CHAPTER 6
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 peril, 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.
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
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, wrote. “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.”
This could also mean looking the other way at their excesses. In this terribly personal war, what the Marines knew as torture was perfectly acceptable behavior to the PFs. A couple PFs from Sergeant Jim Donovan’s team caught an NVA colonel one time and recognized him as the person responsible for obliterating a nearby village several years before. In a matter of minutes, they tortured and killed the colonel. “They chopped off a bamboo thing and stripped it. They soaked it in water and just started whipping him and screaming at him for questions. He wasn’t gonna talk at all. I think his body turned out to be like jelly.” Donovan contemplated interceding but he was concerned that, if he did, the PFs would turn on him. “This is people that have been at war for a hundred years and they didn’t have any Geneva Convention shit.”
Corporal Goodson encountered a similar situation one night—before the accidental shooting—when his PFs captured the Viet Cong girlfriend of an NVA officer. Everyone understood that she knew much about an impending enemy attack on the CAP. While in custody, she struggled mightily, “like a wild animal,” in Goodson’s memory. “The girl had hate in her eyes and continuously fought her captors, cussing us through her gag.”
As the Marines stood aside, a team of PFs took her into a shack for interrogation. Goodson and the Americans heard shouts and the sound of slapping. Then, when Goodson heard her emit a bloodcurdling scream, he climbed the side of the shack and peered down from a ventilation hole. “The beaten girl was nude, lying in a pool of water on the floor. Wires, attached to every vital part of her body, led back to a hand-cranked generator. The hand on the generator cranked in rapid turns. The girl screamed again as her body jerked around on the floor.” Sickened and haunted by the scene, he could watch no more. He contemplated doing something to stop this, but came to the painful realization that he was powerless. “It was their territory. It was their way. No one could interfere.” The girl died in agony.10
Working with the PFs, then, was a constant process of accommodation, negotiation, and amalgamation. But when the Marines and the PFs clashed with the VC, or were attacked by them, they fought together as brothers. In the run-up to and during the major communist Tet Offensive of 1968, they made a point of attacking the CAPs with powerful formations. According to one study, almost half of all enemy attacks in I Corps from November 1967 through January 1968 were against the CAPs.
Even before the fighting intensified, many of the CAP Marines had picked up intelligence on the enemy offensive, as well as a foreboding mood among the villagers. “When we sent in reports” to higher headquarters, Private First Class Tom Krusewski recalled, “nobody believed us. That was one of the problems with the CAPs—we didn’t have any officers with us. They thought we exaggerated. And they distrusted the Vietnamese.” Indeed, NCOs had so much latitude and independence in running their CAPs that officers seldom had much impact on the day-to-day operations. To most CAP members, the officers were distant and out of touch, and generally held in contempt. “In our teams we were not listened to by higher command,” one sergeant asserted. “We watched [enemy] heavy weapons squads come in, platoons come in [before Tet], and we called these [in]. And nobody would believe us. We watched them move in with rockets . . . and heavy mortars. We were told by higher-ups that, quote, ‘we didn’t know what the hell we were talking about.’”
Thus, the average Marine sensed what was in the offing, even if those at headquarters did not. While walking through his village one day, Corporal Igor Bobrowsky noticed that people were building coffins. Sergeant Keith Cossey watched as his village “had suddenly been filled with strange young men in civilian clothes.” All of them carried South Vietnamese ID cards but they were actually the vanguard of a North Vietnamese Army regiment. “We had our hands full with literally hundreds of these characters just hanging around.”
When the attacks started, they were especially violent. With terrible suddenness one night, the VC hit Private First Class Thomas Flynn’s Tiger Papa Three CAP by bombarding their makeshift compound with RPGs. The tin and wood hootch where Flynn was sleeping collapsed on him. He got separated from his rifle. In the confusion, with bullets flying and the screams of Marines, PFs, and VC mixing together amid the noise, Flynn saw a Viet Cong soldier toss a grenade into an adjacent bunker, killing a Marine. “His body [was] twisted and his stomach was torn open from the explosion,” Flynn wrote. As Flynn approached the enemy soldier, he turned and pulled a knife. “Before he could react, I grabbed his wrist and his throat and kicked his legs out from under him with a large sweep. We both went down on the ground with me on top. I disarmed him. With both hands on the handle, I thrust the knife into his chest.”
