In Corson’s opinion, the vulnerability of the compounds should not have been a problem if the CAPs were doing their jobs correctly, winning the support of the people and thus finding out the enemy’s every move from them. Corson believed that the CAPs had to maintain a visible presence in one spot, as an alternative to the VC. He believed that each CAP should, in the words of one scholar, “be a center of pacification; a place to which hamlet officials, elders and peasants could turn.” Mobile CAPs could not do that quite as well as stationary CAPs. Overall, it is probably fair to say that the mobile CAPs were better at the mission of destroying the enemy and providing security (for both Marines and civilians) but at the expense of everyday grassroots influence within the villages.12
In 1970, not long after the program reached a zenith of 114 platoons that were covering about 15 percent of the I Corps population, the United States began its withdrawal from Vietnam in earnest. As this happened, Lieutenant General Ngo Quang Truong, the most highly respected ARVN commander of the war, pleaded with one Marine general: “I don’t care what you do, but please don’t take the CAPs.” Nonetheless, the CAPs were disbanded and scaled back in the same proportion to other American forces in Vietnam. In 1971, the program came to an official end.
The CAPs were the most innovative aspect of the American pacification effort in Vietnam. They demonstrated the adaptable versatility of well-trained infantrymen, and the persistent tendency of modern warfare to devolve into a contest of will at the basic levels of home, hearth, and local economics.
How successful were the CAPs? The answer is mixed. The Americans lost the war in Vietnam, so the combined action approach could only have been so successful. Even at the peak of the program, only 2,220 Marines and corpsmen were a part of it, and, of course, some of them were administrative people who spent most of their time at a base. That number of 2,220 represented less than 3 percent of the Corps’ strength in country. At any given time, no more than 10 to 15 percent of the population in I Corps was affected, in any way, by a CAP. And I Corps was just one part of South Vietnam, so the reach of the CAPs was not very extensive.
What’s more, the presence of a CAP did not exactly guarantee success. Some never made any inroads with their PFs or the locals. Their relationships were chilly or downright hostile. James Trullinger, a scholar with many years of experience in Vietnam, spent much of that time in My Thuy Phuong, a village that hosted a CAP. Trullinger developed close relationships with people on all sides of the war, including members of the VC. Among the people he interviewed, he found that none of them had any close ties with or partiality to the CAP Marines. Outside of a tiny few government supporters, most of the people supported the VC, if not openly then surreptitiously. They thought of the guerrillas as courageous local boys who were standing up to the Americans and a repressive Saigon government. “The people were very happy after they saw how brave the Liberation Front guerrillas could be,” one villager said. “Many of us thought to ourselves, secretly, that we must support the Liberation Front.”
The other major issue was that, even when the people accepted a CAP and befriended the Americans, they seldom had any love for the South Vietnamese government. Often enough they hated and feared the VC, but they were put off by the poor behavior of ARVN soldiers, as well as the tendency of government officials to be corrupt and exploitive. So, often, the Americans earned their loyalty but not the Saigon regime, and that did not bode well because the Americans could not stay forever.
A few of the CAP Marines, like Edward Palm, believed that the program was a failure. “Combined action was merely one more untenable article of faith. The truth, I suspect, is that where it seemed to work, combined action wasn’t really needed, and where it was, combined action could never really work.” In his opinion, the VC infrastructure “was too deeply entrenched, literally as well as figuratively in some places. They had had more than 20 years to win hearts and minds before we blundered onto the scene. We were naive to think 13 Marines and a Navy corpsman could make much difference in such a setting. The cultural gulf was just unbridgeable out in the countryside.”
