Civic Action: The Marine Corps Experience in Vietnam
©1994 Peter Brush
Note: This article was
published in Viet Nam Generation,
Vol. 5:1-4, March 1994, pp. 127-132.
According to a 1939 US Army Field Manual,
the ultimate objective of all military operations is the destruction of the
enemy's armed forces in battle. Decisive defeat in battle breaks the enemy's
will to continue fighting and forces him to sue for peace.1 This early Clausewitzian doctrine served the US well
in World War II, but by the 1960's the teachings of Mao Tse-Tung, Lin Piao and
Che Guevara became relevant to an understanding of the nature of "people's
wars" or "wars of national liberation." The most effective
strategy for opposing communism in wars of this type was of a dual nature. The
destructive phase would address the conventional force threat, while the
constructive phase was concerned with the political, economic, social, and
ideological aspects of the struggle.
The Marines understood this duality best.
According to British counterinsurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson, "Of all
the United States forces [in Vietnam] the Marine Corps alone made a serious
attempt to achieve permanent and lasting results in their tactical area of
responsibility by seeking to protect the rural population."2 This appreciation of the value of pacification was
part of the historical baggage that the Marines brought with them to Vietnam.
The Americans and South Vietnamese seemed to
understand the importance of the relationship between the government and the
civilian population, but were unsuccessful in translating this understanding
into practice. With the Communists, their self-interest demanded that they
impose severe controls on the use of violence toward the population. Sir Robert
Thompson wrote, "Normally communist behaviour towards the mass of the
population is irreproachable and the use of terror is highly selective."3 To a much greater degree than the American and South
Vietnamese (GVN) troops, the Communists depended on the goodwill of the
Vietnamese rural population.
In February, 1965, the US began Operation
Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing of North Vietnam. Many of the USAF and
SVNAF fighter-bombers making those attacks were based at Danang, whose airfield
was considered vulnerable to retaliatory attacks by the PLAF (the military
forces of the National Liberation Front). With an insufficient logistical base
in place to support the arrival of heavily armed US Army units, it was decided
to dispatch Marine Corps forces. The Marines were able to go ashore where no
port facilities or airfields were available, and it was not necessary to
stockpile supplies ahead of landing. By mid-1965 there were 51,000 US
servicemen in Vietnam, some 16,500 Marines and 3,500 Army troopers in defensive
missions; the rest functioned in an advisory capacity to the ARVN4 and as airmen flying and supporting combat missions.
The Marines would be assigned responsibility for I Corps, the military region
of South Vietnam comprising the five northern-most provinces. The remaining three
military regions were the responsibility of the US Army.
By 1966 Westmoreland had completed the
construction of the requisite support infrastructure. The Army, denied the
opportunity to invade North Vietnam, applied the doctrine of conventional
operations and force structure that had worked against the Japanese and Germans
in World War II and against the Chinese in Korea: the efficient application of
massive firepower. The goal of this search and destroy strategy was the
attrition of insurgent forces and their support systems at a rate faster than
the enemy could replace them, either by infiltration from North Vietnam or by
recruitment internally. The strategy of attrition offered the prospect of
winning the war more quickly than with traditional counterinsurgency
operations.
Westmoreland's strategy notwithstanding, the
Communists were largely successful in controlling the fighting during the war.
General Lewis Walt, commander of the Marines in Vietnam, noted, "The fact
is that every enlargement of U.S. military action has been a specific and
measured response to escalation by the enemy."5 Whether one sees the US as leading this escalation
or merely responding to it, as with the strategic, so too was the tactical;
over 80 percent of the firefights were initiated by the Communists.6
The US government seemed cognizant of the
relative value of pacification efforts--programs designed to bring security and
government control and services to the countryside. In 1966, Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara offered the following evaluation of the situation in
Vietnam:
The
large-unit operations war, which we know best how to fight and where we have
had our successes, is largely irrelevant to pacification as long as we do not
have it.
