Americans long have sought answers, even blame, for their lost war in Vietnam. Literature on the conflict’s military dimensions – at least those works arguing the war was winnable – contend the United States squandered its chances for victory in Southeast Asia because of a misguided strategy. Such narratives claim that, once President Lyndon B. Johnson deployed American ground combat troops to South Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, head of the US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), pursued an ill-advised strategy of attrition. Rather than concentrating on population security and counterinsurgency, Westmoreland instead wrongly engaged in a conventional war aimed at little more than racking up high body counts.Footnote ¹ Worse, the storyline continues, MACV’s commander implemented this strategy despite being presented with a clear alternative from US Marine Corps commanders operating in the northern provinces of South Vietnam. There, marines focused more appropriately on winning the “hearts and minds” of the local population. Their supposed successes implied that Westmoreland had missed a grand opportunity to win the war in Vietnam.

Nowhere was this better illustrated than on Life magazine’s cover in late August 1967. With his back to the camera, a young Vietnamese boy on crutches strolls beside an American marine carrying fishing poles in one hand and rifle in the other. According to editor George Hunt, Ngo Cuoc, called “Louie” by his American companions, is “bright, tough and high-spirited.” His habit of calling marines “Sweetheart” and his crutches, provided by a US medical team, point to the kindhearted warrior image so carefully constructed on the magazine’s cover. But for the rifle and military jeep in the photograph’s background, “Louie” and his fishing partner might be heading to the local pond in almost any rural American town. Despite a full-scale war raging for nearly two years, the image is one of compassion rather than destruction. Coupled with the picture, the cover story’s title, “To Keep a Village Free,” indicates that the US Marines in Hòa Hiệp had found a better way to help South Vietnam protect itself from the dangers of a staunch communist insurgency. Their mission was not only to defend but also to befriend.Footnote ²

This idyllic depiction on Life’s cover has become a mainstay of historical critiques condemning American strategy in Vietnam. Take, for instance, Andrew Krepinevich’s well-received The Army and Vietnam. In a scathing analysis of the US Army’s performance, Krepinevich denounced senior military leaders for their obsession with conventional tactics in a war requiring a more enlightened strategic approach. To the former West Point faculty member, the army “left counterinsurgency to the RVNAF [Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces], while US commanders went out in search of the big battles.” Moreover, when presented with a different approach, the marines’ Combined Action Platoon (CAP) concept, the army’s reaction “was ill-disguised disappointment, if not outright disapproval.” The missed opportunity could not be more discouraging. If only army leaders had broken free of their conventional mindsets and listened to their marine brethren, who believed that the CAP model of saturating the countryside with small, American-led security units offered a surer path toward victory, the war might well have turned out differently. “Casualties would have been minimized, and population security enhanced,” argued Krepinevich.Footnote ³

Such counterfactuals found broad acceptance in both postwar memoirs and scholarly monographs. In his 1970 account Strange War, Strange Strategy, marine general Lewis W. Walt argued that of all the innovations in Vietnam “none was as successful, as lasting in effect, or as useful for the future as the Combined Action Program.” Less than a decade later, RAND analyst Douglas Blaufarb opined that CAP tactics, “if used on a wider scale, could have made a vast difference in the war for the countryside.”Footnote ⁴ More recent pundits followed suit. Foreign-policy analyst Max Boot contended in 2002 that Westmoreland’s “big war stymied pacification efforts” and thus “the Combined Action Program was never more than a sideshow to the army’s conventional campaign.” In Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, John Nagl similarly blamed MACV’s commander for his narrow-minded advocacy of a “‘search and destroy’ strategy.” Despite encouraging results – Nagl contended that the CAP program “worked almost immediately” – Westmoreland ignored prevailing evidence and refused to “widen the concept to include army units.”Footnote ⁵ In short, the general chose a strategy of firepower over winning hearts and minds.

Such conventional wisdom, however, presents a flawed picture of American strategy under Westmoreland. MACV’s commander, like his successor Creighton Abrams, never subscribed to an “either–or” approach to confronting a political–military threat inside South Vietnam’s borders. At no point did Westmoreland concentrate solely on conventional battle at the expense of counterinsurgency. Likewise, the general never believed local civic action or pacification programs were a magic bullet to convince Hanoi’s leaders their own war was unwinnable. In reality, American strategy from 1964 to 1968 rested on a belief that South Vietnam faced a dual threat – both conventional and unconventional – requiring a similarly comprehensive response. A reexamination of American strategy under Westmoreland and the marines’ Combined Action Program reveals no “missed opportunity,” a conclusion that raises important questions about the limits of American military power abroad in the mid-1960s and how historical myths can distort interpretations of the past.

Westmoreland’s War: Myth versus Reality

If one accepts claims that the US Army in Vietnam simply conducted “search and destroy” missions supporting an imprudent strategy of attrition, the marines’ Combined Action Program surfaces as an attractive alternative. Clearly, popular narratives of the Vietnam War build from the foundation of attrition warfare. Veterans and historians alike have condemned Westmoreland for relying “mainly on massive operations conducted by brigade and division and multi-division sized forces.”Footnote ⁶ Rather than concentrating on population security and helping build bonds between rural inhabitants and the Saigon government, MACV’s commander chose instead to grind down the enemy through superior firepower.Footnote ⁷ Almost all the clichés of Vietnam are present in these indictments – attrition, search and destroy, body count. Worse, the supposed infatuation with killing the enemy led to untold civilian suffering as murder, rape, torture, and abuse, at least according to one account, became “virtually a daily fact of life throughout the years of the American presence in Vietnam.”Footnote ⁸ Not merely had Westmoreland lost the war through his faulty strategy: he also oversaw the destruction of a countryside and its people.

As compelling as this narrative appears, especially for Americans seeking to lay blame for their lost war, reevaluating the historical record finds that Westmoreland waged a far different war. First, the general used the word “attrition” not simply to describe combat operations but to portray the war in Vietnam as a protracted conflict. In mid-1965, Westmoreland wrote to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Earle Wheeler that US forces would be in for the “long pull.” Describing the escalating conflict that summer, MACV’s commander saw “no likelihood of achieving a quick, favorable end to the war.”Footnote ⁹ Two years later, Westmoreland repeated the warning both privately and publicly. In a January 1967 message to Wheeler, the general concluded the enemy was “waging against us a conflict of strategic political attrition in which, according to his equation, victory equals time plus pressure.” That April, Westmoreland spoke at the annual luncheon of the Associated Press. While praising his soldiers’ accomplishments, the general summarily dismissed notions of gaining an easy victory. “I do not see any end of the war in sight.”Footnote ¹⁰ Even when the president called Westmoreland and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker home in November to offer “proof” of the war’s progress to support a White House–directed salesmanship campaign, the two warned that the American effort in Vietnam was “not a short-range proposition.”Footnote ¹¹ Attrition, in truth, meant more than just body counts.

Second, Westmoreland never subscribed to a strategic approach in which killing was the ultimate goal. The so-called search-and-destroy strategy was a term constructed by critics aiming to simplify MACV’s multifaceted concept for waging a complex war. To both his subordinates and the larger American public, Westmoreland was clear – the threat to South Vietnam required more than simply applying firepower. The general saw his principal objective as maintaining and expanding military and political control in key population areas while seeking to “restore security, develop Vietnamese allegiance to the GVN [Government of South Vietnam], and to degrade the effectiveness of the Viet Cong [VC] apparatus.”Footnote ¹² Westmoreland believed pacifying South Vietnam meant destroying not only enemy main-force units but also the political infrastructure that sustained a deep-rooted insurgency.

Without question, Westmoreland’s faith in the ability of American military force to strengthen the bonds between the civilian population and the Saigon government was misplaced. It is doubtful that any foreign force entering into the long Vietnamese civil war could have fortified such bonds. Still, the general grasped the struggle’s larger political aspects. As he publicly declared in April 1967, “I think it’s impossible in view of the nature of the war – a war of subversion and invasion, a war in which political and psychological factors are of such consequence – to sort out the war between the political and the military.”Footnote ¹³

Westmoreland’s point about subversion and invasion is crucial when considering the viability of the marines’ Combined Action Program. The National Liberation Front (NLF) insurgency posed a multilayered threat within South Vietnam’s borders. As the 1965 MACV command history noted, in facing the insurgent menace, “it was apparent that RVNAF strength was insufficient for both offensive operations and support of the pacification program.” Nor did it help that Saigon’s government appeared “unstable and ineffective” to the point that MACV considered it in “near-paralysis.”Footnote ¹⁴ Yet the insurgency and Saigon’s political woes represented only a portion of the threat to South Vietnam’s future.

Of particular concern to Westmoreland were the armed forces of North Vietnam, “which were backing the uncompromising political stance of Hanoi with significant military capability.” MACV had to consider not only the insurgency’s political cadre and local militia units but also People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) regulars. In 1966 alone, the American command estimated Hanoi had infiltrated some 48,400 soldiers into South Vietnam. (Another 25,600 infiltrators may also have entered, though hard intelligence proved elusive.)Footnote ¹⁵ Even if Westmoreland had wanted to concentrate on securing the South Vietnamese population from the insurgency, PAVN regular units precluded him from focusing exclusively on one type of threat.

So too did the larger mission from President Johnson. The March 1964 National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 288 stated that the US objective in Vietnam was a “stable and independent noncommunist government.”Footnote ¹⁶ Westmoreland’s military strategy thus derived from the broad principle that Saigon’s government needed to function in a secure environment. Military victories alone were insufficient for achieving this ambitious political goal. Of course, security required military action, and Westmoreland developed plans that included destruction of PAVN forces, protection of the people, liberation of populated areas dominated by the NLF, and destruction of enemy base areas inside South Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁷ Thus, any focus on battle had to facilitate larger objectives of helping develop and maintain a viable local government. As Johnson articulated in late 1966, success “must also be brought about through the effective application of broad and comprehensive politico-economic-sociological-psychological programs designed both to improve the well-being of and to orient the population toward the central government.”Footnote ¹⁸ Had Westmoreland concentrated solely on body counts, he would have been out of step with the mission articulated by civilian policymakers.

Certainly, offensive operations were necessary to Westmoreland’s strategic concept. In 1965 alone, Hanoi sent seven regiments and twenty separate battalions down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail into South Vietnam. Adopting a strictly counterinsurgency approach made little sense unless coupled with plans to defeat these North Vietnamese regulars. As Westmoreland noted, the “essential tasks of revolutionary development and nation building cannot be accomplished if enemy main forces can gain access to the population centers and destroy our efforts.”Footnote ¹⁹ Still, MACV focused on population security. Despite the presence of large enemy formations, Westmoreland believed the insurgency inside South Vietnam “must eventually be defeated among the people in the hamlets and towns.” To accomplish this goal, however, meant securing the country from well-organized and equipped forces while simultaneously securing the people from “the guerrilla, the assassin, the terrorist and the informer.”Footnote ²⁰ Westmoreland argued that American troops could contribute best in the first category while the South Vietnamese could make better progress in the second. The problem, as MACV saw it, was that communist forces were drawing the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) away from the population. Thus, if American units could construct a shield behind which the ARVN could operate, insurgents would be cut off from external support and, over time, population security attained.

MACV’s resultant three-phase strategic concept first sought to “halt the losing trend” by the end of 1965. To do so required defending political and population centers while strengthening the RVNAF and preserving areas under governmental control. Next, Westmoreland would resume the offensive to destroy enemy forces and reinstitute rural construction activities. During this crucial phase, MACV hoped to expand pacification operations by providing security to the people. This point, often underappreciated by Westmoreland’s detractors, served as the centerpiece of US military strategy inside South Vietnam. Offensive operations were not an end unto themselves. Rather, American troops would “participate in clearing, securing, reserve reaction and offensive operations as required to support and sustain the resumption of pacification.” Only by securing cleared areas could allied troops help extend the government’s control over the population. In the final phase, Westmoreland sought the insurgency’s complete destruction while offering assistance to the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) for maintaining internal order and protecting its borders. Though MACV ostensibly aimed to complete this final phase by the end of 1967, Westmoreland warned that any timeline for American withdrawal would depend on enemy resistance.Footnote ²¹

Without question, Westmoreland’s was an ambitious strategy, arguably outside allied troop capabilities. Yet to discount that strategy as simply “search and destroy” or “attrition” misses the nuances of a complex war and a reasoned American approach to fighting it. Far from being wedded to a conventional approach, Westmoreland realized the importance of the village war, local politics, and limiting civilian casualties. Moreover, he understood the effect a burgeoning American presence was having on the local population. While emphasizing the necessity of US forces moving at will through the countryside, he also stressed that they should “constantly demonstrate their concern for the safety of noncombatants – their compassion for the injured – their willingness to aid and assist the sick, the hungry and the dispossessed.”Footnote ²² Clearly, this balancing act required skill and maturity on the part of American soldiers and marines. Westmoreland was asking them to simultaneously destroy and build. Still, MACV’s commander realized the final battle would be “for the hamlets themselves” and, as such, American forces would be drawn “toward the people and the places where they live.”Footnote ²³

Contemporary counterinsurgency doctrine supported such operational concepts. So too did prevailing theories on revolutionary warfare. The army’s field manual on “Counterguerrilla Operations” advised commanders to pay special attention to local inhabitants and assess their loyalty, morale, and strength of will for resisting insurgencies. Moreover, doctrine recommended that US forces make “maximum use of existing police and paramilitary forces.”Footnote ²⁴ In fact, internal defense was deemed the host nation’s primary responsibility, with Americans advising and assisting. Providing security meant more than military action. Thus, as the marines’ counterinsurgency manual noted: “A number of diversified actions such as tactical operations, psychological warfare, civil populace control, and civic action (political, social, and economic) are conducted concurrently.”Footnote ²⁵ Both doctrine and theory, however, suggested a sequential approach to counterinsurgency. Marines might conduct a number of concurrent operations but providing security ranked first among all other considerations. The message was clear. Defeating the enemy preceded pacification and government stability.Footnote ²⁶

Of course, the enemy’s defeat required important contributions from local forces. South Vietnam’s military structure included not only the ARVN but also regional and local militia units that Westmoreland needed to consider. MACV thus proposed to accentuate the unique strengths of both US and South Vietnamese forces. Relying on their advantages in mobility and firepower, American troops would operate against large enemy formations away from population centers. Because of their “greater compatibility with the people,” the ARVN and local militia units would secure the population once cleared of enemy influence.Footnote ²⁷ Westmoreland worried, though, that, as pacification efforts expanded in 1966 and 1967, local Popular Forces (PFs) – in essence, village militia – might not meet the demands of providing village security. Still, MACV envisioned a symbiotic relationship between American and South Vietnamese allies. US forces would help the ARVN dislodge the communists from contested locales while militia units would help control these “cleared” areas. Only then would allied operations have a “lasting effect.”Footnote ²⁸

The varying capabilities within the South Vietnamese defense establishment matched the war’s grand mosaic. Given vast regional differences in geography, demographics, and political support for the Saigon government, strategic flexibility remained a priority throughout Westmoreland’s tenure. MACV thus determined that all operations “would be conducted through centralized direction, but decentralized execution.”Footnote ²⁹ In reality, Westmoreland had little choice. The heavily populated Mekong Delta presented immensely different challenges than provinces along the Laotian border or the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Vietnam. Whereas residents in the southern delta encountered a largely insurgent threat, US marines in the northern provinces grappled with NLF and North Vietnamese main-force units which had infiltrated the country via the Hồ Chí Minh Trail. Hence, the conventional tactics employed by the US Army’s 1st Cavalry Division at the famous 1965 battle in the Ia Đrӑng Valley, while wholly appropriate against PAVN regiments, often proved counterproductive in more populated areas. As one MACV officer recalled, “each situation required different military tactics and a different mixture of military and political” action.Footnote ³⁰

Figure 1.1 US Army officer William Westmoreland (center) with Nguyễn Cao Kỳ (right), Chief of the Vietnam Air Force, in Đà Nẵng (July 18, 1964).

Source: Michael Ochs Archives / Stringer / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images.

The war’s mosaic nature is worth considering when evaluating arguments that a nationwide adoption of the marines’ Combined Action Program would have led to victory. Westmoreland understood early on that there was no single answer for the complex political–military conflict that was at once a war of internal subversion and one of external invasion. By necessity, MACV’s strategy was multifaceted. Never did Westmoreland concentrate solely on a “big unit war” at the expense of counterinsurgency. Historian John Prados has usefully summarized the elements of Westmoreland’s approach “as isolation of the battlefield, pacification of the villages, and main force combat.”Footnote ³¹ All of these elements factored into the larger objective of sustaining an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam. The US Marine Corps, however, believed they had found a better way.

