When Daniel Ellsberg was on trial for stealing the Pentagon Papers, his
defense lawyers, to confuse the issue, introduced the claim that U.S.
participation in the Vietnam conflict was premeditated, that the Tonkin
Gulf incident was a contrived excuse for our intervention. I was one of
the witnesses for the federal government. On cross-examination, Ellsberg's
attorney, Leonard Weinglass, wanted me to admit that well before we went
to Vietnam the Marines were preparing for combat there. I surprised him by
confessing. Yes, I said, we were indeed preparing for the eventuality of
having to fight in Vietnam. Even more important, I told him, we were
preparing to fight in a lot of other places, too.
Unwittingly, Mr. Weinglass had underscored one of the characteristics
that has distinguished the Corps--a standing determination to be ready for
combat wherever and however it may arise. Total readiness is,
nevertheless, more an objective than a reality, because of the enemy--his
strengths, his aims, and his resolve. We have learned, to our regret, that
while you are certainly the better for preparing, the war you prepare for
is rarely the war you get.
Thus, we come to an unusual, and generally unheralded, aspect of the
Marines' quality as fighters. Adaptability, initiative, and improvisation
are the true fabric of obedience, the ultimate in soldierly conduct, going
further than sheer heroism to make the Marines what they are. "The battle
is what it's all about," Marines say. "Try as hard as you can to be ready
for it but be willing to adapt and improvise when it turns out to be a
different battle than the one you expected, because adaptability is where
victory will be found." This virtue of adaptability has found expression
many times in the Marines' combat history, especially since the beginning
of the twentieth century.
In 1916, for example, Marines went to Santo Domingo on short notice
with the simple mission of protecting the American Legation in Santo
Domingo City. They were still there eight years later, involved in the far
broader tasks of both pacifying and governing the country, to which they
had adapted readily. In 1950, they went to Korea intending to make a
decisive amphibious assault at Inchon to sever the North Korean supply
line. Ten weeks later they were still in Korea, fighting quite a different
kind of war--a protracted land campaign in the subzero ice and snow of the
Chosin Reservoir. And four years later they were still there, fighting an
attritional war of position. They stood up to these varied combat
challenges because of an instinctive determination to adapt.
The sternest fighting test of all, where the need for adaptability was
greatest, came in Vietnam. The onset of that conflict found the Corps in
an advanced state of training oriented primarily toward its traditional
amphibious mission but with some attention given to counterinsurgency
situations. Since 1962, when President Kennedy required all of the
services to emphasize counterinsurgency training, the Marines had been
preparing to operate in a counterinsurgency environment, not just in
Southeast Asia but anywhere in the world.
Serving in the Joint Staff as the focal point in counterinsurgency
operations and training, I went to Vietnam eight times between 1962 and
1964. In those early years, I learned something of the complex nature of
the conflict there. The problem of seeking out and destroying guerrillas
was easy enough to comprehend, but winning the loyalty of the people, why
it was so important and how to do it, took longer to understand. Several
meetings with Sir Robert Thompson, who contributed so much to the British
victory over the guerrillas in Malaya, established a set of basic
counterinsurgency principles in my mind. Thompson said, "The peoples'
trust is primary. It will come hard because they are fearful and
suspicious. Protection is the most important thing you can bring them.
After that comes health. And, after that, many things--land, prosperity,
education, and privacy to name a few." The more I was of the situation
facing the Vietnamese government and the Vietnamese Army, the more
convinced I became--along with many other Americans, that our success in
the counterinsurgency conflict would depend on a complete and intimate
understanding by all ranks from top to bottom of the principles Thompson
had articulated.
