Military Advisors Reflect on Vietnam War Experiences
Military Advisors Reflect on Vietnam War Experiences
By John Valceanu
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Aug. 29, 2012 – Two former military advisors who served with Vietnamese units during the Vietnam War spoke about their experiences in the Pentagon yesterday and shared their thoughts on advisory programs and counterinsurgency operations.
Retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and retired Army Lt. Col. James Willbanks took part in a panel discussion on “Advisors in the Vietnam War,” along with Andrew Birtle, chief of the Military Operations Branch at the Army Center of Military History. The panel was part of the Historical Speakers Series sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense Historical Office.
Birtle opened the program with an overview of the U.S. advisory effort in Vietnam. An expert on counterinsurgency operations doctrine who authored books on the subject, Birtle outlined the development of the military advisor program from the first U.S. advisors in 1950 until end of the war in the early 1970s.
“Perhaps the most common emotion advisors experienced in Vietnam was the frustration of being held responsible for something they could not control,” Birtle said. “Nothing was more frustrating than the feelings that one’s efforts were falling on fallow ground.”
Zinni spoke after Birtle, sharing his experiences as an advisor to a Vietnamese Marine unit in 1967. The general, who eventually rose through the ranks to lead U.S. Central Command, said his primary duties as an advisor in Vietnam were to help coordinate fire support, air capability and operations with U.S. units. Working, living and eating with the Vietnamese – and operating all over South Vietnam — gave him an insight into the conflict that he said he wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.
“Those who saw that war from inside a U.S. unit – despite the fact that certainly they saw plenty of combat, as we did – they saw a different war than I did,” Zinni said.
“I saw the war through the eyes of the Vietnamese people. I saw the war through the eyes of villagers that I lived with. I saw the war through the eyes of Vietnamese soldiers and Marines there weren’t there on one-year tours, but were there for the duration,” he said. “I saw the war from the Delta to the DMZ. I saw the war from Cambodia to the coastal plains in the east. And it was a totally different perspective than I was hearing from my counterparts.”
Zinni said he saw the most benefits result from Vietnamese units that built relationships with U.S. units over time, in which U.S. and Vietnamese soldiers could get to know and trust each other over time. He said it worked well with relatively small Marine Corps units, as well as with Army airborne and Ranger units.
“One of the strengths of the advisor unit, besides the fact that we didn’t have advisory teams and we sort of immersed ourselves into their organization and culture, is that we connected to the Vietnamese Marines very closely,” Zinni said.
But Zinni said there was a price to pay for being that close to the local forces.
“The advisory effort, when you were totally immersed in the culture, took a toll on you. By the time my advisory tour was coming neat to its end… I had contracted malaria, mononucleosis, dysentery and hepatitis,” Zinni said. “I was down to 123 pounds.”
This was not an uncommon phenomenon for service members in advisory roles.
“Most of the advisors suffered health issues and very few advisors finished a whole tour without a significant health problem or eventually being evacuated because of a health problem,” Zinni said.
Despite the physical hardships, Zinni said the experience gave him “a sense of what this war was all about” and made him realize that the U.S. was failing to give the South Vietnamese people a good enough reason to put their lives on the line.
“If we didn’t capture the hearts of the people, if we couldn’t give them something to fight for, if we weren’t willing to ensure that the government was responsible to people, and we weren’t willing to cut off a base of supply that was endless, we eventually could not win that conflict, despite all the victories on the battlefield,” he said.
Zinni said he felt military leaders did not pay enough attention to knowledge gained in Vietnam, as attention shifted elsewhere after the war ended.
“Vietnam was rich in the lessons we never learned,” he said.
“The enemy beat us strategically; they didn’t beat us tactically,” Zinni said. “They didn’t beat us in terms of what we were able to develop in military capability with the South Vietnamese, but they beat us psychologically, and they beat us strategically. That lesson was never carried over.”