The Marines Weigh In

In March 1965, the first contingent of marines landed at Đà Nẵng in Quảng Nam province. Their mission, to defend American air bases supporting the bombing of North Vietnam, called for setting up three defensive “enclaves” at Phú Bài, Đà Nẵng, and Chu Lai. By June’s end, seven battalions were operating in I Corps, the five northernmost provinces of South Vietnam. Designated the III Marine Amphibious Force (MAF) under the command of Major General Lewis W. Walt, the security force had no immediate plans for conducting nonmilitary civic action programs.Footnote ³² Base security ranked as the primary focus in these early months. Walt, though, was anxious to protect the local civilian population and soon gained Westmoreland’s approval to conduct more ambitious operations against the NLF insurgency. As the marines expanded from their enclaves, they met more than just isolated guerrilla units. In August, during Operation Starlight, the marines battled a full NLF infantry regiment in the coastal lowlands near Chu Lai. Inflicting more than 700 enemy casualties, the operation indicated that protecting the population would require heavy fighting.Footnote ³³

Walt, however, concluded that defending his base areas required pacifying the population and weeding out the insurgency. Security meant patrolling, and patrolling meant close contact with South Vietnamese civilians. Judging that the main threat came from local guerrillas, III MAF commanders advocated a clear-and-hold approach in which hamlets would be taken apart “bit by bit,” cleared of enemy influence, and then put back “together again.”Footnote ³⁴ Such an approach obviously put civilians in a vulnerable position. As the official Marine Corps history noted, civilians in combat zones “presented difficulties. The first attempts to evacuate them were difficult; the people were frightened and did not trust the Marines.” Moreover, the Americans had to make grim choices when facing stubborn resistance. “Although attempts were made to avoid civilian casualties, some villages were completely destroyed by supporting arms when it became obvious that the enemy occupied fortified positions in them.” Both Westmoreland and Walt might have seen pacification as the “ultimate goal,” yet early experiences suggested counterinsurgency could be just as destructive as conventional warfare.Footnote ³⁵

Still, Walt deemed population security key and the village war central to victory. The III MAF commander learned, though, that as marines expanded outward insurgents often flowed back into “liberated” areas. Worse, one officer recalled, the ARVN, supposedly maintaining security in cleared areas, “came not to stay, but to loot, collect back taxes, reinstall landlords, and conduct reprisals against the people.” To remedy this problem, marines in Phú Bài formed a Joint Action Company with local PFs to help disrupt NLF activities.Footnote ³⁶ Despite these tactical innovations, Walt increasingly disagreed with Westmoreland over strategy. The MACV commander worried that continued occupation of defensive enclaves along the coastline would cede the countryside to enemy main-force units. Westmoreland later argued that, with the enemy “free to recruit in regions the Marines had yet to enter and to operate in nearby hills with impunity, every subsequent move … to extend the peripheries of the beachheads would become progressively more difficult and would make the beachheads more vulnerable.” Walt retorted that the bulk of I Corps’ population resided along the coast. Strikes against communist main-force units were necessary, but providing day-to-day population security mattered most.Footnote ³⁷

Westmoreland, for his part, believed conventional enemy offensives required a response. The I Corps Tactical Zone (CTZ) particularly troubled him. Roughly 200 miles long and varying in width from 30 to 80 miles (50–130 km), I Corps included more than 2.5 million inhabitants living on a diverse landscape – coastal lowlands, a hilly piedmont region, and jungle highlands. Regional transportation facilities, according to one American officer, were “poorly developed.”Footnote ³⁸ Geographical concerns aside, Westmoreland worried most about the enemy buildup just outside South Vietnam’s boundaries. All but one of I Corps’ five provinces bordered either Laos or the DMZ separating the two Vietnams. Westmoreland thus felt it urgent to “prevent the enemy from generating a major offensive designed to ‘liberate’ the provinces” in I Corps.Footnote ³⁹ Intelligence reports of the enemy deploying anti-aircraft weapons southward and stockpiling supplies just outside South Vietnam’s borders only heightened his fears. So too did the fact that the number of main-force NLF battalions in I CTZ doubled during 1965, reaching fifteen by year’s end. In March 1966, two full PAVN regiments attacked a Special Forces camp in Thừa Thiên province.Footnote ⁴⁰ Westmoreland could not ignore local insurgents within the villages, but neither could he disregard the conventional threat to South Vietnam.

While Walt and Lieutenant General Victor H. Krulak, commander of the Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, agreed with MACV on the need for a “multipronged effort,” they lashed out at criticisms that their “offensive pace” was “inordinately slow.” Walt acknowledged the fifteen confirmed enemy battalions and sensed an increasing threat in late 1965. Yet the infiltration of PAVN units into South Vietnam reinforced marine views that MACV’s strategy, aiming to “attrit the enemy to a degree which makes him incapable of prosecuting the war,” was “inadequate.”Footnote ⁴¹

In truth, Walt’s and Krulak’s criticisms missed their mark on two levels. First, the marine commanders underappreciated that enemy main-force units operating so close to sanctuaries outside South Vietnam did not require the population’s support for survival. Without question, relationships between main forces, smaller units, and hamlet organizations existed in the marines’ “three-front war.” Success in pacification, however, did not lead necessarily to starvation and thus defeat of the enemy’s big units.Footnote ⁴² Second, Krulak in particular mislabeled MACV strategy as simple attrition. More accurately, Walt wrote Westmoreland in late 1965 that he understood his primary missions were “to defend the established bases … to support the RVNAF effort, and to provide a security shield behind which the ARVN can develop a rural construction program.” Clearly commanders debated how best to create such a shield, yet Krulak’s assessment that MACV did not understand the critical importance of the people was simply wrong.Footnote ⁴³

Westmoreland unquestionably saw enemy main-force units as the most pressing threat to South Vietnam’s security. Yet his skepticism about the marines’ concept resulted not from some narrow devotion to attrition but rather from a clear-sighted understanding of the war’s environment. The tasks MACV assigned to I Corps units illustrate a balanced approach with which Walt and Krulak actually agreed. Westmoreland directed the marines to develop and protect secure base areas, coordinate their operations with the RVNAF, maintain reserves for exploitation, and conduct a “vigorous rural construction program.” Stressing protection of the people, III MAF operations were to “concentrate on heavily populated areas to clear villages and hamlets in the coastal region. Such operations would require maximum mobility, discriminatory use of firepower, and flexibility in adjusting to the situation.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Given concerns over the ARVN’s lackluster rural pacification efforts, Westmoreland unsurprisingly advocated marine participation in local area security. Even Krulak admitted the Vietnamese military had “little stomach” for the day-to-day task of protecting the population. Moreover, a singular approach to pacification miscalculated the reality of available manpower resources. When asked in late 1966 how many Americans were needed to secure and pacify South Vietnam, Marine Corps commandant Wallace M. Greene, Jr., said it would take “as many as 750,000 troops.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Surely Westmoreland would have welcomed that number.

Leaders in the Hanoi Politburo equally debated the appropriate role of military force in their strategy to unite Vietnam. The decision to commit PAVN regulars did not come easily. Yet after tumultuous deliberations among party leaders, some of whom advocated a more cautious approach, General Secretary Lê Duẩn’s campaign to escalate the war militarily won the day. Never losing sight of the political struggle, Lê Duẩn argued it was necessary to “smash the enemy’s military forces.” Thus, the armed struggle played a “direct and decisive role.”Footnote ⁴⁶ By 1965, Hanoi had committed itself to full-fledged escalation. Both the military forces and civilian population in I Corps witnessed the results. Journalist Robert Shaplen reported in 1967 that the enemy was employing “sophisticated Russian howitzers, artillery, mortar, and rockets” just south of the DMZ.Footnote ⁴⁷ Marine intelligence indicated in late 1967 that forty-three PAVN and eighteen NLF battalions were operating in I Corps alone, not including the DMZ. If some Hanoi leaders still thought in terms of protracted warfare, Lê Duẩn was undeniably seeking a decisive battlefield victory to force the collapse of Saigon’s “puppet army” and the expulsion of US troops from Vietnam.Footnote ⁴⁸

Thus, marine criticisms that Westmoreland’s strategy failed to account for local security undervalue Lê Duẩn’s own commitment to winning the war through decisive military action. Such assessments equally dismiss the parallels between marine and army approaches to civic action and assisting the local population. Both services agreed that aggressive patrolling and offensive operations kept the enemy off balance. Marines in Vietnam likely supported army Lieutenant Colonel John McCuen’s contention that local “militia should be the backbone of self-defence.” Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Smithers’s belief that “the Viet Cong ultimately must be challenged and defeated in the village and the hamlet where they maintain their primary effort” would also have gained approval.Footnote ⁴⁹ One US Army War College student in early 1968, assessing the two services’ approaches to civic action, found the concepts adopted by the two to be “identical.” Even in South Vietnam, Westmoreland took interest in the marines’ County Fair program despite concerns that pacification-oriented programs might dissipate US strength and leave American units vulnerable to enemy main-force attacks.Footnote ⁵⁰

Programs like the County Fair – in which marines surrounded a village to root out insurgents while concurrently establishing dental and medical aid stations, conducting a census, and providing “native entertainment” – illustrated a population-centric approach.Footnote ⁵¹ Officers such as Walt and Krulak might acknowledge the presence of PAVN regulars in I Corps but they still believed that defeating the insurgency would lead to local security and the enemy’s ultimate downfall. Marines participating in Operation Golden Fleece, consequently, sought to protect farmers during the harvest season. If the NLF were kept from collecting rice taxes, the population might see clear rewards from receiving governmental protection. Yet whether through commodity distribution or medical care, the marines’ “emphasis was on short-term, high-impact, low-cost projects.”Footnote ⁵² Few questioned whether such projects would be sustainable, especially in the absence of American troops and support. But, by the summer of 1965, the marines had already convinced themselves that they alone held the key to victory in Vietnam.

CAPs: The False Alternative

Still tied to their enclaves in mid-1965, marines at Phú Bài drafted plans to incorporate local Popular Forces into their base security system. By integrating militia platoons with marine rifle squads, the allies might enlarge their enclaves thanks to additional manpower from these newly combined units. Marines would enter a nearby village and provide military training to the PFs, while patrolling the local countryside and participating in civic action. Encouraged by upbeat reports, Walt authorized an expansion of the program in January 1966. By July, III MAF had thirty-eight Combined Action Platoons spread across the three marine enclaves. Each of these CAPs consisted of one thirteen-man marine squad and a PF platoon of thirty-four South Vietnamese.Footnote ⁵³ According to one veteran, the scheme was simple. “If the PFs could be properly trained in firearms and squad tactics, if they could be instilled with pride and discipline, they just might be transformed into a viable, cohesive unit to augment the CAP Marines in the villes.” Paternalistic notions aside – could Americans truly instill pride in rural villagers? – the marines did their best to coordinate with Vietnamese district chiefs. Though Walt wanted to establish seventy-five CAPs by year’s end, fifty-seven combined platoons were operating by the opening of 1967, an impressive growth even if it was not as much as Walt had hoped.Footnote ⁵⁴

The program’s expansion meant that recruiting capable marines for CAP duty quickly became a concern. Though ostensibly admitting only volunteers, the program accepted many men who were “volunteered” by their commanders. Moreover, participants needed a level of maturity to train local militiamen while facilitating a village’s economic and social growth. A CAP School at Đà Nẵng consequently taught a wide array of subjects, from Vietnamese language and customs to civic action and patrolling techniques. An emphasis on military training illustrated that many CAP marines were not infantrymen but came instead from combat support units.Footnote ⁵⁵ More importantly, the volume of tactical instruction belied arguments that marines promoted a less violent approach to counterinsurgency. Of all the CAP pacification progress indices, “destruction of organized VC military forces” ranked first. Thus, the training of local militia endeavored to “bring the PF soldier to a state of military proficiency by which he is capable of providing his own village/hamlet defense.” Certainly, CAP marines supported “nation-building activities,” but contemporary directives on village pacification made clear that security mattered most. Thus, CAP members heard familiar tasks in their mission briefs: seek and destroy the Viet Cong, defend against VC attacks and subversion, and develop the PFs’ ability to resist the insurgency.Footnote ⁵⁶

Such phrases should not surprise, given received wisdom on the relationships between security and pacification. Marines presumed that, once they gained the trust of the local militia and then the people, villagers would provide them with intelligence on the NLF’s military operations and political infrastructure. In short, the marines believed “security for the rural population remained the basic requirement for pacification.” Senior leaders at MACV agreed wholeheartedly. Ambassador Robert Komer, head of MACV’s revolutionary development program, noted that “sustained territorial security” was the “indispensable first stage of pacification.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Perhaps, but did progress in security truly lead to pacified areas? Given that MACV defined pacification as linking the South Vietnamese villager to a distant central government in Saigon, such notions rested on dubious hypotheses. Not only was defining and measuring security difficult but, even once the area was secured, many villagers found little reason to throw their support behind a shaky Saigon government. CAP members surely aspired to a “unity of interest between the South Vietnamese villager and the individual Marine.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Yet too often the local populace maintained its own agenda while navigating through a complex war in which the threat of returning insurgents made throwing one’s open support behind American troops a dangerous proposition.

As the CAP program expanded, so too did opportunities for daily contact with the rural population. Official reports suggested encouraging results. A combined action unit in a village usually served to keep the indiscriminate use of American firepower away, surely important for building relations with local militia. Between August and December 1966, some 39,000 Popular Forces had deserted, yet none involved troops assigned to combined action units. Other figures noted that PFs assigned to CAPs were achieving impressive “kill ratios” against the Viet Cong. One report boasted that these trends “underscore the improved military performance that is possible through the melding of highly motivated professional Marines with heretofore poorly led, inadequately trained, and uninspired Vietnamese.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The lessons were clear. With the proper leadership, local militia could defeat the NLF insurgency, provide security to the population, and help turn the tide of a stalemated war.

Below the surface, however, problems were brewing. The “crash course” in language and cultural instruction left marines ill equipped to deal with the intricacies of South Vietnam’s village life. As journalist Frances FitzGerald found, American troops walked “through the jungle or through villages among small yellow people, as strange and exposed among them as if they were Martians.” Because many battalion commanders resisted giving up their best marines, the quality of CAP members ran the gamut from “outstanding to abysmal.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Thus, through a lack of professional education, persistent language difficulties, the environment’s unfamiliar nature, and the uneven quality of the marines themselves, the CAP program actually exposed larger issues with American intervention in Vietnam. One marine made a common assumption that potentially undermined the very presence of combined action units. “Anyone seen or heard moving around in the dark of night was considered to be VC and shot without hesitation.” Such aggressiveness may have kept local insurgents off balance but also risked innocent civilian casualties as marines shouldered the responsibility for village security. ARVN Lieutenant General Nguyễn Đức Thắng, for example, opposed the combined action concept because he felt the South Vietnamese were “inclined to sit back and let the Marines” do all the work.Footnote ⁶¹

In fact, the Popular Forces remained a nagging weakness. Lieutenant Colonel William R. Corson, the CAP program’s first director in February 1967, argued that PFs were “the building blocks upon which a successful strategy in Vietnam could have been based.”Footnote ⁶² While many marines sympathized with their ill-equipped, untrained allies, harsh realities undermined Corson’s lofty aspirations. For one thing, district and village chiefs controlled PF units, not the marines. CAP sergeants and corporals thus found their influence circumscribed by a separated chain of command. As advisors, marines could coordinate and cajole but not command. Edward Palm, a CAP patrol leader, noted that this separation inhibited relationships with the local militia. “Despite numerous suggestions, complaints, and threats, we were never able to form integrated, cohesive patrolling teams. It was the luck of the draw every time out.” Perhaps unavoidably, Palm recalled the “inevitable suspicion” that “our PFs were in league with the enemy and were tipping them off about our patrols.”Footnote ⁶³ True, PF soldiers were a mixed lot. If marines coming from combat service support units “lacked skills in scouting and patrolling,” some PFs joined up for the sole reason of avoiding conscription into the regular army. Thus, the marines’ official history arrived at a somber evaluation. “The PFs were to provide continuous security in the hamlets, but events had proved conclusively that they were incapable of carrying out their mission.”Footnote ⁶⁴

If local militia effectiveness proved elusive, the growing conventional threat in I Corps during 1967 equally placed strains on the CAP program. As Hanoi sent more PAVN units into South Vietnam’s northern provinces, marine commanders dispatched their own troops forward into battle. Walt found his Vietnamese counterparts slow to pick up the pacification slack. Worse, large-scale military operations not only ravaged the countryside but also drove thousands of villagers out of their homes and into resettlement camps. Even before the “border battles” of late 1967, at least 300,000 people in I Corps had become refugees. The Tet Offensive in early 1968 caused a further spike in the number of displaced persons.Footnote ⁶⁵ Not only did Combined Action Platoons struggle to meet demands of this human suffering, they found it increasingly difficult to maintain their own security. While Walt hoped to expand the CAP program, his combined action marines were suffering two and half times the number of casualties as their PF counterparts. So many CAPs had been overrun during the Tet Offensive that III MAF decided “to reduce their vulnerability by operating thereafter as mobile units without a fixed base.” Though controversial, the pronouncement meant the marines more closely mirrored the mobile advisory concept adopted by MACV in mid-1967.Footnote ⁶⁶ Walt and Krulak might disparage Westmoreland’s focus on the “big unit war” but Lê Duẩn’s commitment to military action left them little choice but to follow suit.