In 1964, I assumed command of Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, embracing
all the Marines in the Pacific Ocean area. Following the experience of
Thompson and based on what I had learned in the preceding two years, we
set about orienting our training toward combat in a counterinsurgency
environment. The training culminated in early 1965 in a major series of
exercises called Silver Lance, patterned as closely as possible upon the
emerging situation in Vietnam. All counterinsurgency issues were explored:
fighting both large and small bands of guerrillas; handling situations
involving the local civilian population; supporting training and
cooperating with the indigenous military; dealing with our own diplomatic
representatives; and meeting the challenge of a privileged sanctuary,
where a bordering, ostensibly neutral country is used as a base and a
route of approach by the enemy. We added realism to the exercise by having
Marines, carefully rehearsed for their roles, take the parts of friendly
and hostile native forces as well as of our own political and diplomatic
personnel. Everyone, from the high command to the individual Marines, was
tested, and we all learned from the experience. The exercise could not
have been more timely. About a third of the Silver Lance forces--the
air/ground 1st. Marines Brigade--were at sea off the California coast when
the decision was made to land a Danang. The brigade was turned westward
immediately and directed to sail toward the anticipated battle. It was
actually disembarked in Okinawa, but it ultimately ended up in Vietnam, as
did all the other participants in the exercise. And the 3d Battalion 9th
Marines fro Okinawa, the first unit to be committed, actually war-gamed a
landing at Danang only two weeks before the landing took place.
So the Marines, from colonels to private, were mentally prepared and
reasonably ready for a counterinsurgency conflict. However, it turned out
that the mission of the initial force to land at Danang was greatly
different from what they had been practicing. The unit was restricted to
protecting the Danang air base from enemy incursion, nothing more. It was
not permitted to "engage in day-to-day actions against the Vietcong," nor
were the Marines allowed to leave the air base or to be involved directly
with the local population--which is what counterinsurgency is all about.
Soon the force was enlarged to include the whole of the 9th Marine
Expeditionary Brigade of five thousand men, but it remained confined to
the airbase area, tied to what the senior U.S. command, "COMUSMACV" termed
"protection of the Danang air base from enemy attack."
This was never going to work. We were not going to win any
counterinsurgency battles sitting in foxholes around a runway, separated
from the very people we wanted to protect. Furthermore, the air base was
over-looked by hills to the west and northwest, giving the enemy a clear
view of the field. On two sides, the arifield complex was cheek-by-jowl
with the city of Danang, only a wire fence separating the base from two
hundred thousand people--most of them suspicious of us, some of them
hostile. Despite all this, General Nguyen Chan Thi, the Vietnamese
commander of the area, termed the I Corps Tactical Zone agreed with
General Westmoreland. He did not want the Marines moving outside the
airfield area either. Thi, an intense, mercurial personality, had had no
experience with Americans. He had, however, been involved with the
French--not altogether favorably--and was determined, at the outset, not
to allow the Americans to infringe his authority. Ultimately, Thi became
totally confident in the Marines, willing to do just about anything they
asked.
As Commanding General, Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, I was responsible
for the training of all the Marines in the Pacific, for the equipment,
their supply of Marine Corps items, and their readiness, but I had no
authority whatever over their operational employment in Vietnam. That was
General Westmoreland's business, and he answered to the commander of the
Pacific Theater, Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp.
Nevertheless, I felt strongly that American lives, as well as many
valuable aircraft, were going to be hazarded if we could not patrol the
hills around the Danang field. Furthermore, I believed that we could do
little to help the people if we were obliged to shun them. I went, with
Brigadier General Frederick Karch, the Marine brigade commander, to
remonstrate with Thi. Thi listened. After we were finished, he just said,
patiently, "You are not ready." We repeatedly pleaded with him, and he
relented slightly. By 20 April, 1965, the Marines were patrolling the
hills about two miles west of the airfield and the countryside about four
miles north of the field. I suspect, in both cases, that General Thi felt
safe--there were few Vietcong in those areas but, as we were to learn,
there were many not far distant.
These tiny moves into the hinterland turned out to be the first steps
in a massive expansion responding to the siren calls of seeking more
favorable terrain and engaging the enemy. The eight-square-mile enclave
around the Danang airfield grew, in six months, to more than eight hundred
square miles. Another enclave of some one hundred square miles was created
fifty miles to the south at Chu Lai to accommodate construction of a
second airstrip. A third enclave of some sixty square miles was
established at Phu Bai, fifty miles north of Danang, at the direction of
General Westmoreland, to protect a communications unit there. The creation
and growth of the three enclaves brought a great opportunity to work among
the native population, to seek out the Vietcong guerrillas in each area,
and to bring a little stability to rich and populous areas, some of which
had been under enemy control for a decade.