Willbanks spoke after Zinni. Now the director of the Department of Military History at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Willbanks arrived in Vietnam as an advisor in 1971, when only four U.S. Army infantry battalions and a total of fewer than 125,000 U.S. troops were left in the country. He was assigned to an advisory team supporting an Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or ARVN, division.
“I was a captain with two and a half years in service, on my first combat tour,” Willbanks said. “I was being asked to advise a 40-year-old ARVN battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel who had been fighting most of his adult life. “
Because of his lower rank and relative inexperience, Willbanks said he sometimes had difficulty in getting the battalion commanders to listen to his advice. His duties during the early part of his tour involved assisting and training the Vietnamese in staff operations, acting as liaison to the remaining U.S. units in the area, helping with combat operations planning and accompanying the battalions on combat operations in the field.
Willbanks said everything changed when the North Vietnamese launched the “Easter Offensive” on March 31, 1972. He volunteered to replace a wounded advisor in provincial capital city of An Loc, where a battle raged day and night for the next two and a half months.
“At this point, the focus of my efforts shifted to coordinating U.S. combat support,” Willbanks said. “I spent all my time adjusting artillery – at least in the beginning, and pretty soon we had no artillery to adjust – air strikes, and also coordinating attack helicopters and fixed-wing gunships, calling for dustoff medical evacuation and coordinating aerial resupply.”
Willbanks said being in An Lac at that time was an experience different than anything he had ever conceived.
“It was a desperate battle that seesawed back and forth as the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese forces fought each other, sometimes house to house, block to block, room to room,” he said.
The South Vietnamese forces held out, and the battle began to die down as the summer wore on, but Willbanks was wounded for a second time and evacuated from the city. Once he was released from the hospital, he spent the rest of his time helping the ARVN recover from the Easter Offensive. He said he left the country at the end of his tour “feeling pretty good” about what he’d been able to accomplish in helping the South Vietnamese forces.
Speaking generally about advisory efforts, Willbanks said there was less of an emphasis on the advisory effort and a shift away from it once U.S. ground troops started arriving in Vietnam. This eventually meant that not all advisors had the right qualifications, training or ability for the job. The advisory tours were often less than 12 months, which created turbulence hampered the ability to form a bond between Vietnamese troops and their U.S. advisors.
Eventually, the emphasis began to shift back to the advisors, as combat troops left Vietnam, but Willbanks said he thought it was too late by that point.
“From a personal perspective, I found the advisory duty very difficult. The duty required decisiveness and aggressive pursuit of the mission, but it also called for patience and restraint – a conflicted mix, to say the least,” he said. “The reality on the ground often flew in the face of the need to report progress.”
Willbanks said advisors “walked a tightrope” when it came to their duties. They had to be involved and proactive without stifling the initiative of the Vietnamese commanders. They had to be empathetic to their counterparts and understand their culture while being honest about the units and their leaders.
Perhaps most importantly, Willbanks said, advisors had to find a way to build a relationship with their counterparts without making them too dependent on the advisor and on U.S. combat and service support. This proved to be a problem when the U.S. withdrew and the Vietnamese were left on their own.
“I have to say, even with all the difficulties involved, and even knowing how it all turned out, I’m proud of what I did as an advisor in Vietnam, and I only wish we could have done more,” Willbanks said. “The South Vietnamese were good people, and they deserved better than they got.”
Key quote by Gen Tony Zinni: “Vietnam was rich in the lessons we never learned.”