Success
in pacification depends on the interrelated functions of providing physical
security, destroying the VC apparatus, motivating the people to cooperate and
establishing responsive local government.7
Both the US Army and Marine Corps understood
that the war in Vietnam could not be won solely by defeating the large units of
the enemy. Attention to counterinsurgency operations8 would be necessary to remove the political influence
of the NLF, particularly in the rural areas of South Vietnam. The Army remained
convinced throughout that the emphasis should properly remain focused on
conventional warfare and the interdiction of the enemy's external support
mechanisms. For the Army, large unit operations were felt to be the key to
victory, and small unit operations were largely ignored.
The US Marine Corps had adopted a strategic
approach that emphasized pacification over large-unit battles almost from the
outset of their arrival in Vietnam. Previous Marine deployment as colonial
infantry in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and especially Nicaragua had elements
of civil development and an emphasis upon the training of local militia. Marine
General Walt, himself trained by Marines active in these Caribbean campaigns,
held that many of the lessons learned in the "Banana Wars" were
applicable to Vietnam.9 These lessons
were spelled out in the U.S. Marine Corps Small Wars Manual (1940):
In
regular warfare, the responsible officers simply strive to attain a method of
producing the maximum physical effect with the force at their disposal. In
small wars, the goal is to gain decisive results with the least application of
force and the consequent minimum loss of life. The end aim is the social,
economic, and political development of the people subsequent to the military
defeat of the enemy insurgent forces. In small wars, tolerance, sympathy, and
kindness should be the keynote of our relationship with the mass of the
population.10
This was not merely a policy of altruism;
one Marine general noted that there were 100,000 Vietnamese within 81mm mortar
range of the Da Nang airfield. Anything that would instill a friendly attitude
toward Marines among the civilian population would clearly help carry out the
more conventional mission of the Marines.11
Shortly after the arrival in force of the
Marines in 1965, a program called Combined Action Platoon was initiated. Each
CAP unit consisted of a fifteen-man rifle squad assigned to a particular hamlet
in the Marine tactical area of responsibility. CAP units worked with platoons
of local Vietnamese militia (Popular Forces, or PFs). CAP Marines were
volunteers with combat experience who were given basic instruction on
Vietnamese culture and customs. These combined units conducted night patrols
and ambushes, gradually making the local Vietnamese forces assume a greater
share of responsibility for village security. Their mission was the destruction
of the NLF infrastructure, organization of local intelligence networks, and the
military training of the PFs. CAPs were immediately successful. General Walt
described the results as being "far beyond our most optimistic
hopes."12 Two years after the
initiation of CAP a US Department of Defense report noted that the Hamlet
Evaluation System security score gave CAP-protected villages a score of 2.95
out of a possible 5.0 maximum, compared with an average of 1.6 for all I Corps
villages. There was a direct correlation between the time a CAP stayed in a
village and the degree of security achieved, with CAP-protected villages
progressing twice as fast as those occupied by the Popular Forces militia
alone.13
The casualty rate for CAP units was lower
than that of units conducting search-and-destroy missions. British
counterinsurgency expert Gen. Richard Clutterbuck noted that although Marine
casualties were high, they were only fifty percent of the casualties of the
normal infantry battalions being maneuvered by helicopters on large scale
operations.14 The extension rate of Marine participants in CAP
exceeded sixty percent, and there were no recorded desertions of Popular Force
soldiers from CAP units.15 The NLF
never regained control of a hamlet which was protected by a CAP unit.16 By the end of 1968 there were 114 CAP units in I
Corps, providing security for 400,000 Vietnamese people, or fifteen percent of
the population of I Corps.17
One of the superior combat narratives of the
Vietnam War, The Village, by F. J. West, Jr., describes the history of
one CAP unit in a typical Vietnamese village.18
General Lewis Walt, commander of the III
Marine Amphibious Force, was in the habit of asking his district advisors to
comment on the effectiveness of Marine battalions in I Corps. In June, 1966,
Walt visited Major Richard Braun, advisor to the Binh Son district chief in
Quang Ngai Province. Braun told Walt that the Marines would be more effective
if they worked with the Vietnamese rather than searching for Viet Cong on their
own. When Walt asked for specific recommendations, Braun suggested sending a
platoon of Marines to the village of Binh Nghia.