Most of the other Marines disagreed. General Walt asserted that “of all our innovations in Vietnam none was as successful, as lasting in effect, or as useful for the future as the Combined Action Program.” Lieutenant Colonel Corson saw the CAP as a dramatic success and believed that, if it had been expanded by fifteen thousand Marines, the VC would no longer have been able to operate. “It would have taken two years [to eliminate the VC]. There was no doubt in my mind about it.” General Westmoreland would never have approved such an expansion of the program. He admitted that the CAPs experienced some success at the local level, but as commander in Vietnam he did not believe he had enough troops to sprinkle throughout the country in such fashion. “I simply had not enough numbers to put a squad of Americans in every village and hamlet; that would have been fragmenting resources and exposing them to defeat in detail.” One study estimated that in order to secure all of the unoccupied hamlets in similar fashion to the CAPs, over 22,000 PFs and 167,000 American troops would be required at the cost of $1.8 billion per year. Not even the most ardent pro-CAP devotee would have argued for such an expansion. Everyone acknowledged that the big units were needed to fight major NVA and VC formations. Advocates like Corson and Krulak simply asserted that dealing with the big enemy units was not enough—in order to win the war, the countryside also had to be secured through pacification and the CAPs were, in their view, the best way to do that.
David Sherman noticed that his unit’s village got stronger as time passed. The people had more control over their lives and they grew more prosperous. He was amazed that his makeshift squad and the PFs performed as well as they did. “Either group could have been xenophobic about the situation. We could have been more isolated than we were; they could have resisted all change. Instead, we both managed to get our acts together. We found ways to cooperate despite the cultural clash. It was, I think, an enriching experience for all of us.” Tom Harvey, a platoon leader, held no illusions that the CAPs had inflicted any sort of lasting defeat on the VC, but he still viewed the program as quite effective for its size. “I think the concept of the CAP was one of the best to come out of the U.S. effort in Vietnam, and one of the few that wasn’t counterproductive. I think we accomplished a lot with a relatively small cost to the U.S. taxpayer. We managed to keep the VC out of all the hamlets in Phu Thu District . . . with a force of probably no more than 75 Marines. Considering the number of kills, POW’s, enemy weapons captured, chieu hois [ralliers], and intelligence, coupled with the relatively low cost to operate, I do not see how there could have been anything more efficient going for us.”
Walt’s III Marine Amphibious Force and General Krulak’s Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, produced all sorts of graphs, charts, and statistics to measure this kind of success in the platoons. Much of this amounted to bureaucratic self-justification. It also demonstrated the overreliance on questionable statistics that warped the perspectives of American leaders, military and political, during Vietnam. After all, how could one really measure the level of loyalty and security among the people in a hamlet? Only those on the ground, round the clock, could offer any valid opinion, and even then the situation could change by the day. For this and many other reasons the high-level statistics are all questionable to the point of uselessness. The following facts are not, though. The combined action platoons reduced desertion rates among the PFs. In villages with CAPs, local leaders usually felt secure enough to sleep in their homes, a relative rarity among non-VC chiefs in non-CAP villages. Neither the VC nor the NVA ever displaced a CAP from a village. In 1999, Jim Donovan interviewed a former NVA division commander and asked him what he thought about the effectiveness of the CAPs. “In his opinion the hamlets where the Marines lived were of little help to his troops when they needed food, men or intelligence.”
Over the course of nearly five years in existence, the CAPs killed 5,584 enemy soldiers and
captured another 1,652. They also captured 2,347 weapons, a high ratio of weapons to enemy KIAs that lent credence to the body count numbers. They were 900 percent more likely than their colleagues in the big units to capture prisoners. They also sustained far fewer casualties from mines and booby traps. In terms of killing and capturing the enemy, they were per capita more potent and efficient than the line companies.
The effectiveness goes beyond these mere barometers, though. Many of the CAP Marines came to feel very strongly about their villages. They felt a commitment to protect the people, secure what they thought of as their freedom, and fight alongside their PF brothers. What other explanation could there be for the high extension rates among the CAP Marines? At the village level, the war made sense to them. Those who extended were committed to see the war through to a successful conclusion.
