we set up ambush, [the Trung Si] no longer mingled his men amongst mine. Time subdued the overt hatred and bitterness, but our relationship with all the Vietnamese people had changed. The distrust could not be shaken.”
The Americans needed to understand that the PFs were in a perpetual state of war, struggling for their homes and families. Long after the Marines rotated back to the U.S., their fight would still rage on. This created a combination of fatalism and patience in most of the PFs, especially their leaders. The Americans had to accept this or fail. The typical PF leader was canny, courageous, and probably more combat-experienced than all the CAP Marines put together. It did no good to deal with him in a heavy-handed way, like a drill instructor berating a recruit. “He don’t like the idea of some big galoot of an American walking in his ville and walking over to him telling him what he’s gonna do and what he’s not gonna do,” Lieutenant Eagan said. “So . . . you have to deal with them as an individual and try to get him to come around to your way of thinking, or at least come to a point where you can compromise your thinking with his and come up with a mutual action patrol.”
Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II Through Iraq Page 28