Because of this dual threat – from outside South Vietnam’s borders and inside its villages and hamlets – the marines’ aspirations of providing lasting population security ultimately came up short. Without question, CAPs put their shoulders into it. In a two-month summer period of 1966, the combined action unit at Fort Page engaged in more than seventy firefights. During the 1967 national election period, III MAF as a whole conducted an average of 1,240 small-unit patrols, ambushes, and company-sized search-and-destroy missions a day. The results, however, proved disappointing. Los Angeles Times correspondent Jack Foisie found that, even “after the areas behind the US line of advance have been cleared of the enemy, harassment continues unless the villages are garrisoned.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet III MAF never possessed the manpower to sustain its security advances. Moreover, a garrison state hardly encouraged loyalty to Saigon’s government. Marines involved in both large-unit and combined action operations surely made inroads against the insurgency by keeping the enemy off balance and driving wedges between the population and the NLF. The question of sustainability, though, remained. As one senior ARVN officer recalled, the “security attained was not a guarantee that it would be immune to enemy spoiling actions and that the trend was irreversible. The results only reflected the situation at a certain time; they did not represent the kind of solid, permanent achievements that defied retrogression.” One CAP veteran was more succinct: “We had managed neither to protect our village nor secure the support of the people.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Contemporary literature, however, presented a sanguine picture. Laying the foundation for future “lost opportunity” narratives, marines highlighted the number of villagers voting in the 1967 election. Mayors, once “scared off by the Viet Cong,” were returning to their hamlets. The Marine Corps Gazette boasted of militia taking “heart from the Marines’ firepower and combat aggressiveness” and that civic action was having a “significant role in the transformation” of villages under the Corps’ protection.Footnote ⁶⁹ Corson himself offered up impressive figures. In hamlets with CAPs, four out of five hamlet chiefs resided full time in their homes. “In hamlets without a CAP,” the program director claimed, “29 per cent have functioning hamlet councils; in those with a CAP 93 per cent have reached this level of progress.” Corson even maintained in a 1967 interview with the Washington Post that 1,000 marines were providing security for 250,000 people. (Journalist Ward Just called the remark “startling.”)Footnote ⁷⁰ Even civilian think tanks such as the Hudson Institute offered measured praise. One 1967 report acknowledged that the CAPs had “not eliminated the infrastructure in every hamlet,” nor “have they ever been able to feel they could leave a village safely behind.” Nonetheless, they promoted an enhanced “mobile defense capability … based on local intelligence.” As the report concluded, the combined action approach “should be applied to a solid mass of villages, as they [CAPs] have not been up to now.”Footnote ⁷¹

Despite these glowing testimonies, the marines’ inability to link security with social and economic development plagued the CAP program and illustrated fundamental inconsistencies with the larger American presence in South Vietnam. In areas in which they operated, combined units often increased the level of security among the local villages and hamlets. Yet physical control of the population hardly addressed social grievances or economic hardships. In truth, development rarely achieved “revolutionary” levels. In large part, the Saigon government was still grappling with ways to extend its influence into the rural countryside. As The Pentagon Papers authors realized, “despite their good intentions to work through the existing GVN structure, the Marines found in many cases that the existing structure barely existed, except on paper, and in other cases that the existing structure was too slow and too corrupt for their requirements.”Footnote ⁷² Too often the governmental chain from hamlet to Saigon was either broken or indifferent to the people’s needs. As much as marine officers wanted to help win villagers’ “allegiance and loyalty,” no foreign occupation force could serve as a surrogate for functioning local government. And no amount of tactical skill in providing village security or in training PF militia could overcome inherent weaknesses within the South Vietnamese political community. Too many rural people simply felt out of step with their government in Saigon.Footnote ⁷³

To his credit, Westmoreland gave I Corps’ leadership space to experiment with CAPs while confronting the PAVN threat across South Vietnam’s border. Arguments that MACV vetoed plans for expansion of the program fall flat. In the end, the Marine Corps itself allocated less than 2 percent of its manpower to CAPs.Footnote ⁷⁴ In late 1967, for instance, 1,343 marines and 2,074 PF members were assigned to combined action units. Never did the program exceed 2,500 marines, even when III MAF reached its peak of roughly 85,000 troops in 1968. Despite such a large presence, Westmoreland reasoned that III MAF controlled only 2 percent of the terrain and 13 percent of the population in all of I Corps.Footnote ⁷⁵ As with “security,” the word “control” surely held diverse meanings. Still, the few villages in which the CAPs operated hardly served as a paradigm for marine operations in the country’s northernmost provinces. Westmoreland correctly realized, given Hanoi’s intentions, that scattered combined action units did little to secure the population from the main-force threat. In Douglas Blaufarb’s words, the marines’ failure “to link the various CAPs together into an interlocking and mutually supporting network” only exacerbated the MACV commander’s concerns.Footnote ⁷⁶ Marines, however, tended to blame such shortcomings on Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition.

While this popular narrative has appealed to a broad audience for decades, it ignores the realities behind MACV strategy and the tactical problems and solutions shared by the US Army and Marine Corps in Vietnam. In his official report on the war, Westmoreland noted that “cordon and search” and County Fair operations, “first developed by the Marines,” were adopted by all ground commands. Though Walt disagreed with MACV’s emphasis on larger, offensive operations, he conceded during and after the war that he could not ignore enemy main-force units.Footnote ⁷⁷ Moreover, Westmoreland argued that he “simply had not enough numbers to put a squad of Americans in every village and hamlet.” Although Krepinevich later countered that “it was not necessary to place army squads in every village simultaneously” if one followed the “oil spot” principle of steady expansion, at least some veterans had doubts. One CAP member disputed that “we could ever have found enough Marines with the intelligence and sensitivity to make it work on a large scale, nor could we have provided the language and cultural training.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Critics of America’s lost war, however, concluded that “if only” Westmoreland had followed the marines’ approach, the war “might have” turned out differently.

Conclusions: The Perils of Mythmaking

Proponents of the CAP alternative have long relied on counterfactual arguments that, under closer scrutiny, call into question whether Westmoreland missed a grand opportunity to win the war. In truth, US Army units experimented with pacification just as the Marine Corps did – oftentimes, with similarly mixed results. In the 1st Infantry Division, operations such as Rolling Stone sought to balance the interrelated fields of civic action, psychological warfare, and combat operations. By providing long-term security to the population in Bình Dương province, the division hoped to achieve its primary objective of opening the area to “RVN economic and military influence.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Similar goals guided the 25th Infantry Division. In May 1966, Westmoreland directed commanders to work more closely with their ARVN counterparts “in order to improve their morale, efficiency and effectiveness.” Soon afterwards, the 25th instituted the Combined Lightning Initial Project (CLIP), modeled on the marines’ Combined Action Program, to help achieve the division’s pacification goals. Soldiers not only trained local PFs, but also conducted clear and hold missions to “help expand the security ‘oil spot’” around the division’s Củ Chi base camp. In the 4th Infantry Division, operating along Cambodia’s border, the “Good Neighbor” program equally sought to balance local security with the threat posed by PAVN main-force units.Footnote ⁸⁰

The experiences of these US Army divisions directly challenge popular “lost war” narratives. Army commanders weighed offensive operations against pacification efforts just like their marine brethren. The failure of both services says more about the inability of Americans to resolve underlying problems within the South Vietnamese political community than it does about US military strategy. CAPs simply could not achieve the “credible permanence” so necessary for gaining the population’s true support.Footnote ⁸¹ Especially after the 1968 Tet Offensive and the de-Americanization of the war, villagers were unconvinced the marines would not abandon them. Lacking a long-term commitment to their security, many rural peasants deemed it too risky to support the Saigon government over the NLF. Thus, Americans remained little more than an occupation force. In the process, persistent questions over the legitimacy of the government of South Vietnam made any gains against the National Liberation Front fragile at best.Footnote ⁸² True, the NLF’s influence waned in the years following Tet, but it seems doubtful though that any expansion of the CAP program would have been enough to break the communists’ will. In short, there were some political issues that military force simply could not resolve.Footnote ⁸³

Perhaps this uncomfortable truth helps explain why the false alternative of the marines’ Combined Action Program remains so congenial. In the aftermath of Vietnam, Americans wanted to believe there was a better way, that victory lay within their grasp. The alternative, though, was a myth. At its peak in 1969, there were only 114 CAPs for an I Corps population of roughly 2.5 million people. Evidence also indicated that in the “‘softer’ areas of civic action, psychological operations, and general institution- and nation-building” CAPs never performed all that well.Footnote ⁸⁴

Yet, long before the war’s end, the marines already had judged their program a success. In May 1968, Krulak called on his colleagues to “stand up to their Army critics and extol the ‘proud’ record of the Marine Corps in Vietnam.” In Krulak’s view, his officers would have to defend the Corps’ “right to fight by reciting its record of ‘achievement’ in Vietnam” since “our postwar survival may well turn on our ability to articulate our contribution.” Suppressing the limits of the CAP program thus not only helped to honor the sacrifices of young marines but, perhaps more importantly, to solidify the Corps’ reputation in a war already being condemned by critics as a failure. Krulak, in a large sense, was setting the foundations for a key myth of the Vietnam War: Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition had flopped while the Marine Corps’ strategy of population security had measured up.Footnote ⁸⁵

Though such narratives have found receptive audiences over the past five decades, especially those hoping to salvage one military branch’s reputation after the American loss in Vietnam, the reality proves much more complicated. Westmoreland never made exclusive choices between attrition and counterinsurgency. The Combined Action Program thus ranked as one among many tools used by American military officers to help sustain a tenuous South Vietnam government under assault from both political and military agents. There existed no “magic solution” to the dual threat of external invasion and internal subversion.Footnote ⁸⁶ Hence, the CAP “alternative” should be viewed as historical myth built by proud marine officers and uncritical military historians. Certainly, studying the merits of the marine approach offers valuable historical perspectives. But myths based on “if only” arguments do little to further our understanding of the Vietnam War. By judging that war only through stories we find congenial, through narratives in which victory always is possible, history loses its functionality for deeper understanding. In the end, counterfactuals based on false alternatives take us only so far.

At 11:30 p.m. on August 4, 1964, in Washington, DC, President Lyndon Johnson informed the American public that he had ordered air strikes on North Vietnam in response for the apparent attacks by North Vietnamese patrol boats on US Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. At that moment half a world away, fifty-two navy fighters from the carriers USS Ticonderoga and USS Constellation flew toward patrol-boat bases at Phúc Lợi, Quảng Khê, and Hòn Gai, and the oil storage depot at Vinh. The air strikes, dubbed Operation Pierce Arrow, wrecked half of North Vietnam’s small torpedo-boat flotilla and almost one-fourth of its oil supply, but the attackers did not emerge unscathed. Anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) fire claimed two A-4 Skyhawks, killing Lieutenant Junior Grade Richard Sather and forcing Lieutenant Junior Grade Everett Alvarez to parachute from his stricken aircraft. Alvarez would remain a prisoner of war of the North Vietnamese for eight long years.

At the time of the air strikes, few if any Americans realized that the raids signaled the start of an extended application of air power that would deposit 8 million tons of bombs on the landscape of Southeast Asia between 1964 and 1973. Half of that total fell on South Vietnam, the United States’ ally in the perceived struggle against communist aggression. Roughly 3 million tons fell on Laos and Cambodia, so-called neutrals in the Vietnamese conflict. The remaining million tons landed on North Vietnam, with the bulk of that falling during the Operation Rolling Thunder air campaign of 1965–8.Footnote ¹ Despite the enormous amount of ordnance dropped, and the vast displays of technology dropping it, two years after the United States removed its forces from the war, South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were communist countries.

Did the inability of bombing – and innumerable airlift and reconnaissance sorties – to prevent the fall of South Vietnam demonstrate the limits of air power, or did it reveal that the strategy that relied heavily on air power’s kinetic application to achieve success was fundamentally flawed? From the vantage point of more than a half-century after the bombing began, and more than forty years after the last bomb fell, the answer to both questions remains yes. Yet the two questions are intimately related, and answering them reveals the enormous impact that a political leader can have on the design and implementation of an air strategy, especially in a limited war. Ultimately, the air wars in Vietnam demonstrate both the limits of air power and the limits of a strategy dependent on it when trying to achieve conflicting political goals. The legacies of the air wars in Vietnam remain relevant to political and military leaders grappling with the prospects of applying air power in the twenty-first century.

The reliance on air power to produce success in Vietnam was a classic rendition of the “ends, ways, and means” formula often used for designing strategy. Air power was a key “means” to achieve the desired “ends” – victory – and how American political and military leaders chose to apply that means to achieve victory yielded the air strategy that they followed. Much of the problem in Vietnam, though, was that the definition of “victory” was not a constant. For Johnson, victory meant creating an independent, stable, noncommunist South Vietnam. His successor, President Richard Nixon, pursued a much more limited goal, one that he called “peace with honor” – a euphemism for a South Vietnam that would remain noncommunist for a so-called decent interval, accompanied by the return of American prisoners of war and the end of the United States’ Vietnam involvement.

For American air leaders as well as Johnson, the million tons of bombs dropped on North Vietnamese soil counted far more than those that fell elsewhere in terms of helping to achieve the desired political objectives. Rolling Thunder offered the promise of ending the war independently with air power, while the bombs falling on South Vietnam promised a ground victory that air power had supported. In the end, a victory of any sort that achieved Johnson’s objective of a noncommunist, stable South proved impossible to obtain with American military force. Many air leaders, however, viewed Johnson’s political restrictions as the key reason that air power had failed to achieve independent success during Rolling Thunder. They pointed to the 1972 bombing as an example of what unfettered air power could achieve, and many focused specifically on Nixon’s eleven-day December bombing effort known as Operation Linebacker II. Yet those air commanders who argued that a Linebacker II in 1965 would have “won the war” then failed to see that conditions in 1965 were not the same as those in 1972. Moreover, the objective of Nixon’s aerial onslaught differed significantly from Johnson’s goal of an enduring noncommunist South and was much easier to achieve, particularly given the type of war confronted by American air power in 1972.

The Strategic Foundations of American Air Power

Vietnam proved an especially thorny problem for American air leaders because it did not suit their expectations. After finally achieving the holy grail of service independence in 1947, the air force had become the United States’ first line of defense in the anticipated “general” war against the Soviet Union. That defense was in fact an offense, in which Strategic Air Command’s (SAC) bombers were the centerpiece of the designated strategy. “Massive retaliation,” the guiding principle of President Dwight Eisenhower’s defense policy, promised a tremendous assault with nuclear air power against the Soviet heartland should either the Soviets or a proxy Soviet state launch an attack against the United States or its allies. The concept suffered as a credible option, but the air force ingrained the emphasis on an independent aerial victory in its doctrine. Air leaders realized that air power had failed to win a victory in Korea, but they viewed the limited war there as an anomaly, especially given Eisenhower’s endorsement of massive retaliation. Although they realized that such a limited conflict might recur, they also believed that readiness for general war – a synonym for nuclear combat – sufficed for wars of lesser magnitude.

The air force’s preparation for general war on the eve of Vietnam hearkened back to the prophecy of Billy Mitchell, the teachings of the Air Corps Tactical School, and the perceived effectiveness of strategic bombing in World War II. Mitchell had maintained that air power alone could defeat a nation by paralyzing “vital centers,” which included great cities where people lived, factories, raw materials, foodstuffs, supplies, and modes of transportation.Footnote ² All were essential to wage modern war, Mitchell had written in the aftermath of World War I, and all were vulnerable to air attack. Moreover, he deemed that many such targets were fragile, and wrecking them promised a victory both quicker and cheaper than one achieved by surface forces. Air power could attack vital centers directly, avoiding the senseless slaughter that had characterized World War I land combat. Bombers would wreck an enemy’s will to fight by destroying its capability to do so, and the essence of that capability was not its army or navy, but its industrial and agricultural underpinnings. Eliminating industrial production “would deprive armies, air forces and navies … of their means of maintenance.” Air power also offered the chance to attack the will to fight directly, but Mitchell thought that bombers did not necessarily have to kill civilians to wreck a nation’s will to resist.Footnote ³

Mitchell’s conviction that air forces could achieve an independent victory in war by such “beneficial bombing” became a hallmark of Air Corps officers who promoted his vision of independent air power founded on the bomber. Basing many of their assertions on their study of American industry and population centers, they refined Mitchell’s notions into an “industrial web theory” that offered a blueprint for how to wreck an enemy state with air power. After World War II, many American airmen viewed the bombing of Germany and Japan as a vindication of such theories. Although bombing had not singlehandedly defeated Germany, the air campaign against the German homeland had significantly damaged its ability to wage war.