The ARVN had been chased out of Binh Nghia
two years previously. A platoon of the Viet Cong lived there regularly, and
often a company or more would come in to resupply or rest. Binh Nghia belonged
to the NLF, and was the full-time government of five of the seven hamlets in
the region and controlled the boat traffic moving on the Tra Bong River.19
On 10 June, 1966, Corporal William Beebe led
a group of Marine volunteers from their base camp to the Vietnamese village of
Binh Nghia. All the Marines were seasoned combat veterans who had been chosen
on their ability to get along with the villagers. With the arrival of the
Marines, the village police chief felt strong enough to move his security
forces into the village proper from a nearby outpost. Chief Ap Thanh Lam called
a meeting of the villagers, explained that the Americans and his men had to
come to stay, and asked for volunteers to construct a new fortified
headquarters. Forty civilians joined the Marines, policemen, and Popular Forces
in constructing a fort. Work progressed on the fort by day, and by night combined
Marine-PF patrols went hunting for the enemy. Beebe later commented on his
early experiences in Binh Nghia: "I still get shaky thinking of those
first few nights.... It was nothing [previous experiences in combat] compared
to that ville. That was the most scared I've ever been in my life."
The activities of the combined unit settled
into a regular pattern. The police left combat to the Marines and PFs. Chief
Lam considered his police to be highly trained specialists and concentrated on
intelligence matters, leaving night patrols and ambushes to the others.
Initially, the Marines and PFs were distrustful of each other, but over time
came to respect each others' particular strengths. The Marines used the PFs as
"eyes and ears" because they could not always depend on them to
advance with the Marines. But the PFs were valuable at point due to "the
belief that a Vietnamese soldier could spot a Viet Cong at night before an
American could." From the beginning the Marines could shoot better than
the Viet Cong; "Long hours on the ranges of boot camp.... had seen to
that. And after hundreds of patrols in the village the Marines were learning to
move as well as the Viet Cong."
The Marines liked duty in the village. They
enjoyed the admiration of the PFs who were unwilling to challenge the Viet Cong
alone. They were pleased that the villagers were impressed because the Marines
hunted the Viet Cong as the Viet Cong for years had hunted the PFs and village
officials. The Marines were aware that the village children did not avoid them,
and that the children's parents were more than polite. The Marines "had
accepted too many invitations to too many meals in too many homes to believe
they were not liked by many and tolerated by most."20 Their conduct had won them admiration and status
within the Vietnamese village society in which they were working. This combined
action platoon would pay a high price for their success, for most of them would
die at Binh Nghia.
In September, 1966, the NLF attempted to
force the Marines out of the village. Eighty local-force Viet Cong joined with
sixty soldiers from the 5th Company of the 409th NVA Battalion in an attack on
the fort, which was defended by six Marines (the others were away from the fort
on patrol) and twelve PFs.21 Five
Americans and six PFs were killed,22 but
the position held. The day after the fight the commander of the 1st Marine
Division entered the smoldering fort to speak to the Marines. General Lowell
English remarked that perhaps the combined platoon was too light for the job,
too exposed, and overmatched from the start. He was considering pulling them
out; they could stay at the fort, or go.
One Marine stated the position of the group:
The
general was a nice guy. He was trying to give us an out. But we couldn't leave.
What would we have said to the PFs after the way we pushed them to fight the
Cong? We had to stay, There wasn't one of us who wanted to leave.23
Once during a fight the Marines called in an
artillery strike on thirty Viet Cong. The single round fell three hundred yards
short, destroying a thatched hut and killing two civilians.24 Even though the combined unit Marines were not
responsible for the error, they saw too much of the villagers and lived too
closely with them not to be affected by personal grief. Rifles and grenades
were to be the weapons of the Americans at Binh Nghia. The village stayed
intact throughout some of the heaviest fighting in Vietnam--there was never an
airstrike called for Binh Nghia during the war.25 Although the region was marked as "VC" on
military operational maps, they were also marked in red as "out of
bounds" for harassment and interdiction artillery fire because American
ground forces patrolled the area.