By mid-1965 the five thousand man force had grown to over eighteen
thousand, and there was still a crying hunger for more Marines. This was
so because the Marines' concept, from the start, involved fighting the
Vietnam battle as a multipronged effort. They aimed to bring peace and
security to the people in the highly populated coastal regions by
conducting aggressive operations against the guerrillas and expanding the
pacified areas as rapidly as they were totally secured. At the same time,
they planned to train the local militia and to support the Vietnamese
Armed Forces in their fight against the Vietcong. Finally, the Marines
were determined to go after the larger organized units wherever they could
be definitely located and fixed. They set about this balanced strategy
with a will, showing persistence and no small degree of innovative genius.
The Marines' fist experience of protecting the people began in May
1965. It was a challenging test of the lessons practiced earlier in the
year in exercise Silver Lance. To secure the Danang air base from
guerrilla attack from the northwest, it was necessary to cover the broad
valley of the Cue De River. They learned quickly that Le My, a village of
about seven hundred people, comprising eight hamlets, only six miles from
the main airstrip, was truly enemy country. Two guerrilla platoons--about
forty men--lived in the village where they had constructed an extensive
cave and tunnel system. They moved in and out at will, extorting the
people's rice and money, coercing their youth to join the insurgency, and
threatening the village officials. Because of the Vietcong oppression, Le
My was sick unto death. There was little government, little agriculture,
little commerce, no security, no public services, and no schools. The
Vietnamese Army and regional troops had made a few feeble passes at
chasing the Vietcong away, but the enemy retained control of the area, its
resources, and its people. Further complicating the situation was the fact
that some of the active guerrillas had relatives in the village, from whom
they received food, sanctuary, and information. Nevertheless, the people
at large were dispondent and terrified. Even the village chief spent many
of his nights in Danang because of his fear of assassination or capture.
In early May, after every patrol in the area reported receiving sniper
fire, the Marines decided to clean the guerrillas out of Le My. They
launched a two-company operation and found they had undertaken a
time-consuming and enervating job. The Vietcong reacted to the American
threat strongly--by fire, ambush, and booby trap, giving the Marines a
foretaste of the bitter antiguerrilla war that was to absorb them for the
next six years.
Eventually, however, the insurgents were rooted out of the caves and
tunnels, and killed, captured, or driven away. The people's confidence was
slowly restored by the security provided by the Marine units as well as by
local militia, which resurfaced as the Marine influence grew. By
ministering to the villagers' health, by supporting them in construction
projects, and by helping them to dig wells and reestablish schools and
markets, the Marines brought the villagers level of stability unseen in a
decade. Concurrently, the Marines encouraged and assisted the local
militia, training them, repairing their weapons, and helping them
construct strong defensive positions around the village.
The Marines tried to put into effect in the village of Le My exactly
what they had practiced before coming to Vietnam. Although lacking in the
polish that comes with experience, the effort turned out to be
classic--actually a good pattern for their subsequent actions, in scores
of other villages, to deliver the people from terror. Among other things,
it illustrated that the pacification process demanded the combined efforts
of both Americans and Vietnamese. To this end, Lieutenant General Lewis
Walt, the senior Marine commander, created a "Joint Coordinating Council,"
which included representatives from all organizations involved with the
pacification process.
I learned a lasting lesson at Le My. In late May 1965, I went there
with Lieutenant Colonel David A. Clement, whose battalion had done the
entire Le My project. We met the district (county) chief and the village
chief, who showed us with much pride and gratitude the rejuvenation of the
village--the white-washed dispensary with two shy nurses wearing white;
the one-room schoolhouse filled with serious-faced little children' the
thriving marketplace, and, more seriously, the newly constructed outposts
and security installations around the village perimeter. Neither of the
two officials could speak English, but the district chief could speak
French, and, amid all the smiles, bows, thanks, and congratulations, he
said to me in a very sober way, "one thing. All of this has meaning only
if you are going to stay. Are you going to stay?"
It was a hard question, but basic. The villager could not risk giving
us their trust if we were going to go off and leave them unprotected in
the vain belief that the Vietcong, once driven off, would not come back.