Thanks to the advisers for their service. I always pay attention to Col. Gentile’s comments. I was never at the strategic level. However, those who run down or reject the Vietnam experience anger at least a couple of million old Vietnam Vets. I was on two TDY A Teams in 65-66, 9th Inf Div Delta 68-69, and a District Senior Adviser 72-73. So, I saw Vietnam before the build-up, during the build-up, and at the close. This is what I see from my experience: 1) Serve more than one tour and learn the language. 2) Don’t assign an FNG to advisory duty unless they work for someone with experience. 3)I did the Area Assessment for my small area. a)The people did not like the outsider North Vietnamese. However, regardless of who was running things, the family was the important unit. The people would do what was necessary to preserve family. b) Education was important. About 85% were literate. They also educated their girls. Women had lots of influence in business. c) They would fight to defend their area. They didn’t do as well out looking for trouble. 4) Fire support was necessary. Do not level the playing field. 5)Vietnamese locals would fight the defensive fight without fire support. They had difficulty with the offensive fight without fire support. **Set up the defense of a village / hamlet like an area ambush. Kill lots of enemy. Locals know who do not belong. 6) Keep in mind that large NVA units were introduced in 65. In March 65 an NVA Battalion hit Camp Kannack. The SF Team and Yards left 119 (?) dead NVA in the wire. Think that word didn’t get around? Since 65 we could face local force, main force, or NVA. That changed the way we did our business. 7) No amount of local pacification effort after TET of 68 could stand up against an NVA Regiment coming out of a safe area without the regular units and lots of fire support. Most replacements were outsiders. It wasn’t truly a guerrilla war. 8) However, about 92% of the people were under government control by 1972. I believe this is a direct result of the CORDS operation in coordination with the regulars. Most Vietnam veterans were just like the advisers in the article. They were proud of what they had done. Welcome home, we were winning when we left.
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Perhaps most importantly, Willbanks said, advisors had to find a way to build a relationship with their counterparts without making them too dependent on the advisor and on U.S. combat and service support. This proved to be a problem when the U.S. withdrew and the Vietnamese were left on their own.
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I suspect the testimony was more lengthy than that summarized by the news release and for one I would love to read the rest of their testimony if available. We all benefit by listening to the warriors who went before us.
A couple of thoughts, first even if we did the advisor mission better it is doubtful it would have resulted in a different outcome due to the overall flawed strategy, but that is not an excuse for failing to do the advisory mission well. We should always excel at the tactical and operational level, those are levels we can control and improve upon. Sometimes we’re handed a faulty strategy to pursue and there is little we can do about it. There were many lessons that should have been learnt from that gallant advisory effort in Vietnam.
I think the quote above from LTC Wilbanks applies equally, if not more so, today to our advisory effort in Afghanistan. We didn’t begin with a reasonable end in mind and as a result we either intentionally or unintentionally made the Afghan security forces dependent to a large degree upon ISAF support. This is a case where failing to learn at the tactical and operational level may well result in a strategic failure.
The relatively recent approach we used in Afghanistan of surging more trainers and advisors was ill advised in my opinion since it simply resulted in greater dependency on the coalition, and it also is partially to fault for the green on blue murders. We were in too much of a rush to create a specific number of Afghan troops as though a formula that prescribed the appropriate ratio of troops to civilians would magically result in a victory.
Frankly, some of our Generals should have been relieved for providing this ill conceived advice and then creating the smoke and mirrors facade that they were successful. In short we applied an industrial age approach to mass produce security forces, and those forces hailed from an agricultural age society, and then we attempted to lead them with information age technology, and now we want to hand the reigns over to them and say here you go. We repeatedly fail to learn and it hard to find an acceptable reason to describe why we’re so stupid as an organization.
“The enemy beat us strategically; they didn’t beat us tactically,” Zinni said. “They didn’t beat us in terms of what we were able to develop in military capability with the South Vietnamese, but they beat us psychologically, and they beat us strategically. That lesson was never carried over.”
Gen Zinni is correct in that it is the strategic lessons that escape us. I differ with him in his assessment that this is where the enemy “beat us,” but it is certainly where they out understood, out executed and outperformed us. But it is where we beat ourselves.
We from the military community and equally those from the policy community in the US are so very uncomfortable with the unavoidable and inseparable nexus of political policy and military strategy. I’ll give CvC an “Amen” and a high five on that point any day. Yet we draw hard lines of demarcation between civil and military thought and action, and we suffer for doing so.
