NOTE:
An edited version of this article appeared in the February 1997 issue of Vietnam
magazine. In the editorial in that issue, Colonel Summers said, "Although
I would take issue with his conclusions, ignoring as they do the last seven
years of the war during which guerrillas played an insignificant part, Marine
Corps veteran Peter Brush's examination of the Marine Corps approach to counterinsurgency
is a valuable addition to an understanding of the war." (p. 6) -- Peter
Brush.
According
to a 1939 U.S. 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 doctrine served the U.S. 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 military threat, while the constructive
phase was concerned with the political, economic, social, and ideological
aspects of the struggle.
The
Marines understood this duality well. According to British counterinsurgency
expert 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. Robert Thompson claimed that,
"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 U.S. began Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing
of North Vietnam. Many of the USAF and South Vietnamese aircraft making those
attacks were based at Danang, whose airfield was considered vulnerable to
retaliatory attacks by the Communists. With an insufficient logistical base in
place to support the arrival of heavily armed U.S. 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 U.S.
servicemen in Vietnam. 16,500 Marines and 3,500 Army troopers were in defensive
missions while the rest functioned in an advisory capacity to the ARVN4
and as airman flying and supporting combat missions. The Marines were 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 U.S. Army.
By
1966 Westmoreland had completed the construction of the necessary logistical
infrastructure. The Army, denied the opportunity to invade North Vietnam,
applied the doctrine of conventional operations 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 U.S. 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
U.S. government seemed aware 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 U.S. 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 National Liberation Front, 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 supply mechanisms. For the Army, large
unit operations were felt to be the key to victory, and small unit operations
were largely ignored.
The
U.S. Marine Corps had adopted a strategic approach the emphasized pacification
over large-unit battles almost from the outset of their arrival in Vietnam.
Previous Marine deployments 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 humanitarian policy; one Marine general noted that there were
100,000 Vietnamese within 81mm mortar range of the Danang 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 Department of Defense report noted that the
Hamlet Evaluation System security score gave CAP-protected villages a rating 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 general Richard Clutterbuck noted that
although Marine casualties were high, they were only 50% 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 60%, 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 15% 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."
Initially,
the Marines and PFs were distrustful of each other, but over time came to
respect one another's 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 childrens' 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 Viet Cong joined with sixty North Vietnamese Army 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 VC 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 U.S. 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 food
collection, taxation, and recruitment. NLF attempts to re- establish 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. In December, 1967, U.S. Army and of Korean
Marines moved into the area while the U.S. 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. But the village was intact, and had
survived the fighting.
The
Marines knew they held no inherent right to a perpetual existence within the
U.S. armed forces. The Corps had remained a separate service because of its
performance in previous conflict. 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 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.
U.S. Navy doctors and corpsmen working with the Marines provided over four
million medical treatments and trained about 9,000 Vietnamese nationals in
nursing skills. Marine helicopters and land vehicles evacuated 19,000 sick or
injured civilians to civilian and U.S. 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
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."29 Given that the
Strategic Hamlet Program was a demonstrated failure even before U.S. 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.30 "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."31
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."32 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."33 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."34
Marine
General Victor Krulak was the most articulate spokesman of pacification. Krulak
was a former special assistant for counterinsurgency to the U.S. 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 attrit 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."35 For Krulak, a strategy of pacification was the only way
to succeed, and in 1966 presented his views to Secretary of Defense NcNamara 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."36
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 NVA 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.37 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."38
In
many ways, Marine Corps strategy and tactics were more appropriate to the
reality of the Vietnam battlefield than those of the U.S. 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 U.S. noted a large enemy
buildup in the Demilitarized Zone. Westmoreland decided this area should
receive the focus of the U.S. effort in I Corps, which obligated the Marines to
move northward. Civic action remained a side-show to U.S. efforts to wage
conventional war. To acknowledge the effectiveness of pacification would deny
the appropriateness of U.S. military doctrine and ignore the historical
successes of the U.S. 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 to 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.39
The U.S. Army in Vietnam was a force configured to wage 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 seen as an 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.
With
the end of the Cold War the humanitarian functions of the U.S. military will
assume increased importance in low- intensity conflicts. Recent troop
deployments to Iraqi Kurdistan, Bangladesh, and Haiti are testimony to the
utility of civic action. The non-traditional 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, D.C.: DA, 1939), 27, quoted in Larry
Cable, Conflict of Myths: The Development of American Counterinsurgency
Doctrine in the Vietnam War, (N.Y., N.Y.: 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, Mass.: 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, N.H.: 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,
D.C., 1974), 38.
5 Lewis W. Walt, Strange War, Strange Strategy, (N.Y.,
N.Y.: Funk, 1970), 187.
6 James Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam,
(Boston, Mass: 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, Mass.: Bantam
Books, 1971), vol 4, 348-353, quoted in Steven Cohen, Vietnam,
(N.Y., N.Y.: 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), p. 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, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 264.
18 F. J. West, Jr., The Village, (N.Y., N.Y.: 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 Cable, Conflict, 198. And fail it did: Stanley
Karnow, Vietnam: A History (N.Y., N.Y.: 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.
30 Westmoreland's first combat experience with the infantry was
in Korea. Gen William C. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (Garden
City, N.Y.: 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.
31 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.
32 Westmoreland, A Soldier, 165.
33 Krepinevich interview with Kinnard, June 21, 1982. Krepinevich,
The Army, 175.
34 Krepinevich interview with Depuy, March 26, 1979. Krepinevich,
The Army, 175.
35 Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, (N.Y., N.Y.:
Random House, 1988), 630.
36 Krulak, p. 202.
37 Otto Lehrack, No Shining Armor, (Lawrence, Kan.:
University Press of Kansas, 1992), 181.
38 See Prados, Valley, 146, for both statistics on
DYE MARKER resource utilization and quotation on Westmoreland's rational for
its discontinuance.
39 Robert Thompson, Revolutionary War in World Strategy,
1945- 1969, (N.Y., N.Y.: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1970), 130. d in
Krepinevich, The Army, 172.