They had already had the experience of being encouraged and then abandoned
by the French, and by their own Army, too. so I said, "These same Marines
will not stay here, but others will never be far away, and your own
militia will be here all the time." He made it clear that this was not
exactly what he wanted to hear but it was better than nothing. It turned
out to be good enough to encourage one hundred fifty people from two
Vietcong-dominated hamlets some ten miles distant to leave their homes and
their precious land and move to Le My just to be under the umbrella of
American protection.
Le My had it ups and downs in the next five years--minor forays by
guerrillas, assassination of one of its mayors--but the Vietcong never
took over the area gain. Le My was a microcosm of the entire war at this
period, reflecting on a small scale the perspective of ten million rural
Vietnamese in fourteen thousand hamlets. They always feared, and sometimes
hated, the Vietcong for the extortion, taxation, brutality, and designs on
the local youth. They wanted and welcomed our protection but were
terrified at the prospect of getting it and then losing it. The nearer
were to them and the more thorough our efforts, the better the system
worked. This painstaking, exhausting, and sometimes bloody process of
bringing peace, prosperity, and health to a gradually expanding area came
to be known as the "spreading ink blot" formula. In the effort to free and
then protect the people, it should have been at the heart of the battle
for freedom in Indochina. Many people applauded the idea, among them Army
generals Maxwell Taylor and James Gavin. General Westmoreland told me,
however, that while the ink blot idea seemed to be effective, we just
didn't have time to do it that way. I suggested to him the we didn't have
time to do it any other way; if we left the people to the enemy, glorious
victories in the hinterland would be little more than blows in the
air--and we would end up losing the war. But Defense Secretary Robert S.
McNamara expressed the same view as Westmoreland to me in the winter of
1965--"A good idea," he said about the ink blot formula, "but too slow." I
had told him in a letter dated 11 November 1965, "In the highly populous
areas the battle ground is in the peoples' minds. We have to separate the
enemy from the people, and clean up the area a bit at a time."
With the tiny experience of Le My to encourage them, the Marines moved
assertively into more Le Mys, as well as on to other combatant efforts
aimed at breaking the guerrillas' hold on the people. One such endeavor
was called "County Fair." It began as a simple U.S.--Vietnamese program
for rooting out Vietcong military and political cells from the villages.
Under cover of darkness a Marine unit would surround a village believed to
be infiltrated by Vietcong. Then a Vietnamese Army unit would enter the
village, search for tunnels and caves, and flush out any hiding
guerrillas. Concurrently, they would screen the residents for identity
cards and take into custody any suspicious persons.
The idea was sound in principle and sometimes effective in execution.
But often it went aground on either of two circumstances. First, the
Vietnamese Army was never enthusiastic about working among the people, and
they were not particularly good at it. Second, the Marines were sometimes
anxious to do too much for the same people.
some County Fairs were immensely complicated. While the Vietnamese Army
troops were busy digging out guerrillas, there might be a Marine band
concert in progress, a soup kitchen, a medical program, a dental program,
a population census, some native entertainment, possibly a film, and even
some political speeches--all going on at once. I never saw a County Fair
where I did not wonder whether the villagers were absolutely sure of what
we were doing. And I wondered how long it would take the Vietcong to
percolate back after the Marines and Vietnamese Army had packed up and
left.
A more effective project was called "combined Action," a scheme which
brought together a squad of Marines and a platoon of the Vietnamese
Popular Forces. The Popular Forces were at the very bottom of the pecking
order in the Vietnamese military. They were recruited from and served in
their own hamlet and, as soldiers, they were pitiable. Poorly equipped,
poorly trained, poorly led, and given only half the pay of the Vietnamese
Army, they fought indifferently, if at all, and were notorious for their
desertion rate. They were literal afraid of the dark; they were quite
unwilling to fight at night when the Vietcong were at large. It is not
remarkable that they inspired little confidence among the villagers.