The strategic policy errors of Vietnam are startlingly similar to the strategic policy errors that leave us mired in Afghanistan. We make unrecoverable strategic policy errors at the very beginning, and then convert every metric of their failure over time into tactical lessons that we apply to our actions on the ground.
All action is tactical. All forces are tactical. All weapons are tactical. But EFFECTS from actions, forces and weapons can fall across the range from tactical to strategic.
Gian, here is a lesson to consider: In both conflicts we measured the objective, easily observable, analyzable, reportable tactical effects of our actions and measured our “victory” and “successes” in those terms; while we largely ignored and did not understand the largely subjective, unobservable, hard to assess and report STRATEGIC metrics of those same actions that persistently were moving in the wrong direction.
100 tactical successes are like being able to 100 sets of 1 push-up. It might look good on paper, but it doesn’t make you a stud. Particularly when each of those single tactical successes in accompanied by a completely misunderstood, and therefore ignored, strategic failure.
Another lesson is that our policy rationale and framing of both of these conflicts created predictably unwinnable situations. Do it once? Mistakes happen. Do it twice? Three times? Don’t put this on the backs of the men and women on the ground. This was strategic malpractice at the highest level. That’s the book, and I’ll help you write it: “Strategic Malpractice – Lessons not learned by American Leaders.”
It seems to me the main strategic lesson of the Vietnam conflict is one of basic logistics. If your supplies and money are cut off and the other guy’s aren’t; you lose and he wins. North Vietnam was never cut off by the Soviets and Red Chinese. They won. We cut off the South Vietnamese. They lost.
While I certainly was not an advisor with the South Vietnamese, I do recall evenings in the O Club at NAS Pensacola in the Summer of 1965 listening to VNAF Officers (then training there) openly expressing their dislike and disrespect for their nation’s political and military leaders and their openly expressed admiration for “Giap,” who they thought was a great general who had driven out the French.
We, American Officers, never expressed our thoughts — just listened, and I must say listened in amazement. Unlike their leaders, none of them had fought for the French.
Did they keep fighting for another decade, obviously; but during a major portion of that time US ground troops were in their country (along with others providing air power and naval gunfire support)propping them up and carrying on the fight.
What fascinated the most about Zinni’s comment was his statements that:
“Despite the physical hardships, … the [advisory] experience gave him “a sense of what this war was all about” and made him realize that the U.S. was failing to give the South Vietnamese people a good enough reason to put their lives on the line. …. If we didn’t capture the hearts of the people, if we couldn’t give them something to fight for, if we weren’t willing to ensure that the government was responsible to people … .”
According to biographical detail Zinni was an advisor in 1967, thirteen years after South Vietnam became an independent country.
If after 13 years an officer from a foreign nation has to provide a local military unit’s officers and men a “good enough reason to put their lives on the line” for their unit or country and “if WE couldn’t give them something to fight for …,” in the psychological recesses of their mind that war was over for them. If the members of an established military unit don’t have it in their hearts to fight for their country and their service, to make the necessary sacrifices without foreign provided support and motivation after 13 years of existence — they had already lost, it was only a question of when they were going to give up.
North and South Vietnam were both ruled by de facto dictators.Those supporting the one in the North apparently were more dedicated and more willing to sacrifice themselves than those supporting the Southern dictator. The question or lesson from that experience and environment should have been — Why was the US military committed to this region to keep the then current Southern Dictator in power? What were this nation’s strategic interests in that effort? That is the key lesson to be learned, the rest are tactical issues that should perhaps should have been obvious.
Was it necessary to fight a war to comprehend that as Zinni noted: [If] we weren’t willing to cut off a base of supply that was endless, we eventually could not win that conflict, despite all the victories on the battlefield.”
When I was a young officer, my E-9 father retired in 1967 with more than 30 years in the military. A number of years before that I had asked him (half jokingly) why don’t you volunteer to be one of the advisers to South Vietnam for whom the Navy was then advertising. The old (to me) Chief immediately responded by saying, “If they order me to go I will do my job, but I don’t volunteer to keep dictators in power.” He understood the problem with that war in Vietnam before it really began to heat up.