The CAPs conducted hundreds of thousands of patrols and ambushes. They spread immeasurable amounts of good feelings among tens of thousands of people. They built wells, schools, and homes. They helped farmers maximize their harvests. They taught fishermen to catch more fish. They dispensed medical care to the sick, wounded, and healthy alike. They shielded thousands from VC harassment, tax collectors, and recruiters. Their everyday bravery communicated something honorable about American culture to the Vietnamese—namely, that some young men could, and would, give everything of themselves for the betterment of others. By no means were they perfect, but their behavior was generally correct. Because of this, they established ties of friendship that never quite died away in the years since the war. “There is a residual of goodwill among the Vietnamese who were in contact with them,” Corson claimed decades after the war. “It’s there, because we have people that have gone to areas where they served as CAP Marines; and they found that the residual of goodwill was still there.” Their other legacy is the Military Transition Teams (MITT) employed so effectively by both the Army and the Marines in Iraq in the twenty-first century. Like the CAPs, these teams embedded with their Iraqi Army counterparts, trained them, improved them, and established strong ties with the locals.13
More than any other modern combatants, the CAP grunts in Vietnam experienced the crucial element of human will in war. By necessity, they morphed into rural warriors. In retrospect, the CAPs were the least glamorous but probably the most effective aspect of the ill-fated American war effort in Vietnam.
CHAPTER 7
Attrition and the Tears of Autumn: Dak To, November 1967
“A Lousy Place to Fight a War”
The grunts called it “the Land with No Sun.” This was Kontum province and it was the most challenging terrain in South Vietnam. Also known as the Central Highlands, the area around the valley village of Dak To and a nearby Special Forces camp of the same name teemed with thick jungles, foliage-covered mountains, and muddy valleys. “The mountainous regions are rugged and rise to heights of 2,400 feet,” a 4th Infantry Division report, prepared in early 1968, stated. “They are normally covered with . . . thick jungle. The plateau area is intermittently covered with forests of 100-150 foot trees, grass and thick bamboo rising some 50-60 feet in the air. Except for the valley areas, 90% of the higher elevations are covered with dense close-canopy rain forests.” Another soldier wrote of it as a “merciless land of steep limestone ridges . . . covered with double- and sometimes triple-canopy jungle. This nightmare vegetation reaches up to blot out the sun with teak and mahogany that tower 100 feet or more above the rot of the jungle floor. The draws between the ridges are dreary, tangled places of perpetual twilight, where a thousand growing things struggle to the death for light and air. The jungle is laced with vines and thorns, and in it live diverse snakes, a million leeches and about half the mosquitoes in the world.” To the infantry soldiers, Dak To meant steamy, bone-weary humps, confining jungles, bamboo fields, wild streams, insects, exhaustion, and an eerie sense that they were treading on the enemy’s turf.
In fact, just several miles away, in Laos and Cambodia, the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) maintained an extensive network of infiltration routes and base camps generally known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Shielded by the dense jungles, the North’s courageous soldiers sallied forth from these routes into South Vietnam, often to fight as guerrilla warriors. In the fall of 1967, several regiments of these NVA regulars massed around Dak To, heavily fortifying many of the key hill masses. Their goal was to draw the Americans into a costly struggle for those hills. They hoped that the heavy jungle canopy, the dearth of roads, and the dizzying array of peaks would negate the firepower and mobility of American aircraft, artillery, and vehicles. The communists were planning a major offensive for early 1968 and they wanted to draw the Americans into such remote areas, away from population centers. If the Americans did not take the bait, then the NVA formations would push east, make common cause with Viet Cong (VC) insurgents, whose hidden supply caches would support the NVA, and fight a hit-and-run war near the country’s population centers.