The result was an independent air force with a doctrine geared to achieving an independent victory. Enough similarities remained between the notion of an industrial web and the damage rendered to Germany and Japan for American airmen to make the theory their doctrinal cornerstone. Published a few months after the Eisenhower administration announced its massive retaliation policy, Air Force Manual 1-8 defined strategic air operations as attacks “designed to disrupt an enemy nation to the extent that its will and capability to resist are broken.” Such operations would be autonomous, “conducted directly against the nation itself,” rather than auxiliary operations supporting friendly land and sea forces against an enemy’s deployed armies and navies. The authors concluded that destroying petroleum or transportation systems would cause the most damage to a nation’s will to resist. Only “weighty and sustained attacks,” however, would succeed in wrecking either system.Footnote ⁴

On the eve of sustained combat in Vietnam, this mindset portended ill for the US Air Force. Although their doctrine stated that the industrial web theory applied to “modern” nations, many airmen equated “modern” to “all,” and in Vietnam they would futilely try to determine the key industrial component that made agrarian North Vietnam tick. Part of the problem was that the airmen’s predecessors had designed the industrial web theory based upon their own vision of the United States, and that vision may not have been accurate. Part of the problem was also that post–World War II airmen had transformed the notion into a guideline for nuclear attack, and the prospects of nuclear bombing did not translate exactly into actual warfare, especially for an agrarian nation like North Vietnam. Yet air force doctrine taught that they did translate, and that preparation for nuclear war sufficed to ready the air force for combat at any level. That belief received a significant boost in October 1962, when the threat of SAC B-52s, supplemented by a fledgling intercontinental ballistic missile force, compelled the Soviet Union to back down during the Cuban Missile Crisis. If the threat of bombing could make the Soviets – the United States’ mightiest potential enemy – retreat, surely that threat would make other, lesser, nations fall into line as well. So believed many American airmen and political leaders as the United States looked for a quick, cheap solution in Vietnam.

Launching Rolling Thunder

With the Saigon regime teetering on the verge of collapse in early 1965 to National Liberation Front (NLF) insurgents and their North Vietnamese allies, air power appeared to offer the answer to South Vietnam’s survival when American political and military chiefs agreed to initiate Rolling Thunder. As to how bombing North Vietnam would yield an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam, there existed a wide disparity of opinion, ranging from the signal air power would send to the North Vietnamese – that bombs would ultimately destroy their heartland and its nascent industrial apparatus – to the signal that it would send to the United States’ South Vietnamese allies – that it would bolster their fighting spirit, making them fight harder and cause them to prevail against the forces of the NLF and the contingent of North Vietnamese troops supporting them. Although many airmen believed that North Vietnam lacked the Soviet Union’s will to resist, and that the threat of aerial destruction would force Hồ Chí Minh to surrender, their motivations for bombing the North also subscribed to their doctrine: they believed that the NLF, which formed the vast bulk of the enemy forces in South Vietnam, could not fight without the support and direction of the North Vietnamese, and that bombing North Vietnam would deny the NLF the capability to keep fighting. Lyndon Johnson and his political advisors endorsed this perspective as well in spring 1965. The notion was the fundamental premise of Rolling Thunder, and one that American airmen would continue to support after Johnson’s political advisors had given up on it. Unfortunately for American leaders, the premise was fundamentally flawed.

Although American political and military leaders frequently stated that the enemy waged guerrilla warfare, they also assumed that the destruction of resources necessary for conventional warfare would weaken the enemy’s capability and will to fight unconventionally. During the Rolling Thunder era, however, the enemy rarely fought at all. Hanoi had only 55,000 North Vietnamese troops in the South by August 1967; the remaining 245,000 communist soldiers were part of the NLF.Footnote ⁵ None of these forces engaged in frequent combat, and the NLF intermingled with the Southern populace. Enemy battalions fought an average of one day in thirty and had a total daily supply requirement of 380 tons. Of this amount, they needed only 34 tons a day from sources outside the South, a total that consisted of mostly ammunition; the NLF and the People’s Army of North Vietnam (PAVN) troops obtained food from rice fields in the South.Footnote ⁶ Seven two-and-a-half ton trucks could transport the 34-ton requirement, which was less than 1 percent of the daily tonnage imported into North Vietnam. No amount of bombing could stop that paltry supply total from arriving in the South. Sea, road, and rail imports averaged 5,700 tons a day, yet Hanoi possessed the capacity to import 17,200 tons. Defense Department analysts estimated in February 1967 that an unrestrained air offensive against resupply facilities, accompanied by the mining of Northern harbors, would reduce the import capacity to 7,200 tons.Footnote ⁷ The amount of goods that the communists shipped south “is primarily a function of their own choosing,” the Joint Chiefs remarked in August 1965.Footnote ⁸ Their appraisal remained valid throughout Rolling Thunder. Still, by fighting an infrequent guerrilla war, the NLF and PAVN could cause significant losses. In 1967 and 1968, two years that together claimed 25,000 American lives, more than 6,000 Americans died from mines and booby traps.Footnote ⁹

Initially, though, American political and military chiefs agreed that the NLF could not function without Hanoi’s support. Air force chief of staff Curtis LeMay, and General John P. McConnell, who served as LeMay’s vice chief and succeeded him as chief of staff on February 1, 1965, called for a concentrated air attack ranging from sixteen to twenty-eight days against transportation centers, bridges, electrical power facilities, and the sparse components of North Vietnamese industry. Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, the commander of Pacific Command, who controlled the forces that would conduct such an attack, eagerly endorsed it, as did Lieutenant General Joseph H. Moore, the commander of the 2nd Air Division in Saigon, who directed many of the air force aircraft that would participate. To air commanders, the “sudden, sharp knock” of a three-week air offensive would not just disrupt North Vietnam’s war effort; it would also disrupt the fabric of Northern economic and social welfare – or, at the minimum, threaten its functioning, much as American bombers had threatened the Soviets in October 1962. American leaders understood that the North Vietnamese received the bulk of their war-making hardware from the Soviets and Chinese, and that Hồ Chí Minh could boast of only a single steel mill, one cement factory, and fewer than ten electric power plants. Yet those leaders also surmised that the threat of bombing could hold the meager Northern industrial apparatus “hostage” to the danger of attack. They believed that Rolling Thunder would creep steadily northward until it threatened the nascent industrial complexes in Hanoi and Hải Phòng, and that Hồ Chí Minh, being a rational man who certainly prized that meager industry, would realize the peril to it and stop supporting the NLF. Denied assistance, the insurgency would wither away, and the war would end with the United States’ high-tech aerial weaponry providing a victory that was quick, cheap, and efficient.

In February 1965, Johnson and his political advisors accepted that air power was an appropriate instrument with which to bully North Vietnam: it would cost fewer American lives than sending in American ground troops; they could focus it on key North Vietnamese targets; and, above all, they could control its intensity. Control was essential for Johnson. Although he had committed personal as well as national prestige to preserving a noncommunist South Vietnam, equally important was ensuring that the war in Southeast Asia did not expand into a larger conflict involving either the Chinese or the Soviets. Remembering Chinese intervention in the Korean War, Johnson was terrified that the Chinese would send troops to support their communist neighbors in North Vietnam or, worse yet, that the Soviets would actively join in the conflict – possibly even with nuclear weapons.Footnote ¹⁰ Both the president’s key advisors, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, warned Johnson not to implement the proposed intensive, three-week air campaign against North Vietnam because of the unknown impact that such bombing would have on the communist superpowers. Rusk, as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs during the Korean War, had seen at first hand the effects of miscalculating Chinese intentions, while McNamara had played a key role in helping resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis. Johnson placed an enormous amount of trust in the opinions of both men.

Besides his fears that Vietnam might expand into World War III, Johnson’s commitment to establishing a “Great Society” caused him to shun a heavy air attack on North Vietnam. He feared that a massive increase in military force in Southeast Asia would advertise the seriousness of the threat to South Vietnam, causing the attention of Congress and the American public to shift away from the social programs that he cherished. A rapid increase in military pressure would have further repercussions. The president hoped to secure a favorable perception of the United States among Third World nations. Too much force in Vietnam might cause those countries to view the American effort as motivated by imperial ambitions or feelings of racial superiority. Exerting too much force against North Vietnam would make the United States appear as a Goliath pounding a hapless David, and likely drive small nations searching for a Cold War benefactor into the communist embrace. Johnson also wished to maintain the support of NATO and other Western allies. The greater the effort in Vietnam, the more allies elsewhere would question the ability of the United States to sustain its military commitments.

Johnson’s conflicting goals combined to produce the main principle of air strategy against North Vietnam: gradual response. American political leaders believed that military force was necessary to guarantee the South’s existence, yet other goals prevented them from unleashing the United States’ full military power. To ensure that the war remained limited, Johnson prohibited military actions that threatened, or that the Chinese or Soviets might perceive as threatening, the survival of North Vietnam. Bombing would begin slowly in the southern part of North Vietnam and incrementally “roll” northward toward the heartland containing Hanoi and Hải Phòng. Meanwhile, Johnson and his political chiefs would scrutinize bombing’s effects, with a wary eye focused on the reactions of Moscow and Beijing. Based on those reactions, as well as the response of the American public and the world community at large, they could tighten or loosen the bombing faucet as they saw fit. Rolling Thunder’s initial attack on March 2, 1965, struck only one target, an ammunition depot well south of the heartland, and was the only attack of the week. The following week fighters bombed barracks and ammunition depots, again south of the 20th parallel, on a single day.

Johnson and his political advisors hoped that the attacks would signal to Hồ Chí Minh that ultimately air power would demolish its meager industrial apparatus north of the 20th parallel. Fighters bombed more targets, on more days, during the third week of March, and the bombs crept northward toward Hanoi. During this span, Admiral Sharp stated that he expected that the limited interdiction would yield success by degrading transportation, diverting manpower to rebuilding roads and bridges, and conveying American “strength of purpose” that would “make support of the VC [Viet Cong] as onerous as possible.”Footnote ¹¹ This faith, also shared by political leaders, that the threat of greater destruction would suffice to make the North Vietnamese balk, stemmed from the Soviet retreat during the Cuban Missile Crisis.Footnote ¹² Noted National Security Council official Chester L. Cooper: “It seemed inconceivable that the lightly armed and poorly equipped Communist forces could maintain their momentum against, first, increasing amounts of American assistance to the Vietnamese Army, and subsequently, American bombing.”Footnote ¹³

Evaluating Rolling Thunder

The belief that Hồ would cower to air power lasted very briefly, although a slim regard for North Vietnam’s tenacity endured throughout the Johnson presidency. By early April 1965, after only six Rolling Thunder missions, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy began pressing Johnson to change the focus of American military effort to ground power. Sharp and other air chiefs redoubled their efforts to convince political leaders to bomb key elements of Northern war-making capability directly, but Bundy, Rusk, McNamara, and general-turned-ambassador to South Vietnam Maxwell Taylor persuaded Johnson to emphasize – and enlarge – the American military effort on the ground in the South. To American political leaders after July 1965, bombing the North would serve as a means of supporting American troops in South Vietnam by denying enemy forces unlimited supplies and placing a “ceiling” on the magnitude of the war that they could fight. Many air commanders, however, continued to advocate increased attacks on North Vietnamese heartland targets in the hopes that air power might ultimately wreck the North’s capability and will to fight.

Johnson’s political restrictions made conducting the systematic air campaign called for by the air chiefs virtually impossible. He initially prohibited B-52s from bombing North Vietnam because he thought that the Chinese or Soviets might deem use of the heavy bomber designed for nuclear missions too provocative,Footnote ¹⁴ although he ordered the bombers to attack targets in South Vietnam starting in June 1965. B-52s did not bomb the North until 1966, when Johnson permitted them to attack targets just north of the 17th parallel. Targets in Hanoi remained “off-limits” to all aircraft until the summer of 1966. Johnson then forbade air commanders from bombing within a thirty-mile (48-km) radius from the center of Hanoi, a ten-mile (16-km) radius from the center of Hải Phòng, and thirty miles (48 km) of the Chinese border without his personal approval. Besides determining where his pilots could attack, Johnson also decided how often they could do so. He paused Rolling Thunder completely on eight occasions between March 1965 and March 1968, with reasons that varied from giving the North Vietnamese time to negotiate to observing Buddha’s birthday. Meeting with key advisors Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy over lunch in the White House on Tuesday afternoons, Johnson selected specific North Vietnamese targets for attack in weekly or biweekly increments. Not until October 1967 did these luncheons regularly include army general and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Earle Wheeler; prior to that time, no military representative usually attended.Footnote ¹⁵

The lack of a military presence during the Tuesday lunches blatantly revealed Johnson’s distrust of his generals and caused those wearing the uniform enormous frustration at all levels. Because the luncheon attendees did not publish the results of their sessions, perceptions of the president’s decision-making frequently differed. Conflicting guidance reached air commanders and produced confusion. Pilots learned that they had authority to attack moving targets such as convoys and troops, but could not attack highways, railroads, or bridges with no moving traffic on them.Footnote ¹⁶ Moreover, the precise definition of “moving targets” was unclear to those flying Rolling Thunder missions.

Like many wing commanders, air leaders orchestrated the offensive against North Vietnam as best they could given presidential constraints. They refused to surrender the deeply ingrained notion that bombing could break an enemy’s capability and will to resist, and their targeting proposals that McNamara carried to the Tuesday lunches adhered to the basics of air force doctrine. Johnson, increasingly desperate for a solution to the war, ultimately bowed to many of their targeting suggestions, although he never gave his air chiefs carte blanche to attack North Vietnamese target systems in a coordinated series of “sharp, hard knocks.” Raids occurred incrementally over long spans of time, with the effort against Northern transportation counting for 90 percent of all Rolling Thunder missions and running from March 1965 to June 1966 (and during intervals between shifts in bombing emphasis); an attack on oil storage areas occurring from late June to early September 1966; and raids against Northern industry and electric power plants transpiring in March, April, and May 1967. After those attacks, the objective wavered. At the end of March 1968, in the midst of the domestic furor over the communist Tet Offensive, Johnson restricted bombing to targets below the 19th parallel in an effort to spur peace negotiations. On November 1, 1968, he halted all attacks on North Vietnam and brought Rolling Thunder to a close.

In the end, the aerial assault could break neither Hanoi’s capability nor its will to keep fighting, nor could Rolling Thunder place a “ceiling” on the magnitude of the war that the North Vietnamese and NLF could fight. The 1968 Tet Offensive demonstrated in graphic fashion bombing’s failure to limit enemy operations. Rolling Thunder never suited the character of the war, and the inability – or unwillingness – of many air chiefs to recognize that fact produced “military constraints” that further limited bombing effectiveness. Unable to produce telling results against an enemy that rarely fought, air commanders adopted a method of combat scorekeeping resembling the body count approach used by ground commanders in the South: sortie count. Admiral Sharp’s April 1966 division of North Vietnamese airspace into seven permanent bombing zones, or “Route Packages,” triggered a competition between navy and air force commanders to produce the most sorties in their respective Route Packages on a given day.Footnote ¹⁷ The totals flown then became a warped measuring stick of bombing effectiveness. To increase the count, some commanders called for attacks with less than full bomb loads, which in turn endangered additional flyers;Footnote ¹⁸ one navy A-4 pilot admitted that he attacked the Thanh Hóa Bridge, one of the North’s most heavily defended targets, with no bombs at all but was told simply to strafe the structure with 20mm cannon fire.Footnote ¹⁹

Besides military limitations, “operational” controls further restricted Rolling Thunder. These constraints consisted of such vagaries as geography, weather, aircraft types, and enemy defenses. North Vietnam’s lush terrain was ideal for camouflage, and the enemy frequently resorted to deception. Hanoi also exploited the proximity of Laos and Cambodia by snaking the sophisticated series of pathways that combined to form the Hồ Chí Minh Trail through eastern areas of both countries. Most of the 3 million tons of bombs dropped in Laos fell in the vicinity of the trail, which included more than 1,800 miles (2,900 km) of truckable roadways winding through terrain as high as 8,000 feet (245 m) as well as triple-canopy jungle and dense rain forests. Although the NLF and North Vietnamese did not need the bulk of equipment transported on it during the Johnson era of the war, they stockpiled the goods for major assaults like the Tet Offensive and the siege of Khe Sanh. Weather was one of the air campaign’s most significant operational controls. From September to April, the dense clouds of the winter monsoons made continuous bombing impossible. The monsoons prevented Rolling Thunder from starting in late February 1965 and canceled numerous missions in March, when Johnson’s political advisors had the greatest faith in its success. Most of the raids scheduled during the monsoon season against fixed targets such as bridges became interdiction strikes because clouds obscured the primary objective. In 1966, only 1 percent of the year’s 81,000 sorties flew against fixed targets proposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff,Footnote ²⁰ and weather was a key reason for the low total.