Seconds later, a group of armed VC surrounded him. He lunged for one of them and, as he struggled for his rifle, another VC shot Flynn in the face. “My tongue was ripped. My mouth filled with blood, and I felt several teeth lying loose in my mouth.” He could also feel a hole in his left cheek where the bullet had exited. As he vomited blood, the VC dragged him several yards by the hair. They bayoneted him in the hand and exploded a grenade against his leg. But they were either too distracted with the resistance offered by other CAP members or were perhaps unwilling to finish him off face-to-face. Eventually they retreated, the battle died down, and Flynn’s buddies medevaced him. As was so common in these situations, the surviving Marines and PFs later rebuilt their compound and renewed their mission.
The enemy tactic was to strike swiftly with overwhelming force, attempt to overrun the compound, inflict maximum damage, and then withdraw before nearby conventional units could arrive on the scene. According to Lieutenant Colonel Corson, one 1967 assault was supported by “150 rounds of 82mm mortars, 40-50 rounds of recoilless rifle fire and multiple bangalore torpedoes to break the defensive wire. Once through the wire the assault forces moved rapidly against the pre-selected objectives of the dispensary, the command bunker and the ammunition bunker.”
This particular attack lasted seven minutes. During Tet, most were longer. Often the enemy trained for their assaults on exact mock-ups of whatever compound they had targeted. Because of these elaborate rehearsals, the average enemy soldier was very well prepared to kill at close range. “At times the attackers advanced to ranges so close that hand grenades were employed freely by both combatants,” one post-battle report stated.
In one such instance, a potent force of 150 NVA and VC assaulted a 3rd Combined Action Group CAP in the middle of the night. “As soon as the first [mortar] round hit the compound,” Lance Corporal Frank Lopez, a rifleman, recalled, “they just put cardboard boxes and blankets and mats on the wires.” This allowed them to breach the wire rapidly. They then set to work blowing up bunkers and exchanging shots with the Marines and PFs. “It looked like ants coming over a hill or just coming through the wire, towards the compound yelling and screaming,” Lopez said. “Everyone was just yelling and getting hit.” The CAP Marines and PFs had little illumination and no fire support because their supporting units were also under heavy attack. “The VC threw a lot of satchel charges that night,” another Marine said, “within half an hour the entire compound was set on fire.”
Men of both sides scattered in every direction, among bunkers and buildings, where they fought to the death in a personal fashion. The Viet Cong even taunted the Americans with bullhorns, naming individual Marines and promising to kill them (the VC often put bounties on the heads of CAP Marines). “They [VC] were every place,” Corporal Arliss Willhite remembered. He himself heard his name over the bullhorn. “They had the Compound almost totally destroyed in twenty minutes. Why they did leave, and why they didn’t kill everybody, I don’t know. They just turned around and left when the sun started coming up.” They probably withdrew for fear of getting annihilated by U.S. aircraft or rescue forces. As it was, they killed seven Marines and eleven PFs.
The next year, 1969, the communists launched another Tet Offensive. This one was not quite as potent as the one in 1968, but for the CAP Marines in the path of the attacks, this one was bad enough. Corporal Goodson’s CAP, for example, knew from their many local intelligence sources that the attack was coming. Before the fighting started, though, they had the surreal experience of participating in a bizarre eve-of-battle Tet holiday banquet with the VC and NVA. In a situation that was probably unique in the entire history of the war, Goodson, the seven other Marines on his team, and the PF leader visited the enemy’s remote camp, at their invitation, for a feast. “Every man in black PJ’s and NVA uniforms nodded respectfully as we passed, giving us forced smiles that made no attempt at camouflaging the contempt and hatred they held for us. Yet even past the hatred you could sense a fear and reverence for our presence.” At six feet three, Goodson towered over them, and made a point of stretching to his full height. Each Marine struggled to conceal his own fear, betraying no weakness in front of the enemy.