My first experience with the Popular Forces was on a trip I made to
Vietnam in 1962 with Defense Secretary McNamara. In a hamlet outside the
town of Nha Trang, we saw a Popular Force unit of about twenty-five thin,
grave faced little me, drawn up as a sort of ceremonial honor guard. No
two in the same uniform, armed with an assortment of battered rifles,
carbines, and shotguns, they were monumentally unimpressive to look at. As
we walked down the ragged front rank, McNamara pointed to one rifle and
asked me, "Do you think those things will shoot?" I took one form a
soldier, had trouble getting the bolt to open and, when I did, could not
see daylight through the gun barrel. The ammunition in the youngster's
belt was green with corrosion.
When I told McNamara, he said, "We are going to have to do something
about this. These may well be the most important military people in
Vietnam. They have something real to fight for--their own hamlet, their
own family" And he was right. Unfortunately, little was done on their
behalf between 1962 and 1965, when the Marines hit upon the possibilities
inherent in combining the loyalty and local knowledge of the Popular
forces with our own professional skill. It is hard to say just where the
idea for Combined Action originated, but Captains Paul R. Ek and John J.
Mullen, Jr., and Major Cullen C. Zimmerman are prominently mentioned as
the architects and Lieutenant General Lewis Walt, the overall Marine
commander, lent his energetic support.
A Marine squad composed of carefully screened volunteers who already
had some combat experience was given basic instruction in Vietnamese
culture and customs and then combined with a Popular Forces platoon. The
Marine squad leader--a sergeant of corporal--commanded the combined force
in tactical operations, and the Popular Forces platoon leader was his
operational assistant. The remaining Marines were distributed through the
unit in subordinate leadership positions.
The initial effort, organized as a "Combined Action Company," involved
four such units. In the summer of 1965, the 3d Battalion, 4th Marines,
launched the program at Phu Bai. The combined platoons lived together in
the hamlets. The Vietnamese taught the Marines the language, customs, and
habits of the people and the local geography. The Marines conducted
training in weapons and tactics. Together , they fought the Vietcong,
gradually acquiring the respect and confidence of the villagers. Living
condition were humble--or less. One platoon I visited was living in two
squalid native huts--dirt floor, no doors or windows, a blanket of files.
At the moment the Marines and Vietnamese were busy cooking, sharing their
food, and chattering in a mixture of English and Vietnamese. With much
pride, they were anxious to tell me that only the night before they had
conducted a successful ambush outside the village, killing one Vietcong
and capturing another--a triumph, considering that only weeks before the
Popular Forces troops could not be induced to go forth at night. Together
the two components were effective in often bloody operations against the
Vietcong, bringing a measure of peace to localities that had not known it
for year.
The Combined Action program spread quickly to all three of the Marine
enclaves. By early 1966, there were nineteen Combined Action units; by the
end of 1967, there were seventy-nine. All were engaged in offensive
operations against the Vietcong to protect their own home village. As they
fought their little engagements they wee reminding us of the wisdom of the
ancient Chinese military scholar Sun Tzu, to which Mao Tze-tung adhered,
who declared that in an insurgent war the revolutionaries are the fish and
the people are the medium in which they swim. If the medium is hospitable,
you are likely to win; if inhospitable you are sure to lose. North
Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap had his own way of saying it,
"Protracted was requires a whole ideological struggle among the people.
Without the people we have no information....They hid us, protect us, fee
us and tend our wounded."
The Vietcong had enjoyed a free ride in the Vietnamese hamlets because
of the general incompetence of the Popular Forces and the consequent
uncertainty of the people. The Combined Action idea was an effective
answer to the problem, helping to free the people to act, speak, and live
without fear. It was a multiplier, where the final product had combatant
value many times the sum of its individual components. There were hundreds
of skirmishes and many casualties, but two extraordinary statistics reveal
that the unique organization arrangement paid off: no village protected by
a Combined Action unit was ever repossessed by the Vietcong; and 60 of the
Marines serving the Combined Action units volunteered to stay on with
their Marine and Vietnamese companions for an additional six months when
they could have returned to the United States.