The Central Highlands, and specifically Dak To, presented General William Westmoreland, the American commander in Vietnam, with a vexing problem. He could not sit back and let the NVA move unmolested from their base camps into the rice-producing regions and cities of South Vietnam. Nor could he go after them in the exact manner he wished. He yearned to attack and destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail sanctuaries. But President Lyndon Johnson feared the international political ramifications of invading such ostensibly “neutral” countries as Laos and Cambodia. That the North Vietnamese and their allies in the VC had already done so hardly mattered in the forum of international opinion, which viewed any American cross-border operations as aggression. For fear of this sort of backlash, and the possibility that hitting the communists in Cambodia and Laos would provoke a larger world war with China and the Soviet Union, the Americans, as of 1967, had straitjacketed themselves into fighting the ground war primarily on South Vietnamese soil. For Westmoreland, this meant he had to react to enemy incursions of South Vietnam, rather than take the fight to the communist bases or even North Vietnam itself. His avowed strategy for victory was, of course, attrition—fight the enemy’s big units and savage them with overwhelming firepower until the communists could no longer continue the war.
Like most American commanders from World War II onward, Westy believed that aggressive attacks, the use of maximum firepower, and the relentless quest to annihilate the enemy’s forces in battle all led to strategic victory. By and large, this had worked in the Second World War and it had produced some results in Korea, too. So, in Vietnam, Westy liked the idea of fighting such decisive engagements in the out-of-the-way Central Highlands, where he could employ the full range of his firepower without fear of inflicting casualties on noncombatants. This, he believed, was the place to pile up the large body counts he so badly needed for his strategy to work. If he could not go after the communist bases themselves, he could essentially head the enemy off at the pass—taking on NVA units when they crossed the border, around the hills of Dak To, before they could push east, get into the towns and cities of South Vietnam, and cause even more serious problems. Better, he thought, to fight them in the remote areas first.
He understood that the suffocating jungles and peaks of the border areas negated some of the mobility he so badly needed to carry out his search-and-destroy concept. But he felt that helicopters more than made up for whatever he might lose in ground mobility for his foot soldiers and vehicles. “I believe when the enemy comes forth from Cambodia or Laos with his principal formations looking for a fight we must go out and fight him,” Westy once told one of his superiors. “We must strike him as soon as he is within reach, and before he can gain a victory or tyrannize the local population.”
All of these ideas made some sense, but they also led to serious problems that Westy either downplayed or did not appreciate. If the United States was unwilling to invade Cambodia, Laos, or, for that matter, North Vietnam, then there was almost no way that the Americans could control the borderlands. The NVA knew the gro
und quite well, far better than the Americans. The communists could always retreat to their sanctuaries, where they could devise new plans, reinforce their combat units, and come back to South Vietnam whenever they chose. Ominously for Westy’s attrition strategy, this also meant they could control the rate of their losses.
Westmoreland believed that by fighting the enemy in the border areas, he could “preempt his [the enemy’s] plans and force him to fight before he is fully organized and before he can do his damage.” This was highly questionable. One could actually argue that the NVA sought battle in exactly these spots and prepared accordingly. The thick terrain offered the perfect cover to conceal their movement. The “Land with No Sun” comprised the ideal place to construct well-camouflaged tunnels, bunkers, and spider holes that were often impervious to American bombs and shells. From here they would provoke American commanders, who they knew were so eager to find NVA units and pile up large body counts that they would do battle even when it was not necessarily to their advantage. As of November 1967, the NVA had fortified many of the hills around Dak To in just this fashion. Fighting there was more likely to play right into the enemy’s plans rather than disrupt or preempt them. Not surprisingly, Westmoreland’s in-house antagonist, Marine Lieutenant General Victor Krulak, opposed the commander’s notion of fighting big battles in the Central Highlands. “Those battles were fought too often on the enemy’s terms,” he later wrote, “where close-quarters combat in the fog-shrouded hills, forests, and vine-thick jungles, with which he was familiar, stretched our logistic system and diminished the effectiveness of U.S. supporting arms, particularly air.” Those indeed were the problems and, in the fall of 1967, they were about to coalesce in monumental fighting amid the unhappy hills around Dak To.1
Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II Through Iraq Page 30