As the meal ended, an NVA officer stood up and spoke in English. “Welcome, gentlemen. I hope you have enjoyed your meal. You honor us with your presence as warrior honors warrior. You will all die tonight. Tonight, marines, some of our men will collect the bounty we have placed on your heads. Tomorrow we celebrate with same meal over our victory! But, today, enjoy yourselves. Eat as much as you like.” Corporal Goodson sat listening and thought: “Hope we see you personally tonight.”
When the banquet ended, the team left with little fanfare. The situation was nerve-wracking and strange in the extreme. Knowing full well that they would soon fight a battle of extinction, they had sat down for a convivial meal with the enemy, as if they were about to engage in nothing more consequential than a sporting event or a chess competition. Such were the psychological vagaries of combat, and the strong human connections that often existed between mortal enemies, even in this modern era when combatants sometimes cared little about old-world notions of honor.
Realizing that time was short, they retrieved their weapons, smeared themselves with buffalo dung to blend in with their surroundings, and settled into a predetermined ambush spot to wait for the communist attack. Sure enough, the assault came at about midnight. “It seemed like every tree and bush was alive with NVA and VC,” Goodson wrote. “Brazenly they stepped into the light and opened fire with their AK’s and machine guns. Green tracers and their deadly partners sliced away at the trees around us.” American fire scythed through the enemy soldiers. In the weird half-light, the Marines could see some of them stumbling and falling.
The battle ebbed and flowed like this for an indeterminate amount of time. The team was running low on ammo. Goodson called his company commander, several miles away in a firebase, for fire support. The enemy fighters were within fifty meters of the team now. “They were coming from all directions like a pack of wolves moving in for the kill.” Instead of arranging for artillery or helicopter support, the company commander accused Goodson of staging a fake battle for glory and medals. He refused to provide any help. Angry beyond description, Goodson hoped only to survive long enough to kill the CO. Once again, this was another troubling example of the disconnect between officers and enlisted men in the CAP program.
When the team was almost out of ammunition, and about to be overrun by the enemy, a sensible colonel got on the net, overruled the company commander, and came to the rescue with Hueys and helicopter gunships. The intense fire of the gunships kept the NVA and VC at bay, while the Hueys landed and resupplied the team with ammo. By dawn, the battle was over and the enemy was gone. The team had lost one man killed and another wounded. “Everyone was physically and mentally drained,” Goodson later wrote. “Battles such as this one simply do not end with the last bullet. They are lived time and again in your mind as your senses attempt to cope with the horrors and the highs.”11
Mobility, Agility, and Finality
In response to the Tet battles, the CAPs adopted new mobile tactics. As the furious onslaughts piled up, the program’s senior commanders, such as Colonel Theodore Metzger, came to believe that the stationary CAP compounds were too vulnerable. After all, they were fixed targets. The VC knew exactly where they were and could easily gather intelligence on their defenses (as evidenced by the mock-ups they often built). Nor was it difficult, as Tet proved, for the enemy to amass powerful attacking forces to overrun a compound. If the CAPs became mobile, though, and never planted themselves in one widely known spot for any length of time, the VC lost the initiative. “With its mobility, the CAP can keep the VC guessing,” Colonel Metzger said in early 1970. “They don’t like to come after you unless they’ve had a chance to get set and do some planning. Mobility throws this off. It . . . means that the CAP can be found anywhere outside a village or a hamlet, and they [VC] don’t like this when they’re trying to come in for rice, or money, or recruits, or just plain coordination.” Moreover, the mobile CAPs did not have to tie down a substantial portion of their limited manpower to the job of defending a compound. Instead they became stalkers, roaming daily and nightly throughout an area of operations, insinuating themselves into many villages, frequently clashing with the equally mobile VC.