Senior Marine officers and those who had an interest in Marine Corps
history knew that the Combined Action idea had been applied with success
before--in Haiti (195-34), in Nicaragua (1926-33) and, probably most
effectively, in Santo Domingo (1916-22). There the Marines organized,
trained, and directed a new national police force, the Guardia National,
later to become the Policia National. Formal training schools imbued the
Policia rank and file with a sense of discipline. Under Marine leadership,
the Policia exercised their new knowledge of weapons and tactics in
hundreds of antiguerrilla patrols. But even more important, the Marines
got to the heart of security in the Dominican villages by organizing,
equipping, and training "home Guard" units composed of residents who were
willing to defend their own homes and families. Led by a Marine officer
and including ten to fifteen Dominicans and two or three Marine enlisted
men, these mixed groups successfully brought a measure of peace to their
small communities. In Vietnam, half a century later, similar combined
formations again validated the concept, proving that their effectiveness
far exceeded what might have been expected from their small numbers.
Even guerrillas have to eat, and the Vietcong had no fields of their
own. They depended on the farmers for their sustenance, about 1 1/2 pounds
of rice per man per day. At harvest time it was their habit to come down
to the coastal plain and extort food from the people who had put in six
hard months planting, cultivating, harvesting, and collecting the grain.
The Vietcong extortion (called rice taxation) not only drove up the price
of rice but, for many poor peasants, dangerously narrowed the margin
between survival and starvation, a fact that did not seem to dissuade the
guerrillas at all.
Beginning with the autumn rice crop of 1965, the Marines in the Danang
and Chu Lai areas moved to free the peasants from the Vietcong rice tax
collector. Using intelligence supplied by the villagers themselves, they
launched attacks against Vietcong units massing to commence their
rice-collecting operations. The Marines also deployed into the fields to
protect the harvesters and then helped transport the rice to central
storage areas.
The formula, called golden Fleece, was a success, assembling in the
first harvest season some 870,000 pounds of rice for local use that in
other years would have been vulnerable to Vietcong seizure. Put in other
terms, the Marines' offensive actions disrupted Vietcong units and, in
addition, kept sufficient rice out of the enemy's hands to supply and
estimated thirty-five hundred guerrillas for an entire growing season.
Subsistence, always a serious problem for the Vietcong, became a crisis.
Another step in winning the battle among the people was to prepare the
individual Marine for the contacts he would have with the local residents
as he moved about in the densely populated areas. We set about it in a
methodical manner, developing a Unit Leader's Personal Response
Handbook. The idea began back in Exercise Silver Lance at Camp
Pendleton in early 1965. Its principal architects were three
chaplains--John Craven of my staff, Robert Mole, and Richard McGonigle.
Craven persuaded me, in preparing for Silver Lance, that we would never be
effective in counterinsurgency unless our troops had not only an
understanding of but a respect for the local people, their habits, and
customs. The idea grew slowly, as both commanders and troops had to be
convinced of its importance. The Handbood took a practical,
case-example approach, explaining to Marines the simple rights and wrongs
of dealing with the shy and sensitive Vietnamese people. It became a
standard weapon in our arsenal to deal with the complex problem.
(Skip Operation Starlite)
All together, the first Marines in Vietnam created an innovative
strategy that was well attuned to the problems. It recognized that the
people themselves were both the battlefield and the objective and that the
usual tactical objectives--hills, bridges, rivers--meant little and the
usual battlefield statistics--enemy killed and wounded--meant even less.
Between 1962 and 1968, I went to Vietnam fifty-four times for periods
of five to twenty days. I saw a lot of the country, from the DMZ in the
north to the Ca Mau Peninsula in the south. And I saw a lot of the people,
from French-speaking dilettantes in Saigon to Moslems at Phan Rang on the
seacoast to Montagnards in the hills near the Laos border. As far back as
1963, I went on operations with the Vietnamese Army and the Vietnamese
Marines and saw how easily sizable enemy forces could melt into a
countryside willing to support, or at least to tolerate, them. Everything
I saw kept bringing me back to the basic proposition that the war could
only be won when the people were protected. If the people were for you,
you would triumph in the end. If they were against you, the war would
bleed you dry and you would be defeated.
Sound and logical as it appeared, the Marines' strategy had two
defects: General Westmoreland did not agree with it; and it was unable to
address the reality that the enemy enjoyed a privileged sanctuary in the
ports of North Vietnam and in Laos, through which a growing cascade of
deadly munitions was flowing.