Of the aircraft types that performed most Rolling Thunder bombing, none was well suited for North Vietnam’s forbidding environment. The air force relied primarily on the Republic F-105 Thunderchief, a slow-turning, single-seat fighter designed during the 1950s as a nuclear attack aircraft, and the McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom, developed by the navy as a high-altitude interceptor and modified for ground attack. It suffered from a vulnerability to ground fire, poor rear cockpit visibility, and engines that emitted thick, black smoke, revealing its location. The navy used the Phantom for bombing as well, but relied mostly on the McDonnell-Douglas A-4 Skyhawk, a diminutive single-seat fighter that could carry only four tons of bombs. Together, these aircraft flew against a defensive array that sported 200 surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites, 7,000 anti-aircraft guns, a sophisticated ground-controlled intercept (GCI) system, and 80 MiG fighters by August 1967. Hanoi gained the reputation as the world’s most heavily defended city, and veteran F-105 pilot Jack Broughton labeled North Vietnam as “the center of hell with Hanoi as its hub.”Footnote ²¹ In 1967, the last full year of Rolling Thunder, 326 American aircraft were lost over the North; 921 were lost during the entire campaign of three and a half years.Footnote ²²

Figure 2.1 An F-105 “Thunderchief” with a full load of sixteen 750 lb bombs; it was the US Air Force’s primary aircraft for bombing North Vietnam during Operation Rolling Thunder.

Source: Wikimedia Commons. The appearance of US Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.

The air offensive originally envisioned as a quick, cheap alternative to ground war proved to be neither. Moreover, Rolling Thunder spurred both China and the Soviet Union to provide North Vietnam with not only military hardware but also economic backing. As a result of the support received from the communist superpowers, the North’s gross national product actually rose during each year of Rolling Thunder. Hồ Chí Minh knew that the Chinese and the Soviets were vying for influence in his nation, and he adroitly played one against the other to gain maximum support. The bombing also provided Hồ Chí Minh with a means to rally the Northern populace behind the war effort. He realized that the constrained bombing would cause little damage, but the American air presence persisted over North Vietnam. Thus, he could consistently point to the air attacks as examples of American barbarism, a claim made time and again by his effective propaganda ministry. “In terms of its morale effects,” RAND analyst Oleg Hoeffding argued in 1966, “the US campaign may have presented the [North Vietnamese] regime with a near-ideal mix of intended restraint and accidental gore.”Footnote ²³ Rolling Thunder killed an estimated 52,000 civilians out of a population of 18 million;Footnote ²⁴ in contrast, the first B-29 incendiary raid against Tokyo in World War II had killed at least 84,000 Japanese civilians on a single night.Footnote ²⁵

Rolling Thunder destroyed 65 percent of North Vietnam’s oil storage capacity, 59 percent of its power plants, 55 percent of its major bridges, 9,821 vehicles, and 1,966 railroad cars,Footnote ²⁶ but such destruction counted for little in terms of ending the war. The myriad of political, military, and operational controls that plagued the air campaign helped prevent it from achieving Johnson’s goal of a noncommunist South Vietnam. Without those constraints, however, its prospects were dim as long as the enemy chose to wage an infrequent guerrilla war. Air force doctrine had discounted the probability of limited war, especially one in which the enemy rarely fought. That doctrine had also claimed that victory through air power was likely regardless of the character of the war, and that the keys to victory were identifying and then wrecking the ingredients tying together the enemy’s capability and will to resist.

Given the type of war the communist army fought, the only two targets that might have hurt its war effort and the support it received were people and food. None of Johnson’s advisors, military or civilian, advocated such attacks. Yet even had raids against population centers or the Red River dikes occurred against North Vietnam – and succeeded in knocking the North out of the war – in all likelihood they would have had minimal impact on achieving Johnson’s war aim. The main enemy was the NLF in the South, not the North Vietnamese, and the NLF were not dependent on Hanoi’s support. Nor were they dependent on Hanoi’s direction. Many NLF soldiers and their leaders fought against the American-backed Saigon regime because it was corrupt and mistreated the Southern populace, rather than because of a commitment to North Vietnamese communist ideology.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, after an American-endorsed coup had ousted the failing government of Ngô Đình Diệm in late 1963, South Vietnam endured seven different regime changes – including five coups – in 1964 alone, and none of the governments had popular support. The regimes that followed remained equally corrupt and out of touch with the bulk of the Southern population.Footnote ²⁸ The United States’ political leaders supported those governments because they were noncommunist, but no amount of American air power could sustain them. Moreover, as long as the NLF kept the war’s tempo limited, Rolling Thunder could not have a decisive effect on the ground war in the South.

Campaigns in the South

Johnson’s July 1965 decision to expand American ground forces from 82,000 to more than 200,000 by the end of the year determined that the war would be won or lost in South Vietnam, where auxiliary air power supported the ground struggle waged by American and South Vietnamese troops. While the US Air Force and the US Navy fought two separate and often unrelated air wars against North Vietnam, in the South no fewer than six isolated air wars, with disparate arrays of air power, transpired simultaneously. Air force fighters such as F-4s, F-105s, and F-100s, based in South Vietnam and Thailand and directed by 7th Air Force Headquarters in Saigon,Footnote ²⁹ formed a large part of that combined effort. Yet fighters were not the only US Air Force contribution to the Southern ground battle. Beginning in June 1965, Strategic Air Command’s B-52s began bombing suspected enemy positions in South Vietnam in what became a massive operation known as Arc Light. That effort entailed bombers flying 12- to 14-hour round-trip missions from Andersen Air Base, Guam, as well as missions starting in 1967 from U-Tapao Air Base, Thailand, and, for a brief period beginning in January 1968, Kadena Air Base, Okinawa. All told, the giant bombers flew 126,615 Arc Light sorties and were responsible for dropping most of the 4 million tons of bombs dropped on the South, the majority of which fell in 30-ton increments per bomber.Footnote ³⁰ Navy fighters, consisting largely of F-4s, A-4s, and A-6s, bombed targets in South Vietnam as well, flying from carriers positioned at “Dixie” station in the South China Sea in contrast to the more familiar “Yankee” station in the Tonkin Gulf used for attacking North Vietnam.

Naval air often supported US Marine operations in the I Corps section of northern South Vietnam, but the marines also had their own air component. Flying F-4s, A-4s, A-6s, A-1 Skyraiders, and numerous helicopters, the marines supported their ground units from bases throughout the I Corps area, especially Đà Nẵng. By far the largest “air force” in the Vietnam War belonged to the US Army, which sent almost 12,000 helicopters to the conflict. Army “choppers,” ranging from the workhorse Chinook to the ubiquitous Bell UH-1, or “Huey,” dotted the South Vietnamese skies, though flying in that force was not the safest of pursuits – enemy forces shot down 4,842 helicopters.Footnote ³¹ Although the army relied on its helicopter force for delivering men, materiel, and firepower throughout the South, the air force provided the major airlift support in South Vietnam with its fleet of turbo-prop transport aircraft – the C-123 Provider, C-130 Hercules, and C-7A Caribou, from Pacific Air Forces (PACAF)Footnote ³² – and two jet transports – the C-141 Starlifter and giant C-5 Galaxy that were part of Military Airlift Command. Last and, in many respects, least in terms of air forces operating in the South was the South Vietnamese Air Force (VNAF). Created in the image of the US Air Force, the VNAF contained A-1, A-37, and, later in the war, F-5 attack aircraft, as well as a smattering of transports and helicopters. It provided close air support to and transport for the South Vietnamese army, but suffered from leadership problems, especially after the flamboyant Air Marshal Nguyễn Cao Kỳ left the VNAF to become prime minister in the summer of 1965.

Whereas the lack of unity of command plagued the bombing of North Vietnam, that same deficiency hampered the various air wars occurring simultaneously over the South. The lack of a single air manager made coordination difficult, even among aircraft flying from the same service. Strategic Air Command never yielded complete control of its B-52s to commanders in Vietnam because the aircraft’s primary mission remained preparation for possible nuclear war; engineers had refurbished the behemoths to carry conventional ordnance instead of nuclear weapons, but the bombers still retained their nuclear capability. Thus, air crews rotated to Southeast Asia in 179-day increments on temporary duty, and then returned to stateside assignments for extended periods to serve on nuclear alert. Initially, Johnson directed B-52 raids in the South through SAC, but in August 1965 he transferred that decision-making power to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After complaints from 7th Air Force about the long-distance control, in April 1966 the Joint Chiefs transferred B-52 targeting approval for raids in South Vietnam to Admiral Sharp in Honolulu, and in November 1966 Sharp gave US Army general William C. Westmoreland, the commander of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), in Saigon, the authority to approve all Arc Light targets, though Westmoreland still had to coordinate with SAC in directing the aerial assault against southern targets.Footnote ³³

Westmoreland refused to yield control of B-52s to air force general William W. Momyer, the 7th Air Force commander, revealing Westmoreland’s view of the B-52 as flying artillery that should be controlled by an army commander. In contrast, Momyer wanted to coordinate the effort of his fighters with the B-52s and guarantee that the bombers would attack only defined targets of men and supplies.Footnote ³⁴ His pleas fell on deaf ears. Westmoreland’s MACV staff, predominantly comprising army officers focused on fighting the ground war, not only made B-52 targeting decisions but also selected the preponderance of Southern targets for 7th Air Force fighters as well by virtue of directing MACV’s intelligence branch. As a result, the air interdiction that occurred in South Vietnam was haphazard and piecemeal.

Figure 2.2 The B-52 “Stratofortress” could carry up to 30 tons of conventional bombs on missions in Southeast Asia.

Source: National Museum of the United States Air Force. The appearance of US Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.

The air force’s struggle with the army for control of the B-52s typified the attitude of many air leaders with regard to how to conduct the air war in the South. Air force chief of staff McConnell, who pressed vigorously for three weeks of “hard knock” bombing to initiate Rolling Thunder, tried equally hard to obtain an aerial victory in the South. McConnell stated in August 1965 that ground forces alone could not defeat the NLF and that only air power could defeat the enemy. The general meant air power provided by the United States Air Force, however. When the army prepared to launch its first airmobile offensive into the Ia Đrӑng Valley in November 1965 with the 1st Air Cavalry Division’s 434 helicopters, McConnell ordered air force commanders in Hawaii and Saigon to keep detailed statistics on every phase of the operation to show that the army was incapable of conducting such an offensive without support from air force fixed-wing aircraft. Many air force commanders were also hesitant to condone transformation of the old C-47 transport into the AC-47 gunship, because they believed that endorsement of the concept would legitimize the army’s use of armed transport helicopters, which would in turn partly eliminate the army’s need for air force air support. McConnell disapproved of using the B-52s in the South because suitable targets were scarce, and Westmoreland was reluctant to send ground troops into the bombed areas to determine the exact amount of damage inflicted. Yet, in a twisted bit of parochial logic, in September 1965 McConnell endorsed continued B-52 bombing in South Vietnam “since the Air Force had pushed for the use of air power to prevent Westmoreland from trying to fight the war solely with ground troops and helicopters.”Footnote ³⁵

Bombing in the South with B-52s yielded mixed results. The initial Arc Light missions produced little damage, as the bombs missed NLF areas, or the enemy, possibly tipped off by agents who had infiltrated the South Vietnamese military, fled before the bombers arrived.Footnote ³⁶ On the other hand, if intelligence could pinpoint enemy forces, as occurred during the 1965 battle of the Ia Đrӑng and the 1968 siege of the marine outpost at Khe Sanh, then the effects could be devastating. On November 14, 1965, 18 rapidly dispatched B-52s dropped 344 tons of bombs on two North Vietnamese regiments to wreck their counterattack against the 1st Air Cavalry Division at the Ia Đrӑng.Footnote ³⁷ During the 77-day siege of Khe Sanh, from January 15 to March 31, 1968, B-52s flew 2,548 sorties and dropped 59,542 tons of bombs, and, along with air force, navy, and marine fighters and marine artillery, completely destroyed two attacking North Vietnamese divisions.Footnote ³⁸ Trương Như Tảng, the NLF minister of justice who survived several B-52 attacks, described a raid as “an experience of undiluted psychological terror.” He remembered: “The first few times I experienced a B-52 attack it seemed, as I strained to press myself into the bunker floor, that I had been caught in the Apocalypse. One lost control of bodily functions as the mind screamed incomprehensible orders to get out.” Trương Như Tảng later noted that he survived the attacks because of the advance warning provided by Soviet intelligence trawlers that observed B-52 takeoffs from Guam and relayed the information to the North Vietnamese and the NLF; flights from Thailand were similarly monitored.Footnote ³⁹ Such warnings were of limited value, though, if the forces the United States was fighting chose to wage open warfare, as was the case at the Ia Đrӑng and Khe Sanh. Whenever the North Vietnamese or NLF chose to mass and fight a “conventional” war of movement in such remote areas, they paid the price to American air power. Until the 1968 Tet Offensive, they rarely chose to do so.

The enemy’s restrained combat during the Johnson presidency made it difficult for air and ground commanders alike to determine air power’s impact on the ground battle. “Unfortunately, for the planners at the time and for subsequent researchers, reliable quantitative indications of results were unobtainable,” observed air force historian John Schlight. “For one thing, the Air Force had no clear-cut objective of its own to measure results in South Vietnam.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Most air force commanders preferred to use their weaponry in independent operations, like interdiction, that offered the prospect of large-scale returns, rather than for auxiliary missions, like close air support, that provided a limited amount of assistance to a single ground unit. To gauge bombing success in the South, Admiral Sharp relied on the arcane sortie-count methodology used to evaluate Rolling Thunder. In April 1966 he told assembled commanders in Honolulu that he aimed to complete the planned sortie totals for the year despite a shortage in conventional ordnance that would force aircraft to fly with less-than-full bomb loads.Footnote ⁴¹

Westmoreland further clouded the impact of air force attacks by telling air commanders to label all air strikes in the South as close air support missions. His directive displayed his unwavering conviction that the entire country of South Vietnam was simply one large battlefield, and that all air power supported his massive ground campaign on it. Nonetheless, the US Air Force continued to track sorties used to assist troops actually engaged in combat with enemy forces, and found that only 3 percent of all sorties flown in South Vietnam through the end of 1966 went to that end. In addition, the US Army requested close air support for only one out of every ten engagements with the enemy. A key reason for the dearth of requests was that half of all ground battles in the South lasted less than twenty minutes, which was too short a span to call upon air power for assistance.Footnote ⁴²

The limited amount of ground combat requiring close air support, along with the enemy’s propensity to avoid fighting, led to the development of “free fire zones” in South Vietnam. These areas were “known enemy strongholds … virtually uninhabited by noncombatants” where any identified activity was presumed to stem from enemy forces and was thus susceptible to immediate air or artillery strikes.Footnote ⁴³ In many cases, American or South Vietnamese troops had removed South Vietnamese peasants from the area, resulting in the conviction that any troops now appearing in the zone would be NLF. Although the notion seemed to guarantee solid results for air power, in actuality it frequently proved disastrous to the oft-repeated goal of winning the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese peasantry. Religious beliefs compelled many villagers to return to ancestral homes and graves that they had been forced to leave, and aerial reconnaissance sometimes mistakenly identified their return as the arrival of enemy soldiers. Such instances had disastrous consequences, and virtually guaranteed that any survivors who might have been apathetic about the war before the attack would now side with the enemy.

Unlike during Rolling Thunder, President Johnson and his political advisors placed few restrictions on the air wars in the South. Johnson deemed that the Chinese or Soviets would raise little outcry over air raids on South Vietnamese territory, and that raids condoned by Southern leaders would not attract the attention of the world press. Until the 1968 siege of Khe Sanh, air force aircraft based in Thailand could not attack targets in South Vietnam without first landing in the South and then flying from there.Footnote ⁴⁴ Air commanders also had to receive permission from South Vietnamese province chiefs, who were responsible for the welfare of everyone living in their province, before launching air strikes.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet, as was the case with free fire zones, obtaining clearance to attack did not guarantee that innocent civilians would not be injured or killed. A favorite technique of NLF units was to fire one or two shots at an American patrol from a South Vietnamese village and then quickly leave the area. The patrol leader might respond by requesting air support and, if the local province chief approved the request, the destruction of an innocent hamlet could result.