By the middle of 1969, almost 90 percent of the CAPs were mobile. As Metzger put it: “CAP Marines literally went to the bush for their entire tours.” At first, this could be quite a daunting challenge, especially for the newer men, who felt comforted by the false security of a compound. For many of the Marines—and all Americans in Vietnam, come to think of it—a compound, firebase, or perimeter meant security. This was actually one of the major problems with the war effort—namely, that not enough Americans were in touch with the people, or engaged in the job of providing them real security. Base camps were designed to offer safety to the Americans and no one else. Leaving that dubious security, plunging into the jungles, paddies, and villages among the people, seemed to augur great danger, if not guaranteed death. So the idea of permanently plunging into the world outside the wire was frightening indeed, a counterintuitive nightmare that portended a sort of bogeyman-inspired doom.
Perhaps this trepidation also stemmed from the natural human impulse to have a home, even in the most dangerous of situations. “I saw the mobile CAPs as extremely scary,” Gene Ferguson recalled. “I didn’t have the safety to run back to.” He liked the idea of having a barbed-wire compound with mortars, machine guns, and bunkers around him. “In the mobile CAP they could just slaughter us like flies. I was so scared. When the weather got bad, we didn’t get resupplied. There were times when we would go three days without any food.” Like most newcomers, Barry Goodson was taken aback when he first joined his CAP and realized it was mobile. “You mean you don’t have a compound to hide in case of an attack?” he asked his new friends. They assured him that they lived in the jungle full-time, moving to different ambush positions every night. A deep apprehension settled over Goodson and he wondered what he had gotten himself into. “Here I was with only five other men [Marines]. The jungle was our home!”
Goodson, like most of the other Marines, got used to the new ways, and came to embrace them. The mobile CAPs were indeed a potent weapon. In practice, they acted as stealthy hunter-killer teams, putting the VC on the defensive, forcing them to react to the Marines and PFs rather than the other way around. For the sake of sheer survival, they learned to blend in well with their surroundings. They were masters at patrolling because that was all they did.
They suffered fewer casualties than the stationary teams, and they inflicted more damage on the VC. “It was darned tough on the CAP Marines,” Metzger said, “but it saved many lives and greatly enhanced our security capability.” In 1969, at the cost of 117 Americans killed and 851 wounded, they killed 1,952 VC and NVA (by actual body count), while capturing another 391. They conducted about twelve thousand patrols or ambushes per month, most at night. They initiated two-thirds of their firefights (compared with a 10 percent rate in the line companies). In the first few months of 1970 alone they killed 288 enemy soldiers and captured 87. All of these numbers were improvements from the 1965 to 1968 phase of the program, when most of the CAPs were stationary.
The mobile CAPs were consummate, agile light infantry. They immersed themselves in the culture and the war itself. They arguably had more at stake than any other Americans in Vietnam because they were so close to the land and the people. Their lives were always at risk. “Ambushes, ambushes, ambushes; it seems like that’s all we did in the CAPs I was in,” Private First Class Warren Carmon recalled. “Our group ran them seven nights a week. My God, even the [line company] grunts got a chance to go to the rear for some rest.” But not the CAP grunts. “Some of our ambushes were very successful. Like one night an NVA patrol, fourteen soldiers, entered our killing zone. It was perfect. We opened up on them, dropping eleven instantly. The other three tried to run but never made it. We moved around so much I can never remember the names of most of the villages. The people, at least to your face, were very friendly. They encouraged us to stay around their homes to protect them. We got along great with the kids.”
The mobile CAPs did have one major downside, though. They enhanced tactical proficiency and security at the expense of civic action. With the teams on the move so much, they did not have as much time to devote to forging relationships with the villagers. They could not dig as many wells, share as many meals, conduct quite as many MEDCAPs, or share in village life to the extent they did before. For these reasons, Lieutenant Colonel Corson, the spiritual father of the program, actually disagreed with the change to mobile CAPs that happened after he rotated home in 1967.
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.