Gentlemen;
Request some help. Doing some amatuer research. Anyone know of documented cases of green on blue during Vietnam?
Thanks!
Robert C. Jones:
The Vietnamese acknowledged that their nationality was composed of three distinct ethnic groups: Northern, Central and Southern (essentially Deltaic).
Among other differences, each had its own dialect–broadly mutually intelligible, but not always so; distinct physical phenotype (skin color, features, body built, etc…I could usually tell a Northerner from a Southerner by looking at them); Buddhist sect (Mahayana in the North and Center, Theravada in the South); attitude toward foreigners (Northerners–yes, the Catholics!–viscerally anti-French and anti-Chinese, very chauvinist,…Southerners virtually void of virulent, nationalist chauvinism, yet partisans of a real, deep-seated Southern regionalism, which was used by but not invented by the French). Each of the three groups had a robust contempt for the other two. Intermarriage was frowned upon, for example..(If communism has by now successfully integrated Vietnamese society, that would be a noteworthy achievement). Reunification was decidedly not the message which resonated among the ethnic Southern masses. And to suggest that by 1975 a significant number of ethnic Southerners were convinced that the DRVN held legitimate claim to rule the South is, IMO, a step too far. As I have previously pointed out, though, the allied side was hard put to fully unleash and make use of the anti-Northern sentiment simply because the face of the GVN regime, whether Diem or the neo-Diemist Thieu government, was itself so manifestly Northern. I mean, the power base was a Northern Catholic constituency and a civil service and officer corps that were disproportionately heavily of Northern ethnicity.
Concur “Communism was a useful vehicle”–in Vietnam as elsewhere in the colonized world–for a hardcore of nationalist leaders to awaken and harness the dormant power of the masses to their ends. But in this case, the end served was Northern irredentism.
Cheers,
Mike.
There are some striking similiarities between the article describing the advisor effort in Vietnam and the advisor on the Security Force Assistance Advisor Teams (SFAATs) now deployed to Afghanistan. For instance:
Striking similarities
1. Advisors attached to Vietnamese (Afghan) units see a different war than the officer or NCO in a regular line unit.
2. Relationships built over time between advisors and the advised unit (Vietnamese or Afghan) provide the most benefits.
3. “If we didn’t capture the hearts of the people, if we couldn’t give them something to fight for, if we weren’t willing to ensure that the government was responsible to people, and we weren’t willing to cut off a base of supply that was endless, we eventually could not win that conflict . . “. (the word “Vietnam” and “Afghanistan” could be interchangeable here).
4. “I was a captain with two and a half years in service, on my first combat tour” . . “I was being asked to advise a 40-year-old ARVN battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel who had been fighting most of his adult life.” If you survey the SFAAT team leaders in Afghanistan advising the ANA kandaks (battalions) you will find the same situation. Although the TLs were supposed to be 0-4s; in 2012 over half of them were 0-3s . . . and they are advising kandak commanders who are usually 40-years-old or older and had been fighting the war for over ten years.
5. Advisors “walked a tightrope” – “they had to be involved and proactive without stifling the initiative of the Vietnamese commanders”. Yep, same thing in Afghanistan.
Striking differences
1. Total immersion into Vietnamese organization and culture. This is not happening in Afghanistan for the most part (era 2012-2013); although you will find some exceptions. Requirements to travel in multi-vehicle convoys, separate bases for ANSF and U.S. advisor teams, Insider Threat (Green-on-Blue), Force Protection rules and directives, and other limiting factors decrease the effectiveness of the advisor in Afghanistan when compared to the advisor in Vietnam.
Gentlemen,
You are not a sentimental bunch, this civilian (i.e., me) well knows. Nevertheless, I would be remiss in not noting that this type of informed and spirited debate teaches a great deal to the uninitiated like yours truly. Too bad it does not occur on other, extra-military, issues as well; ours would be a better republic for it. Thank you, all.
Ned McDonnell.