In short, applying air power to the struggle in South Vietnam was an enormously difficult proposition. The war was not just a guerrilla conflict, but a civil war, and the key to victory was controlling passion rather than position. The location of frontlines or the amount of men and equipment lost had meaning only in terms of how those variables affected the remainder of those willing to fight, and the air force attempted to eliminate that desire from the enemy through Rolling Thunder. Concurrently, air commanders faced the challenge of how best to provide the army and marines with auxiliary doses of air power. To many ground commanders, the answer was simply to provide more firepower sooner. The disparate air forces that flew over South Vietnam could usually reply with large amounts of ordnance, although not always as rapidly as ground commanders would have liked. In a war for the control of hearts and minds, however, more bombs was not necessarily the right answer.

Airlift, a nonlethal form of air power, offered not only the potential to support combat units with men and equipment – as the C-130s, C-123s, and C-7s did for the beleaguered marines at Khe Sanh – but also to carry government officials, food, clothing, and building materials to villages throughout South Vietnam. Such “mercy missions” were in fact conducted, but the “pacification” effort in the South never received the emphasis of the combat airlifts. Moreover, airlift was vulnerable to ground fire, and it was transitory. Johnson’s goal of a stable, independent, noncommunist South Vietnam could be achieved only through a long-term presence on the ground. Accomplishing his war aim would have required a massive outlay of manpower, as well as a fundamental change of mindset about how to use those men. After three years of warfare and the shock of the Tet Offensive, neither the president nor the American public was willing to up the ante, and the war aim changed.

Conclusion

In the final analysis, several legacies emerged from air power’s ordeal in Vietnam. The dismal lack of unity of command displayed there spurred development of the Joint Forces Air Component Commander (JFACC) concept, in which a single air commander directs the flying activities of multiple services to achieve objectives sought by the Joint Force Commander (JFC). The American military first applied the JFACC notion on a large scale in combat against Iraq in 1991, and the success of the concept in Operation Desert Storm cemented its use as a command element since that conflict. In terms of air force doctrine, the perceived success of Linebacker II, Richard Nixon’s December 1972 bombing campaign against Northern targets, in compelling the North Vietnamese to negotiate reinforced the belief that air power could achieve political goals cheaply and efficiently. The 1984 edition of the air force’s Basic Doctrine Manual, the first published after the Vietnam War, noted that, “unless offensive action is initiated, military victory is seldom possible … Aerospace forces possess a capability to seize the offensive and can be employed rapidly and directly against enemy targets. Aerospace forces have the power to penetrate to the heart of an enemy’s strength without first defeating defending forces in detail.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The manual further encouraged air commanders to conduct strategic attacks against “heartland targets” that would “produce benefits beyond the proportion of effort expended and costs involved,” but cautioned that such attacks could “be limited by overriding political concerns, the intensity of enemy defenses, or more pressing needs on the battlefield.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The impact of such “overriding political concerns” on the application of air power is a key legacy of the air wars in Vietnam. To commanders who had fought as junior officers in World War II, where virtually no political constraints limited the application of military force, the tight controls that Johnson placed on bombing North Vietnam chafed those charged with wielding the air weapon. Navy admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, who directed Rolling Thunder as the commander of Pacific Command, wrote in the preface of his 1977 memoirs (titled Strategy for Defeat): “Our air power did not fail us; it was the decision makers. And if I am unsurprisingly critical of those decision makers, I offer no apology. My conscience and my professional record both stand clear. Just as I believe unequivocally that the civilian authority is supreme under our Constitution, so I hold it reasonable that, once committed, the political leadership should seek and, in the main, heed the advice of military professionals in the conduct of military operations.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Many American airmen from the war likely agreed with Sharp’s critique.

Rolling Thunder highlighted how political constraints could limit an air campaign. Indeed, in the American air offensives waged since Vietnam – to include the use of drones against “high-value” terrorist targets – such constraints have continued to restrict the use of military force. Projecting a sound image while applying air power was difficult enough for American leaders in Vietnam; today’s leaders must contend with 24/7 news coverage as well as social media accounts that enable virtually anyone to “spin” a story and reach a large audience. In the limited wars that the nation will fight, such constraints will always be present and will produce rules of engagement that limit air power. “War is always going to have restrictions – it’s never going to be LeMay saying ‘Just bomb them,’” stated retired air force general Richard Myers, Vietnam veteran and former air force chairman of the Joint Chiefs.Footnote ⁴⁹ Against insurgent enemies, political controls may well undermine the political objectives sought. When that occurs, kinetic air power’s ability to yield success will be uncertain at best.

Yet because air power, as a subset of war, is not only a political instrument, but also one that is applied by humans, it will be subject to whims and frailties of the political leader who chooses to rely on it. Lyndon Johnson was a master politician when it came to accomplishing his domestic agenda; foreign affairs plagued him incessantly while in office, with Vietnam finally undercutting his cherished Great Society. In contrast, Richard Nixon saw himself as a Patton-like figure who could swiftly and efficiently brandish military force to achieve his aims. He felt little compunction in berating his air commanders, or – in the case of 7th Air Force commander General John Lavelle in 1972 – casting one adrift when he thought that doing so might save him embarrassment. Nixon believed that air power gave him the ideal military tool for threatening an opponent or persuading an ally, and that perspective has gained traction in the White House since he left it. The past five occupants of the Oval Office have all relied heavily on air power in the conflicts they fought. The political goals pursued – “stability,” “security,” and, on occasion, “democracy” – have proven difficult to achieve with any military force, particularly with air power. Its siren song is an enticing one, however, as Johns Hopkins professor Eliot Cohen has astutely observed: “Air power is an unusually seductive form of military strength, in part because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment.”Footnote ⁵⁰ That promise is a dangerous one, as General Myers warns: “The last thing that we want is for the political leadership to think war is too easy, especially in terms of casualties. It’s awful; it’s horrible, but sometimes it’s necessary. [The decision for war] needs to be taken with thoughtful solemnness – with the realization that innocent people, along with combatants, will get hurt.”Footnote ⁵¹ Were he alive today, the Prussian military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz would doubtless nod at General Myers’s observation.

Clausewitz, of course, never saw an airplane, though if he had his air power notions would likely have been unsurprising. Had he examined the United States’ air wars in Vietnam, he would certainly have commented about the difficulty of achieving political objectives in a limited war. In all probability, he would have looked at Johnson’s Tuesday lunch targeting process, the Route Package system dividing North Vietnamese airspace, the creation of free fire zones in the South, Nixon’s condemnation of his air commanders and dismissal of General Lavelle, the repetitive B-52 routing for Linebacker II, and any number of other elements, and stated simply, “Friction rules.” “Everything in strategy is very simple,” Clausewitz wrote, “but that does not mean that everything is very easy.”Footnote ⁵² Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the air wars in Vietnam is the one that applies to any military strategy – uncertainty, chance, danger, and stress will be certain to limit it.

Figure 2.3 General John D. Lavelle was accused of authorizing illegal bombing raids against North Vietnamese targets and was forced into retirement in 1972.

Source: Associated Press/Alamy Stock Photo.

Most of the literature on the Vietnam War deals with decision-making in Washington, DC, Hanoi, or Saigon. This “top-down” approach often ignores what happened in the rice paddies and jungles of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, even though films of the war have dealt with the violence associated with combat. Thus, members of the general public who have watched a television series on Vietnam, or have gone to the cinema to watch Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Hamburger Hill, or We Were Soldiers, have been exposed more to soldiers’ experiences than have members of the academic community. This chapter will address the combat soldiers’ and marines’ experiences in the war, starting from selection and training, and turning to deployment and then returning home. Because most of the chapters in this volume deal with nonsoldier activities, this chapter will often use colloquial phrases and words which depict soldiers’ combat experiences.

For purposes of full disclosure, the author is a combat veteran, having served as an infantry advisor to the Jarai, Behnar, and Radai tribes in the Central Highlands in 1970 and 1971, most of whom served in Regional Forces/Popular Forces (RF/PF) or People’s Self Defense Forces (PSDF). This chapter, however, is not based primarily on my experiences in the war, but rather on my scholarship of the Vietnam War. My research is based principally on soldier behavior and how Americans fought in such a controversial war.

Those Who Served

Most of the soldiers who served in Vietnam from 1956 to 1965 were career officers and senior noncommissioned officers who performed duties as advisors to the Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). These men were usually veterans of World War II or the Korean War, and were sent to Southeast Asia to assist in logistical support as the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) attempted to deal with the insurgency by the National Liberation Front (NLF). When President Lyndon Johnson decided to send ground troops to Vietnam in March 1965, a different kind of soldier would be required, since a much greater number of soldiers and marines would be needed. The buildup meant hundreds of thousands of low-ranking men would need to be called up.

Conscription – “the draft” – had been in place since the start of the Cold War, but large numbers of troops had not been necessary for the perceived communist threat around the world. Vietnam would require the United States to recruit and/or force young men to go to war, so efforts were made to promote serving in the Vietnam War as fulfilling one’s patriotic duty, just like their dads and uncles had volunteered to serve in World War II. This effort was effective to some degree in small towns, and many young men volunteered to join their preferred military branch. Statistics indicate that 70 percent of the soldiers and marines who served were volunteers, with only 30 percent having been drafted. However, many of those who volunteered did so in order to choose their military occupational specialty (MOS), thus avoiding being forced into the infantry. Draftees served two years, and volunteering added a third year to one’s tour of duty. However, men believed that they could avoid combat even if ordered to go to Vietnam by choosing to become a clerk, cook, mechanic, or some other noncombat MOS, as only approximately 20 percent of the men who served in Vietnam were assigned to a combat arm. During the Vietnam War, the combat arms were Infantry, Artillery, Armor, and Combat Engineering.

Men could avoid being drafted in the early days of the war by being a student and having an approved college degree plan, maintaining a 2.0 grade point average (GPA), and notifying their local draft board that they were meeting all of their student requirements. This enabled them to be granted a “2-S” deferment. They could also take their military physical examination at an armed forces examining and entrance station (AFEES), and if they did not pass, they would be granted a “4-F” deferment or medical disqualification. In some cases, men were granted this deferment by supplying a letter from their own doctor. If a college student wanted to become an officer, he could do so by enrolling in the College Option Program which enabled him to delay entry until he completed his degree requirements. As the war progressed, students were required to take a Selective Service College Qualification Test if they wanted to attend graduate school, thus further delaying their entry into military service.

Whether draftees or volunteers, these recruits would report to AFEES after qualification, be sworn into the military, and begin a journey that would take them to a basic combat training (BCT) facility such as Fort Dix, New Jersey, Fort Knox, Kentucky, Fort Ord, California, or Fort Benning, Georgia. There they would undergo training in military procedures, first aid, drill and ceremony, and weaponry. A major part of the training was physical fitness, which was designed to prepare soldiers for the stress of jungle warfare: those underweight were “beefed up” and those overweight were “slimmed down.” This training took eight weeks.

Upon completion of BCT, soldiers were sent to advanced individual training (AIT) at sites that were determined by one’s MOS. For those assigned to the infantry, they were sent to Fort Lewis, Washington, or Fort Polk, Louisiana. AIT was intensive both physically and mentally: this eight-week course was designed to prepare soldiers for combat in the jungles of Vietnam. They were introduced to the M-16A1 rifle and the M-60 machine gun and taught how to fire and maneuver in squad formations. At the end of the formal training they were sent to “Tigerland,” where they were trained in escape and evasion, prisoner-of-war experiences, and survival techniques. This week-long course was the final preparation for Vietnam. After their personal situations were taken care of, soldiers were shipped off to Vietnam by either plane or ship. Thus, the typical man had been a soldier for only four months when he was sent to the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam. This training program was much more accelerated than the training regimen in World War II.

Once “in country,” soldiers were sent to a “repo-depot” where they would await their assignment to a unit. These facilities at Long Bình, Cam Ranh Bay, and Đà Nẵng were where the fate of thousands of soldiers would be decided by noncombat clerks.Footnote ¹ These men could look at the bulletin boards where requests were being made by unit commanders for more troops, or they could read the daily edition of Stars and Stripes to see where big battles had taken place which resulted in high American casualties. While all MOSs were assigned to units at “repo-depots” it was those with 11B (infantrymen) and 11C (mortar-qualified) that were most concerned about exactly where in-country and to which unit they would be assigned. And the rumor mill was rampant in “repo-depots” as all of these “FNGs” (a slang term meaning “fucking new guys”) were scared to death about going to units where they were replacing dead men. “And as you move mindlessly through the replacement system, the whim of an unseen clerk sends you to a unit in a quiet sector – or to a unit that will take its men like lambs to the slaughter,” wrote James McDonough in his memoir, Platoon Leader: A Front-Line Personal Report of Vietnam Battle Action.Footnote ²

There is a saying among Vietnam veterans that your experience varied by where you were, when you were there, and what you did while there. This “where, when, what” criterion was first established at the “repo-depot.” Some soldiers tried to negotiate their way to a better, safer situation by letting the administrative personnel know about their typing ability, their skills as a bartender that could be used at a division base camp officers’ club, or their aptitude as a mechanic. “Anything but infantry” was the feeling of most of these scared soldiers.

Bell UH-1 (“Huey”) helicopters or C-130 Hercules transport planes would pick up the FNGs and transport them to their units where they would be assigned to a squad in a platoon of a company. Most units had a one-week training program that allowed the men to “zero in” their M-16A1 rifle, practice throwing hand grenades, and get used to carrying a rucksack loaded with 75 pounds of C-rations, claymore mines, and peripheral equipment. Mostly, the time spent with their new unit was important because they had to prove themselves to the men who had already been in combat for many months. This would not happen in training: it would have to be in battle.

There were some instances where units conducted “live fire” training by taking new soldiers on patrols that were considered “safe” but where it was possible that they would encounter People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) troops. The idea behind such training was that soldiers needed to experience killing in the most controlled situation possible before having to see their buddies being killed or wounded. Ambush patrols were particularly suited for this, as the enemy would be surprised and would not be in a position to offer much resistance.

In the Field

A typical day for an infantry soldier consisted of leaving a base camp at dawn for a routine patrol into the jungle or across rice paddies. If the area of operation (AO) was some distance from the base camp, transport helicopters would pick up squads of men and fly them to designated locations where they would deplane and begin patrolling. The typical operation was designated “search and destroy” and targeted villages where there was suspected enemy activity. Usually preplanned artillery fire would precede the insertion of troops. This “prepping the battlefield” with “harassment and interdiction” fire (H&I) was designed to eliminate any large, dug-in enemy troops that might interfere with the planned operation. Soldiers would then begin their patrol targeting a suspected NLF stronghold in a village or a bunker complex that had been spotted through aerial reconnaissance or through intelligence gained from captured enemy documents.

As soldiers proceeded on patrol, they were armed with M-16A1 rifles, which was unique to the Vietnam War. Firing a 5.56mm round (.223 caliber), the weapon was light and had very little recoil. It was designed for jungle warfare, and because of the light weight of the ammunition soldiers were able to carry a large quantity. It was fed through a magazine which held twenty rounds, but eighteen was the preferred capacity to avoid jamming. The weapon was accurate, but the bullets could easily be deflected by vines in the jungle. And the weapon tended to jam if not continuously and properly kept clean and lubricated. In the early days of war, soldiers asked parents to send WD-40, which performed better in the humidity of Vietnam than the government-issued Lubricant, Small Arms (LSA).

For the American soldiers, the M-16A1 was matched against the AK-47 of the PAVN and NLF. That weapon fired a 7.62mm round (.30 caliber) and was not as prone to malfunction in the humidity and heat of Vietnam. It was also heavier than the M-16A1, yet was carried by Vietnamese soldiers who tended to be much smaller than their American enemy. This controversy over which weapon was more suited to the jungle environment continued for the entire duration of the war, with many American soldiers deciding to use an AK-47 if they could find one after a battle.