By March, 1967, it appeared that the enemy
had modified their strategy toward Binh Son district in general and toward Binh
Nghia in particular. The PLAF previously had sought out contact with the
combined unit, but now avoided the patrols. Vietnamese military intelligence
reported that the NLF political cadres had attended a conference in January,
where it had been decided to no longer fight the spreading pacification efforts
with local troops. Rather, the guerrillas were to gather intelligence and act
as guides and reinforcements for the main forces. At the January conference the
Binh Nghia combined unit had been denounced more bitterly than any other US or
GVN program. The unit was hurting the NLF militarily; its patrols and ambushes
prevented NLF use of the Tra Bong River and blocked one route to the air base
at Chu Lai. Its presence impeded rice collection, taxation, proselytizing, and
recruitment. NLF attempts to reestablish control over the area after the attack
on the fort in September were a failure.
By October, 1967, it was felt by District
and Marine Headquarters that the job of the combined unit at Binh Nghia was
finished. The village was pacified and the Marines were needed elsewhere. By
December, 1967, the US Army and ROK (Republic of Korea) Marines moved into the
area while the Marines moved further north, toward the DMZ. A captain from
District Headquarters felt that security in the area had not improved, as the
Army troops were too far in the hills and the Koreans were behind a massive
defensive barrier.
By 1971 the war had passed by Binh Nghia.
The Americans were gone. The Viet Cong guerrillas and local force soldiers were
gone. The fort constructed by the combined unit and the Vietnamese was gone,
the wind and rain having caused the sand bags and punji stakes to cave in and
wash away. But the village was intact, and survived the fighting.
The Marines knew they held no inherent right
to institutional perpetuity within the US armed forces. The Corps had remained
a separate service because of its performance in previous conflicts. For the
Marines, a reading of the primers for Marxist guerrilla warfare and revolution
provided evidence that wars of national liberation would be the principle means
of exerting Communist political and military influence. As a consequence, a
comprehensive counterinsurgency program must include a serious commitment to
civic action-style pacification. CAP units were felt to be an efficient
allocation of Marine assets:
When
the guns are quiet, destructive combat power is dormant; the commander limited
to only this dimension of warfare is hobbled. Here civic action, the
constructive aspect of combat power, gains increased significance.26
Marine civic action was not limited to the
utilization of military assets in Vietnam. Organized Marine Corps Reserve
units in the United States also made significant contributions. Marine reserves
spent $80,000 on elementary school "kits" containing pencils, notebooks,
erasers, scissors, and other essential school items. $33,800 was spent on
brick-making machines, $7,200 on rice threshers, $3,100 toward the construction
of dams to increase agricultural production through irrigation, $32,095 for
civilian hospital construction, and over $3,000 for the purchase of water
pumps to provide drinking water. Money from the Marine Corps Reserve Civic
Action Fund also bought emergency food, toys for children, and supported the
Vietnamese 4-T Program, an organization similar to the 4-H Program in the
United States.27
Marine civic action included the provision
of medical care for Vietnamese civilians. US Navy doctors and corpsmen working
with the Marines provided over four million medical treatments and trained
about 9,000 Vietnamese nationals in nursing-type skills. Marine helicopters and
land vehicles evacuated 19,000 sick or injured civilians to civilian and US
military treatment facilities. Marines assisted the Vietnamese in the
construction of schools and additional classrooms. Thirteen million meals were
provided to refugees, and over 400,000 pounds of clothing were distributed by
Marines. Other aspects of civic action in the Marine area of responsibility
included the construction of wells, bridge building, repair of irrigation
facilities, animal husbandry projects and agricultural seed purchases, and the
distribution of carpentry and blacksmith tools to the civilian population.28
Marine civic action necessitated a partial
resource allocation away from more conventional modern fighting techniques, and
this could provide a benefit to the Marines as well as to their Vietnamese
allies. In warfare soldiers are obligated to find justifications for their
actions on personal levels. The standard rhetoric of "fighting
communism" and "making the world safe for democracy" often prove
inadequate, and the constructive aspects of civic action can assist in solving
the social problems that soldiers will face in the future. All wars end and all
soldiers who survive must return to more peaceful pursuits. Their personal
conduct at home will reflect their wartime behaviors.29
For the Army, pacification remained an added
duty, and not a primary one. Resources committed to civic action were resources
not available for the accomplishment of the military's major mission. The
Army's aggressive approach to pacification is reflected in the Strategic Hamlet
Program, the forcible relocation of Vietnamese peasants into armed refugee
camps around the district towns. Having drained Mao Tse-tung's "sea of
people" in which the guerrilla "fish" swam, massive firepower
would destroy the remaining enemy inhabitants in these free-fire zones. For the
Army, the strategic hamlet program "represented the last, best hope for
a... civic-action-oriented solution; if it failed, the decks would have been
cleared for the implementation of the military approach."30 Given that the Strategic Hamlet Program was a
demonstrated failure even before US Army ground units arrived in Vietnam, it is
not surprising that the Army put but minimal faith in the efficacy of civic
action.
Army leadership was united in their
disapproval of the Marine CAP program. Westmoreland felt that pacification
should be primarily a South Vietnamese task.31
"I simply did not have 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."32
Westmoreland felt Marine tactics were insufficiently aggressive, that their
practices "left the enemy free to come and go as he pleased throughout the
bulk of the region and, when and where he chose, to attack the periphery of the
[Marine] beachheads."33 General
Harry Kinnard, Commander of the Army 1st Cavalry, was "absolutely
disgusted" with the Marines. "I did everything I could to drag them
out and get them to fight.... They just wouldn't play. They just would not
play. They don't know how to fight on land, particularly against guerrillas."34 Westmoreland's operations officer, General William
Depuy, observed that "the Marines came in and just sat down and didn't do
anything. They were involved in counterinsurgency of the deliberate, mild
sort."35
Marine General Victor Krulak was the most articulate
spokesman of pacification. Krulak was a former special assistant for
counterinsurgency to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and, by 1965, the Commanding
General of the Fleet Marine Force, Pacific. He felt that Westmoreland's
strategy of attrition would fail because it was Hanoi's game. The Communists'
strategy in Krulak's view was to seek "to attrite U.S. forces through the
process of violent, close-quarters combat which tends to diminish the
effectiveness of our supporting arms." By killing and wounding enough
American soldiers over time they would "erode our national will and cause
us to cease our support of the GVN."36 For
Krulak, a strategy of pacification was the only way to succeed. Krulak went
over Westmoreland's head and in 1966 presented his views to Secretary of
Defense McNamara in an attempt to force Westmoreland to adopt a pacification
strategy for the whole of South Vietnam. In the summer of 1966 a meeting was
arranged between Krulak and President Johnson. After hearing Krulak describe his
plan for winning the war in Vietnam, Johnson "got to his feet, put his arm
around my shoulder, and propelled me firmly toward the door."37
In the test of wills between Westmoreland
and Krulak, the Army general possessed a formidable weapon--a general's fourth
star. Westmoreland was popular with the press, the public, and especially with
President Johnson. Eventually the Marines gave up their attempts to more widely
implement their pacification strategy and fell in line with the Army.
It is ironic that the Marines, who favored a
long-term, small-unit approach to combat in Vietnam were ordered by the Army to
implement Dye Marker. This plan called for the construction of a barrier along
the DMZ employing minefields, sensors, and barbed wire to reduce PAVN (Peoples
Army of Vietnam) infiltration from North Vietnam. Marines and Navy Seabees
provided the manpower to strip a 600-meter belt, or "trace," of its
vegetation, taking large numbers of casualties in the progress.38 Eventually the project would be abandoned after the
investment of 757,520 man-days and 114,519 equipment-hours because Westmoreland
felt that "To have gone through with constructing the barrier, even in
modified form that I proposed, would have been to invite enormous
casualties."39
Marine Corps strategy and tactics were more
appropriate to the reality of the Vietnam battlefield than those of the US
Army. Civic action might have made a difference had it been instituted on a
wider scale. The CAPs were not uniformly successful and were too scattered to
have a maximum impact. Several months after the CAP program was instituted the
US noted a large enemy buildup in the Demilitarized Zone. Westmoreland decided
this area should receive the focus of the US effort in I Corps, which obligated
the Marines to move northward. Civic action remained a sideshow to US efforts
to wage conventional war. To acknowledge the efficacy of pacification would
deny the appropriateness of US military doctrine and ignore the historical
successes of the US Army. Civic action was a time-consuming process, and time
was a precious commodity in an industrial society.