There were also other weapons issues that leaders had to deal with in squad- or platoon-size operations, such as the need to assign good teams to crew served weapons, such as mortar or machine gun teams. The M-60 machine gun required a gunner and several ammo bearers who would assist the gunner in feeding the belt containing bullets into the weapon. Usually the lowest-ranking or newest soldiers assisted the gunner, but they also had to be ready to take over the gun if the enemy was successful in wounding the main gunner, which was often the case. In units where there was racial tension, platoon leaders had to be sensitive to situations where the crew was not amenable to strong teamwork, which was essential in combat situations. Not being ready to pick up the “pig” (M-60) would endanger the lives of all the men in the unit. “The M-60 is absolutely a superb infantry weapon, that thing will be around for 50 more years. There was almost nothing that could be done to improve it. I mean, it’ll fire when it’s full of wet concrete, you almost can’t break it,” said Vietnam veteran Chad Spawr.Footnote ³

Another weapons issue in combat was the assignment of “grenadier,” who would carry the M-79 grenade launcher. This weapon was a single-shot, short breech-loaded gun that fired a 40mm high explosive grenade that could be used against entrenched enemy soldiers. Some have used the phrase “organic platoon artillery,” meaning that the M-79 allowed small units to place indirect fire on the enemy, which could be useful in either offensive or defensive situations. The problem in assigning the weapon to a platoon member was that many soldiers refused to carry a weapon that took you out of the fight momentarily (until you could reload). Furthermore, since the one round that the grenadier fired was a “high explosive” round, it was not very effective in close-range or ambush situations. Later in the war, a “flechette” round was introduced, which allowed the grenadier to fire at an enemy soldier at close range and to incapacitate him with small razor blade–type particles. But the grenadier still had to carry another weapon, such as a .45 caliber pistol, which itself was difficult to use in situations other than extreme close range.

Also attached to each soldier’s rucksack was an M-72 light anti-tank weapon (LAW) which was capable of busting open a bunker. It had a disposable launcher and replaced the World War II bazooka. This weapon was essential to effective search-and-destroy operations, but it was also dangerous if not handled carefully. “This particular fellow had been carrying this LAW sort of strapped over his shoulder. When he stepped on the mine, the mine engaged the LAW and the rocket fired and blew off part of his head. He was killed, obviously,” said Vietnam veteran Paul Meringolo.Footnote ⁴

Units patrolled along jungle trails, usually avoiding established areas of thoroughfare so as not to expose themselves to enemy booby traps or land mines, which were particularly common in areas where the enemy controlled local villages and hamlets. Often, local civilians were used to place these mines in areas Americans were expected to traverse. The two most frequently encountered and particularly injurious were the “toe-popper” and “Bouncing Betty” mines. Neither was designed to kill, but instead were used to maim – the former to blow half of the soldier’s foot off, and the latter targeting the reproductive parts of a soldier’s body. “Though small in explosive ordnance, the most feared of all booby traps was the Bouncing Betty. ‘I think it was a Bouncing Betty they used to call it, but which was like a tomato can and had a thousand ball bearings in it.’ It had a three-pronged firing device that could be seen by an alert point man when rains had washed away the covering dirt. Once the device was stepped on, ‘The unlucky soldier will hear a muffled explosion; that’s the initial charge sending the mine on its one yard leap into the sky. The fellow takes another step and begins the next and his backside is bleeding and he’s dead. We call it ‘ol step and a half,’” said Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien in his autobiography If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home.Footnote ⁵ Such a wound would likely kill a soldier, but more dreaded than death was Betty’s shrapnel hitting the groin area. “A wound to the genitals was the most feared injury in this war, as in any other conflict. A man’s first question to the medic was not ‘Am I going to make it?’ but rather ‘Do I still have my balls?’” said Vietnam veteran Michael Lee Lanning in his memoir, The Only War We Had: A Platoon Leader’s Journal of Vietnam.Footnote ⁶ The fear of encountering one of these weapons caused many American soldiers to tread carefully on patrol, and many platoon leaders refused to patrol along established routes, choosing instead to hack their way through the jungle or elephant grass using machetes. The fear of death or being severely wounded permeated all soldiers: “It was actually just like to blow your foot off. The concussion would just blow parts … blow toes off or mess up a foot or something. The chances of it killing you weren’t that good unless you fell face down on it or something. But, it would just disable you because one of the tactics later on that was very helpful and worked very well for the North Vietnamese especially was rather than trying to kill guys, they were trying to wound them because then you take at least three people out because you take the wounded plus the other two that are trying to come get him. Or you take a whole bunch of people and when they try to come get them, you just pick them off as they try to come rescue the guy,” said Vietnam veteran James O’Kelley.Footnote ⁷

After a day of patrolling, units were required to establish defensive night positions by setting up a cordon around a “command post” and sending out soldiers to listening posts where they could warn the main unit of any enemy activity. The soldiers would dig foxholes to protect themselves from enemy mortars and rockets, and would place M18A1 Claymore mines around the perimeter, which could be either command-detonated by individual soldiers or attached to trip wires which were set off by unsuspecting enemy soldiers. Once this happened, a firefight would ensue, and the calm night would be interrupted by massive gunfire from both sides. Often, in the limited visibility of the darkness, confusion would cause mistakes to be made, which could result in friendly fire wounding American soldiers. Calls for medevac helicopters would be made by platoon leaders, but sometimes help would not arrive until morning and first light. The wounded would be taken to the nearest evacuation hospitals for immediate surgery, then flown to Japan or back to the United States, depending on the severity of the wounds. If mortally wounded, the bodies would be handled by graves registration personnel who would perform identification and hygiene procedures before sending the bodies to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware in the United States.

These daily search-and-destroy operations took a heavy toll on the psyche of soldiers. The military had established “free fire” zones to help rid the jungle of villages that were sympathetic to the communist cause, whether in support of local NLF units or PAVN regular regiments. And with the American goal in a war of attrition being the largest “body count” possible, soldiers were expected to assault villages that had been identified as enemy territory. “A recon patrol spotted a thatched hut and a garden plot with a dozen banana trees. The company got on line, and we cautiously approached the humble rotting abode. As we got close, a feeble old man was spotted trying to escape up a knoll beyond his house. Dressed in nothing but a loin cloth, he pawed at the earth, making little headway. Several soldiers retrieved the man. He couldn’t have hurt anyone. Skin hung from his bones, he weighed maybe sixty or seventy pounds. This was our enemy? The man was put on a bird bound for Pleiku, where he would receive medical attention. Rules were rules. We burnt his home, destroyed his garden. An hour or so later, word came that the Montagnard had died. His heart must have failed under all the stress,” said Vietnam veteran Tom Lacombe in his memoir, Light Ruck: Vietnam, 1969.Footnote ⁸

Creating even more discord for American soldiers was the military’s incentivizing body count. Units that killed more enemy than their fellow units might be given a three-day pass to China Beach in Đà Nẵng or more stand-down time. This led to body count inflation, meaning that blood trails or observing small body parts as enemy soldiers retreated would be counted as killed in action (KIA). As these casualty reports were transmitted through channels, each bureau tended to inflate the result to enhance their reputation for successful operations.

Figure 3.1 US troops stationed at the Camp Eagle Army Base, southeast of Huế, enjoy a Christmas show (December 24, 1971).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

The Life of a Soldier

While being in the field was hard, dangerous, and dirty, there were no comforts that could help the soldier deal with death and destruction except one: mail. No matter where his unit was operating, or how forcefully the enemy was advancing on his position, the US Army and Marines made sure that their men received the letters from home. Huey helicopters flew mail runs to the field every day, even when flying into hostile territory endangering the lives of pilots. But mail delivery was almost as critical as ammunition, water, and food. Being connected to home, and to mom, sister, wife, or girlfriend, was an absolute imperative to maintaining troop morale.

In the average unit, soldiers remained in the field for two weeks before returning to a more comfortable base camp area where they could shower, draw new clothes, and get some much-needed rest. These base camps were where the majority of American troops spent most of their tours of duty, having been assigned noncombat MOSs. This was also the location of the most turmoil within units, since the common element of unit cohesion to stay alive did not exist in the “rear.” Combat soldiers even had a term for these rear-echelon personnel. They were known as REMFs (rear-echelon mother fuckers). Being in the jungle on operations required everyone to be as alert as possible at all times; thus, officers and noncommissioned officers strictly enforced the no-drinking and no-drugs policy when in combat. But in the rear, without the constant threat of enemy contact existing, soldiers often drank alcohol in excessive quantities or used drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, all of which were readily available through local merchants. The use of both alcohol and drugs, mostly with the choice being generational, was rampant in the rear, which caused much of the racial and rank turmoil.

There was an actual rear-echelon culture that existed in the large base camps, and it was difficult for combat soldiers to fit in with those who lived in relative comfort compared to living in foxholes. Jealousy certainly existed for those who had to return to the field after a few days of rest. And it was in the rear that the music of Motown conflicted with the music of the US South or country-and-western music. Since the blaring sounds of the regional favorites could be heard broadcast over speakers purchased through the government PACEX catalogues and played over reel-to-reel, cassette, or eight-track equipment, fights often occurred between those who had just come in from the “boonies” and those who were permanent REMFs. And with killing being the main part of the infantryman’s culture, it was difficult to turn off the attitude from the previous day’s operation.

The extent to which alcohol and drugs affected the violence that erupted in the rear is still debated by historians. With the 1960s drug culture having impacted all who entered the service, each soldier was aware of what drugs could do for him in terms of escape from the realities of combat. As a “head,” a soldier was part of a group that experienced drugs in the rear, but infrequently in the field where being high could put the unit’s security in extreme jeopardy. But when a soldier returned to base camp, he was able to release himself to the joys of his preferred drug. “Well, there was drug and alcohol use. I think that not in the field. On the firebase it existed and in the rear areas it existed. It kind of existed within groups … In the field, if there was somebody out in the field and they were using drugs or alcohol in the field, they’d probably be dealt with … They’d say, ‘You need to get this guy out of here because he’s dangerous.’ Firebases were a little bit more relaxed than that, and the rear area was more relaxed than that but I never used any drugs. I will have to admit to being over the line on alcohol a few times but that was always in the rear area,” said Vietnam veteran Gary Noller.Footnote ⁹

Then there were the “juicers,” who drank heavily of beer and whiskey. Many of the older men were alcoholics who were able to purchase a quart of Jack Daniels for $1.75 and a case of beer for $2.00. Both of these beverages were familiar, having been consumed by many stateside before being deployed to Vietnam. “It’s like you could drink until you passed out. I never passed out but I came pretty close … You could go to the EM Club and buy a shot of good whiskey, whatever the best whiskey was that they had, for a quarter. You could buy a triple, three shots in the same glass, for seventy-five cents and that’s going to give you pure whiskey, whatever you’re drinking. You could go to the main PX in Chu Lai and buy a fifth of whiskey or a quart of whiskey probably for a dollar and a half, a dollar seventy-five. So alcohol was cheap,” explained Noller.Footnote ¹⁰ In the view of platoon leaders and company commanders, both drugs and alcohol were detrimental to the physical and mental health of the soldier, and could affect the mission. The “juicers” could be hungover if they drank too much before an operation, and the “heads” could still feel the effect of a night’s drug party. Adding to the problem was how both groups dealt with each other and with generational and racial confrontations.

“Fragging” is a term that is usually associated only with Vietnam, but it has been part of combat culture throughout history. The term comes from enlisted soldiers using a fragmentation grenade to murder a higher-ranking noncommissioned or commissioned officer. The extent to which such events occurred is the subject of many books and articles, but it happened frequently, particularly in base camps. Between 1969 and 1972, there were 800 recorded incidents, with a peak of 1.8 assaults per 1,000 servicemen in Vietnam.Footnote ¹¹ Soldiers returning from extensive time on operations did not tolerate “chickenshit” orders from people who did not have to go into the field after a few days of standing down. Thus rolling a grenade under the cot of an unsuspecting higher-ranking soldier left no fingerprints on the perpetrator but would either kill or wound the victim and send a strong message to other leaders.

Most of these fragging incidents were triggered by orders involving work details that would not seem particularly onerous, such as cleaning up living quarters, burning latrine waste, or motor pool duty. Often the orders involved personal hygiene or appearance, such as shaving improperly or letting hair grow beyond the length that the army or marines authorized. And to a soldier who had just returned from two weeks in the “bush,” being told to get a haircut or to shave more frequently seemed ridiculous. If repeated often by the same leader, and during enemy stand-down period, a soldier’s patience might reach boiling point and ultimately result in a fragging incident. And if a white noncommissioned officer was ordering a Black soldier to cut his hair to a length that was within army regulations, but not considered fashionable by the soldier, then such an order might be deemed onerous by a soldier who had just returned from ambush patrols, assaulting bunkers, sleeping in foxholes, and killing. So fragging became a way to express discontent not only with the war itself, but with those who ordered work details that conflicted with what soldiers believed was their mission.

Most fragging incidents occurred in the base camps and not in the field, even though opportunities always existed during firefights to murder leaders without leaving much evidence. But executing someone who might be required to save a unit by calling in helicopter gunships or an air strike would not be wise under any circumstances. Also, unit cohesion of those who serve in combat together usually would preclude such activities. The most frequent victims were captains and first sergeants since the “chickenshit” details usually came from them. Vietnam veteran James Padgett told of being accused in a fragging incident: “He tried to frag our First Sergeant. He tried to kill him with a frag. He threw it up on top of a hooch [house]. It rolled off and went down and broke and blew up, and they with holded [sic] him for the inquiry and the first shirt [First Sergeant] comes in there and this is before I made corporal, he said, ‘Padgett, are you trying kill my ass?’ I said, ‘No sir.’ He said, ‘I knew that.’ He said, ‘We just got to go through the strokes.’ ‘No sir, but we know who did.’ ‘Get your ass out of here!’”Footnote ¹²

While the term “combat soldiers” as used in this chapter has been defined as those assigned to combat MOSs, any discussion of combat soldiers must include the 11,000 women who volunteered to serve as nurses in Vietnam. Often working for drafted doctors who outranked them – nurses were second lieutenants and doctors were captains, at least when first arriving in country – these women had enlisted to work with wounded American soldiers. Unlike their jobs at hospitals in the United States, they were often given life-and-death responsibilities in Vietnam. While in triage they had to decide who were the walking wounded, who needed immediate attention, and who were expectants (meaning they were expected to die). This triage procedure took place during mass casualty situations which was quite often during big battles, and the nurses had to deal with these decisions so that the doctors could proceed with required surgeries. Because of these responsibilities, many nurses experienced the results of combat on a daily basis, exceeding that of combat medics. Many nurses returned to the United States after the war and gave up their medical careers because the challenges they had in Vietnam could not be replicated in stateside hospitals. And the extent to which many former nurses experienced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which will be discussed later in this chapter, is only now being recognized in veterans’ organizations. Their contribution to the war effort and saving American, ARVN, and even enemy lives is immeasurable.

Mỹ Lai

With all of the challenges associated with combat against a formidable enemy like the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) and the PAVN, American soldiers generally performed their duties according to rules of engagement that were approved at the highest levels of both military and civilian leadership. Yet those rules were broken on March 16, 1968, at Song My village, Mỹ Lai (4) hamlet, when Charlie Company of the 11th Brigade of the 23rd Infantry Division – Americal – murdered between 175 and 400 Vietnamese civilians, mostly women, children, babies, and old men. All of these noncombatants were probably NLF sympathizers, who found themselves in a hamlet that had been targeted by Americal leadership in retaliation for several incidents of land mines and booby traps having killed or wounded American soldiers. This massacre at Mỹ Lai would become known as the worst atrocity of the entire war in Vietnam and arguably the worst in American history.

Were individual soldiers who did most of the killing responsible for this act, or does it fall on those in charge as a failure of leadership? The individual soldiers began the shooting when ordered to do so by the commanding officer of the 1st Platoon of Charlie Company, First Lieutenant William Calley. At his trial in 1971, Lieutenant Calley said he was following the orders of his company commander, Captain Ernest Medina, who in turn said he was following the orders of his battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker, who had named the operation “Task Force Barker.” Thus the soldiers and all of the junior officers claimed they were only following the orders from their superiors and, since some of them were no longer in the military when the trials began, they did not face punishment.

Were the soldiers at Mỹ Lai trained to do what they did, or was it a function of the killing culture that was rampant throughout Vietnam? The men of the 1st Platoon followed the training that had been provided when they first came in country: the “5 Ss” of search, silence, segregate, speed, and safeguard. Calley appeared with his radio operator and asked why these civilians were being held. “We’re watching over them,” replied Sergeant Meadlo. “No, we want them killed,” replied Lieutenant Calley. “We’ll get on line and fire into them.” Calley turned to Meadlo and said “Fire when I say ‘Fire.’” Then standing side by side, they blazed away. Mothers had thrown themselves on top of the young ones in a last desperate bid to protect them from the bullets raining down on them. Calley fired at both the mothers and the children, killing them one by one. Then he calmly said, “OK, let’s go.”Footnote ¹³ It was only Lieutenant Calley and Captain Ernest Medina who were brought to trial – Lieutenant Colonel Barker had been killed in a helicopter crash a few weeks after the massacre. This killing culture, which had created the environment within which the soldiers felt relatively comfortable firing bullets into the bodies of prone women, children, and babies, must be recognized as part of the attitude toward the NLF. As recruits took basic training or advanced individual training, they were taught to respect the enemy as a fighter, but they were also fed racist terms about the NLF and PAVN soldiers that could easily be construed to mean that the women and children and elderly fathers were also the enemy. “Gook,” “dink,” “slope,” and “slant eyes” were used by cadres in training, and often these terms became part of everyday vocabulary. And if the soldiers of Charlie Company were wanting revenge for watching their buddies die from land mines and booby-trap deaths in previous days, it is likely that the killing culture would allow a comfort level to set in regarding the killing of noncombatants.