Civic action had promise. Had it been
adopted on a wide scale the war would have been different, but it is a matter
of speculation as to whether it would have ultimately affected the outcome.
Less speculative is the applicability of the strategy and tactics that
prevailed:
It
was never clearly understood by the American administration, and certainly not
by the Army, that the whole American effort, civilian and military, had to be
directed towards the establishment of a viable and stable South Vietnamese
government and state, i.e., the creation of an acceptable alternative political
solution the reunification with North Vietnam under a communist government.
Instead,
through the bombing of the North and a war of attrition within the South, the
whole effort was directed to the military defeat of the Viet Cong and North
Vietnamese divisions infiltrated into South Viet Nam. Even if such a military
defeat had been possible, it would not have achieved victory without a
political solution.40
The U.S. Army in Vietnam was a force
configured to wage conventional and nuclear warfare in Europe. Its insistence
on waging large-unit battles ensured that the enemy would avoid the deployment
of its forces in large units when it was to its advantage to do so. The
utilization of massive firepower to inflict large numbers of casualties on the
enemy resulted in civilian casualties and social disruption. The U.S. was
perceived as the ally of the GVN; neither government was seen as an ally by the
civilian population. The more the U.S. took control of the war to avoid the
defeat of the ARVN by the Communists, the greater the ability of Hanoi to
portray the U.S. as neo-colonialists and the GVN as a puppet regime.
The Vietnam War is not merely history. It is
history that must be understood. Its lessons must be applied to the present.
With the end of the Cold War the humanitarian functions of the US military will
assume increased importance in low-intensity conflicts. Recent troop
deployments to Iraqi Kurdistan, Bangladesh, and Somalia are testimony to the
utility of civic action. The nontraditional use of military force represents a
fusion of political and military assets that can further the foreign policy
goals of the United States.
1 Department of the Army FM 100-5, Field Service
Regulations: Operations, (Washington, DC: DA, 1939): 27, quoted in Larry
Cable, Conflict of Myths: The Development of American Counterinsurgency
Doctrine in the Vietnam War, (NY, NY: New York University Press, 1986):
114.
2 Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., The Army and Vietnam,
(Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1986): 172.
3 Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The
Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, (Boston, MA: Little, Brown): 232.
As Mao Tse-tung adapted the strategic and tactical concepts of Lenin to fit the
Chinese situation (p. 51), so too was the basic strategy of the NLF and DRV
derived from Mao's notions of "People's War" (Douglas Kinnard, The
War Managers, (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1977): 64. But
given the similarity of strategy and tactics between the Soviets in Afghanistan
and the Americans in Vietnam, perhaps the most effective way to resist reliance
on the use of heavy weapons against the civilian population is to not have them
available.
4 BrigGen Edward H. Simmons, "Marine Corps
Operations in Vietnam, 1965-1966," in The Marines in Vietnam 1954-1973
(Washington, DC, 1974): 38.
5 Lewis W. Walt, Strange War, Strange Strategy,
(NY, NY: Funk, 1970): 187.
6 James Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in
Vietnam, (Boston, MA: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986): 11.
7 "Actions Recommended for Vietnam," Draft
memorandum for President Lyndon B. Johnson from Secretary of Defense Robert S.
McNamara, October 14, 1966, The Pentagon Papers, (Boston, MA: Bantam
Books, 1971), vol 4: 348-353, quoted in Steven Cohen, Vietnam, (NY, NY:
McGraw-Hill, 1983): 140.
8 Counterinsurgency operations refers to such US
programs as Revolutionary Development, civic action, and pacification and may
be loosely defined as the employment of military resources for purposes other
than conventional warfare.
9 Walt, Strange War: 29. Cable, Conflict:
96, posits that the lessons from these earlier pacification interventions were
not effectively institutionalized by the Marine Corps. According to Cable, the
transmittal of these experiences to Vietnam was effected by the tribal
character of the Marine Corps.
10 USMC, Small Wars Manual, (Washington, D.C.:
HQMC, 1940): I-9-15, quoted in Krepinevich, The Army: 172. Marine Corps
experience in stabilizing governments and fighting guerrillas was formalized in
lecture form at the Marine Corps Schools in Quantico, Virginia, in 1920. These
lectures evolved into Small Wars Manual, 1930, which was revised and adopted as
an official publication in 1940, "a fifteen-chapter compendium of
everything the Corps had learned in its Caribbean experience." Victor
Krulak, First to Fight: An Inside View of the U.S. Marine Corps,
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1984).
11 MajGen J. M. Platt, "Military Civic
Action," in Marine Corps Gazette 54, 9 (September, 1970): 24.
12 Walt, Strange War: 105.
13 Krepinevich, The Army: 174.
14 Krepinevich, The Army: 174.
15 LtCol David H. Wagner, "A Handful of
Marines," in Marine Corps Gazette 52, 3 (March, 1968): 45.
16 LtCol D. L. Evans, Jr., "USMC Civil Affairs in
Vietnam: A Philosophical History," in Marine Corps Gazette 52, 3
(March, 1968): 24. The PAVN did overrun the Marine CAP unit at Khe Sanh village
during Tet in 1969. See John Prados and Ray Stubbe, Valley of Decision: The
Siege of Khe Sanh, (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1991): 264.
17 LtCol David H. Wagner, "A Handful of
Marines," in Marine Corps Gazette 52, 3 (March, 1968) 46.
18 F. J. West, Jr., The Village, (NY: Harper and
Row, 1972).
19 West, The Village: 10.
20 West, The Village: 19, 52, 72, 102.
21 West, The Village: 112.
22 West, The Village: 131.
23 Interview with PFC Sidney Fleming who subsequently
died fighting with the combined unit. West, The Village: 131. Later,
when the combined unit was ordered to leave by higher headquarters on the eve
of another enemy attack, they again refused. West, The Village: 193-194.
24 West, The Village: 36.
25 West, The Village: 187.
26 Maj William Holmberg, "Civic Action," in Marine
Corps Gazette 50, 6 (June, 1966): 28.
27 Capt H. G. Lyles, "Civic Action Progress
Report," in Marine Corps Gazette 53,9 (September, 1969): 52.
28 MajGen J. M. Platt, "Military Civic
Action," in Marine Corps Gazette 54, 9 (September, 1970): 24-25.
29 There are no studies that compare PTSD rates between
Marines involved in civic action with those involved in more traditional
infantry roles of which I am aware. However, it seems obvious to me that CAP
Marines speak more positively of their wartime experiences in their narratives
than do their conventional infantry brothers.
30 Cable, Conflict: 198. And fail it did:
Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (NY, NY: Penguin Books, 1991): 340,
notes that in early December, 1963, in Long An province, "three-quarters
of the two hundred strategic hamlets had been destroyed since the summer,
either by the Vietcong or by their own occupants, or by a combination of
both." Vietcong attacks in the province declined primarily because there
were no longer any strategic hamlets worth attacking.
31 Westmoreland's first combat experience with the
infantry was in Korea. Gen William C. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976): 26. In Korea the US view was that internal
security was the role of the Republic of Korea; the role of US forces in Korea
was the protection of that country from external attack. Summers, On Strategy,
112.
32 Westmoreland, A Soldier: 166. In truth,
Westmoreland did have the numbers. There were 11,000 hamlets (Simmons,
"Marine Corps Operations": 34) in South Vietnam and a 15-man platoon
of US soldiers in each would have required 165,000 men.
33 Westmoreland, A Soldier: 165.
34 Krepinevich interview with Kinnard, June 21, 1982.
Krepinevich, The Army: 175.
35 Krepinevich interview with Depuy, March 26, 1979.
Krepinevich, The Army: 175.
36 Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, ( NY:
Random House, 1988): 630.
37 Krulak: 202.
38 Otto Lehrack, No Shining Armor, (Lawrence,
KS: University Press of Kansas, 1992): 181.
39 See Prados, Valley: 146, for both statistics
on Dye Marker resource utilization and quotation on Westmoreland's rational for
its discontinuance.
40 Robert Thompson, Revolutionary War in World
Strategy, 1945- 1969, (N.Y., N.Y.: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1970): 130.