Adding to this killing culture was the lack of leadership shown by Captain Ernest Medina, and particularly Lieutenant William Calley. Both of these men were commissioned through the Infantry Officer Candidate School (OCS) at Fort Benning, Georgia, and neither was a college graduate, which was unusual. But they both failed to lead properly, particularly Lieutenant Calley, who was the one man on the ground who could have stopped the killing. Instead, he was the one who initiated the shooting, and his men followed. This lack of leadership resulted in the deaths of many innocent civilians and brought shame on and severe criticism of soldiers, marines, and veterans returning from the war.

The issue of who was most responsible for the massacre at Mỹ Lai has been explored by numerous authors, most notably Howard Jones in Mỹ Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness, plus Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim in Four Hours in Mỹ Lai.Footnote ¹⁴ Lieutenant Calley was convicted of many counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison. His punishment was reduced to “time served” by President Richard Nixon. More important was the stigma that was placed on returning American veterans, many of whom were already home and had been for five to seven years. The term “baby-killer” became synonymous with Vietnam veterans, notwithstanding that only 10–20 percent of those served were ever in combat.

Coming Home

The term “coming home” has been used by societies since men began waging war against each other. The extent to which veterans have been welcomed, ignored, or “spat upon” is the subject of many books and films, and is almost as controversial as the war itself. Since most men came home individually rather than with their unit, they were subjected to the vitriol of a society that did not understand, and therefore did not appreciate, the sacrifice that veterans of the war had made. Instead, with the Mỹ Lai massacre having been reported in 1969, then having been discussed throughout the trials, Lieutenant Calley and Captain Medina and everyone who had served became a target of, or at least susceptible to, ridicule for their service. Thus someone who served in 1965 might have been considered a perpetrator of atrocious behavior, even though they had been home for six years.

The controversy over how each man was treated by family, friends, and strangers continues even fifty years after the war ended. People who are critical of those who served deny that there was ever anyone spat upon, particularly by the members of the antiwar movement, as noted by author and Vietnam veteran Jerry Lembcke in his book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁵ But it is evident that veterans were at least ignored upon their return, or were treated with some disdain by society. Even World War II veterans expressed disdain for Vietnam veterans’ service: “Powerful Chairman of the House Committee on Veteran’s Affairs Olin ‘Tiger’ Teague (D-TX) proved especially intransigent. Although a decorated World War II veteran, he joined others in expressing skepticism of the Vietnam veterans’ claims. As one congressional staffer observed, Teague believed, ‘Well you know this is tough, but we [World War II veterans] sucked it up and we didn’t need to go into … counselling.’ At one point, Teague opined, ‘How can you little wimps be sick? A tour of duty lasted only twelve months. In World War II, soldiers fought in the war for years. How can you be traumatized?’”Footnote ¹⁶ In 1974, however, the United States Congress passed the Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act, which provided equal opportunity and affirmative action for veterans who had served and who believed they had been discriminated against because of their service. Furthermore, several states passed revenue bills that required bonuses to be paid to returning Vietnam veterans to compensate for monies lost by those who had been drafted into service while others were allowed to be employed in their selected careers. And regarding whether or not soldiers were spat upon, historian Marilyn Young, who herself was critical of the war, wrote: “It doesn’t matter how often this happened or whether it happened at all. Veterans felt spat upon, stigmatized, contaminated.”Footnote ¹⁷

Returning soldiers suffered many physical and mental wounds, often beyond those they suffered on the battlefield. With mental conditions such as “soldier’s heart” in the American Civil War, “shell-shock” in World War I, and “combat stress reaction” in World War II having been named during previous wars, a new term was added to our lexicon in Vietnam: post-traumatic stress disorder. Robert Lifton first used the phrase in Home from the War: Learning from Vietnam Veterans. Originally published in 1973 before all Vietnam veterans had returned home, his book dealt with issues that had not previously been addressed, such as the effect of coming home alone to a nation that was not supporting the war. After twenty years of recognizing how Vietnam veterans dealt with this societal indifference, psychiatrist Jonathan Shay wrote Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, which focused on the way Vietnam veterans were treated upon their return. Both authors dealt with returning home as a major part of the soldier experience and urged both societies and citizens within those societies to be cognizant of how veterans are treated when they come home.Footnote ¹⁸

Another recently diagnosed mental condition that has been common among Vietnam veterans is moral injury, which differs from post-traumatic stress disorder, in that it pertains not to what the war did to you, but what you did that violated your own deeply held moral beliefs.Footnote ¹⁹ Some psychologists believe that moral injury is the main cause of veteran suicides, which now number twenty per day.

Vietnam veterans are among these high numbers, even though most veterans have been home for nearly fifty years. Psychologists believe that since most of these soldiers are now retired and have nothing to think or worry about on a daily basis, they are focusing on the worst moments of their lives – their days in Vietnam. Hopefully, veteran organizations can help curb these terrible actions by men who served their country in a very unpopular war.

Conclusion

From induction to returning home, the Vietnam combat soldier experienced life, death, killing, and dying similar to the soldiers of previous American wars. However, they were the first US soldiers to experience fighting but losing a war. This loss does account for one of the reasons they have struggled with memories of their involvement. As thousands of books continue to be written about the war, the numbers that deal with battle on the ground, in the air, and on the water is still a small percentage as compared to those written about decision-making in Hanoi, Saigon, and Washington, DC. But, as the Vietnam veterans die off, there will be more interest in what they did and did not do. Perhaps some of the myths will begin to fade as more research is done on those who actually fought in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam.

Linda Pugsley was a 22-year-old registered nurse working at Boston City Hospital when she joined the United States Air Force in 1967. She went through basic training and flight school and was commissioned a second lieutenant. At the time, she had no political feelings about the Vietnam War, but she wanted to help take care of American servicemen who were injured there. She figured she could handle it. A weekend shift at Boston City Hospital usually included gunshot and stab wounds, car wrecks, and other sorts of bloody trauma. Nothing could have prepared her for Vietnam, though.

The young nurse soon realized that she was not just tending to physical wounds. She and other Vietnam War nurses have talked of how injured troops saw them as angels. There was something about seeing a woman, a woman taking care of them, that brought them comfort. Some nurses wore perfume because it reminded their patients of home. In a military hospital in a war zone, it was at once utterly incongruous and a desperately needed bit of normalcy. Lynda Van Devanter, a nurse whose memoir, Home before Morning, was the inspiration for the television drama China Beach, wore ribbons in her hair to uphold the feminine image her patients expected and desired. At the same time, she suppressed her emotions and steeled herself to cope with the mental burden of being soothing and pretty to broken and dying men.Footnote ¹

Nursing was just one of the avenues through which American women served in the Vietnam War. From the 1950s to the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, American women military personnel deployed to Vietnam with the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), the navy, and the marines, as well as the Army Nurse Corps. Civilian women traveled to Vietnam with the American Red Cross, US government agencies, and nongovernmental humanitarian organizations, and as civilian employees of the military. Women were not subject to the Vietnam-era draft and, for some women, the war offered an opportunity to travel and postpone marriage and motherhood, still the expected roles for young women in the 1960s. Some military women volunteered to go to Vietnam because they wanted to support the war effort or to see for themselves what was really happening on the ground. Others enlisted in the military for college and employment benefits after recruiters promised they would not be sent to Vietnam.

Due to deficiencies in government recordkeeping, we can only estimate how many American women served with the US military in Vietnam. While the Defense Department did not keep accurate records on women, it has estimated that approximately 7,500 women served in Vietnam. The Veterans’ Administration has set the number at 11,000. The majority were nurses, mostly from the Army Nurse Corps (ANC). Among those who were not nurses, about 700 women were members of the WAC, while much smaller numbers served in the navy, air force, and marines.Footnote ² Pinning down the numbers of civilian women who worked in Vietnam is even more difficult; estimates have gone as high as 55,000.Footnote ³ Although a few women went to Vietnam before the United States committed combat troops and remained in the country until 1975, the majority of American women who served in either military or civilian capacities arrived between 1965, the year of the first deployment of ground troops, and 1973, when the last US combat troops departed.

Military Nurses

Of the military women who served in the war, the majority did so through the Army Nurse Corps. As historian Kara Dixon Vuic has explained, the army began deploying nurses to Saigon in 1956 to train Vietnamese nurses.Footnote ⁴ Nurses had the double duty of treating the physical wounds of servicemen and sometimes Vietnamese civilians, and offering an emotional salve to injured and dying troops. Some nurses held men as they cried out for their parents and took their last breaths. They broke the news that a man would never walk or see again. Literally and figuratively, nurses carried wounded servicemen across the threshold from combat to the aftermath, which could be a drastically altered life or death.

The number of ANC nurses in-country increased to a peak of 906 in June 1968 before declining as US troops withdrew from Vietnam, and in total approximately 5,000 army nurses served in the conflict between 1956 and 1973. Nurses served one-year tours, held various medical specializations, and worked in hospitals of all sizes, in Saigon and out in the field.Footnote ⁵ Nurses had a variety of reasons for joining the corps, including the wish to avoid, at least temporarily, becoming wives and mothers. Even as they viewed the army as an escape from the assumed social roles, nurses faced some servicemen who viewed them as angelic caregivers who were stand-ins for women back home, and others who resisted their authority and sexually harassed them, expressing either an unwillingness or an inability to accept female nurses as legitimate military personnel. Although male nurses served in the ANC, men comprised less than 30 percent of the army nurses in Vietnam, illustrating the staying power of the idea that nursing was women’s work.Footnote ⁶

The popular image of Vietnam War combat typically features infantrymen caught in a surprise ambush or tripping a booby-trap wire, but nurses also dealt directly with the human consequences of the fighting. “You learn real soon that you can’t fall apart over every nineteen-year-old you send home in a body bag,” said Paula Quindlen, an army nurse who served at the 27th Surgical Hospital in Chu Lai. The work was intense; in hospitals, most shifts were twelve hours, and most nurses worked six days a week. Working in the intensive care units in Quy Nhơn and Saigon, Judy Davis treated patients who were “blown to hell.” To cope, she lost herself in her work, using cigarettes and wine to medicate her own emotional pain. When she had down time between flights, Linda Pugsley dealt with the pain by going to the Officers’ Club, drinking, and dancing to the music of the Filipino cover bands that sometimes played concerts there. Among all the things the air force had trained her to do, it had not taught her how to deal with the emotions of war. Pugsley eventually decided that she would not learn the names of the men she treated, not wanting to see them as friends. Aware that Americans generally saw women as maternal, Pugsley was not surprised when she became a stand-in for a serviceman’s mother or wife. “Sometimes when the young men would be crying, sometimes it was really kind of hard,” she said. “They’d hold your hand and just cry for their mom or their girlfriend. Sometimes you were the last one they saw, and you didn’t mind taking that place.” While working at the 12th Evacuation Hospital in Cu Chi, nurse Lily Lee Adams wore Chantilly perfume because she knew it brought her wounded patients a comforting connection to home.Footnote ⁷

Like many male GIs, most nurses concentrated on the details of their duties rather than the politics of the war. For some, specific aspects of those duties raised their awareness of the tensions and contradictions of the American mission. One of those duties was taking care of wounded Vietnamese. According to Sylvia Lutz Holland, there was a hierarchy of priorities, with American GIs at the top, followed by Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) troops, Vietnamese civilians, and then Viet Cong. For part of her tour, Holland worked in the Vietnamese ward at the 312th Evacuation Hospital in Chu Lai, where she treated patients for a variety of injuries and illnesses, including children suffering napalm burns. She developed a profound sense of respect for the Vietnamese, who seemed to survive even as they lost their homes and their loved ones. “They took care of one another and would absorb people from other families who weren’t even blood relatives,” Holland said. “They were warm and caring. Family members were always in the hospital. They’d sleep under the beds or on the floor.”Footnote ⁸ For Sandra Pang and Lynda Alexander, treating wounded Vietnamese was simply part of the job. Lola McGourty pitied the Vietnamese patients she treated, but she was ambivalent about working with them because she felt that they did not want the Americans to be in Vietnam. She felt especially sorry for Vietnamese women, whose position as sex objects for US troops became clear as she treated troops’ venereal diseases. “Some of them [Vietnamese women] were nurses, some of them were teachers, and the rest of them it seemed relied on prostitution to survive, and we made them prostitutes.”Footnote ⁹ The hospital where Paula Quindlen worked did not have a POW ward, but some POWs passed through her hospital, and she had to care for them in intensive care recovery. “It was hard to treat them because they had blown up our guys,” she said. Linda Pugsley differentiated between Vietnamese ally and enemy, considering the South Vietnamese to be “lovely people” but refusing to treat Viet Cong or North Vietnamese army troops.Footnote ¹⁰ Nurses saw, and in some cases personally struggled with, the tension between the US mission of protecting South Vietnam from communist insurgency and the bloody consequences of the war that accompanied that mission.

Figure 4.1 Nurses tend to wounded American soldiers as they prepare to depart for the United States from Tân Sơn Nhất Air Base (January 11, 1967).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

Despite how difficult it was to handle the casualties, Lynda Alexander, an air force nurse who volunteered for Vietnam in 1968, felt more useful in Vietnam than at any other point in her life. When her tour ended, she did not want to go home. “This was the real thing,” Alexander said. “You ever talk about having a feeling of satisfaction, such need? Somebody cared what you did. It was just the most down-to-the-bone thing.”Footnote ¹¹ Sylvia Lutz Holland, the nurse who served at the 312th Evacuation Hospital in Chu Lai from 1968 to 1969, felt a high degree of professional fulfillment during her tour of duty. “It was the only time in my nursing career when I used every bit of knowledge I had and developed a sense of confidence in my judgment as a professional,” Holland said.Footnote ¹² Nurses’ experiences in the Vietnam War illustrated the wartime contradiction that saw women actively participating in the supposedly male world of war but only insofar as they embodied conventional femininity and performed the women’s work of caregiving.

Women’s Army Corps

After nurses, the next largest number of servicewomen who went to Vietnam deployed with the Women’s Army Corps. Approximately 700 American women served in Vietnam through the WAC. These servicewomen worked in a variety of fields, including intelligence, office work, air traffic control, and journalism. Like nurses, the first WACs went to Vietnam to train personnel in South Vietnam’s Women’s Armed Forces Corps (WAFC).Footnote ¹³

Major Kathleen I. Wilkes and Sergeant 1st Class Betty L. Adams arrived in Saigon in January 1965 and worked with Major Trần Cẩm Hương, director of the WAFC. WAFC personnel worked primarily in secretarial roles to assist the Army of the Republic of Vietnam in its various clerical needs. Some WAFCs also worked as nurses and in “welfare service,” taking care of dependants who traveled with ARVN soldiers. WAFCs, like WACs, were not trained in combat, but those employed in the welfare service stayed near combat zones with troops, thus performing “the most dangerous assignments in the corps.”Footnote ¹⁴ In order to be eligible for officer training, WAFC recruits had to pass a test demonstrating that they had the equivalent of a US eleventh-grade education. All other recruits needed the equivalent of a US junior high school degree.Footnote ¹⁵

By the end of 1967, membership in the WAFC had risen to about 2,700, and by 1969 the number had jumped to 4,000. At the WAFC school, which was completed in March 1965, recruits took an eight-week basic training course, in which they participated in physical training, first aid, sanitation, and the use of weapons. An officer training program was created in October 1966, which required officer candidates to take an additional twenty-week course after completing the eight-week basic training. In addition to the skills learned in basic training, officer candidates studied military tactics, public speaking, leadership, and military justice.Footnote ¹⁶ As part of the officer training program, fifty-one Vietnamese women officers completed advanced training with the Women’s Army Corps at the WAC headquarters at Fort McClellan, Alabama.Footnote ¹⁷

Most WACs had office jobs in Vietnam, but that did not shield them from combat. During the Tet Offensive in 1968, WACs were caught in the midst of combat.Footnote ¹⁸ Describing the WAC experience during the month-long campaign, Captain Joanne Murphy wrote to the WAC director, Colonel Elizabeth Hoisington, to tell her of attacks at Long Bình in mid-February. Rocket fire hit the base’s ammo dump in the middle of the night while most of the WACs slept.

Those assurances did not always reflect the realities on the ground in Vietnam. Pinkie Houser experienced Viet Cong incoming fire on the ammo dump at Long Bình multiple times during her tour of duty. She remembered two attacks vividly. The first occurred on Christmas Eve 1969, early in the evening, while a group of GIs and WACs were opening presents and laughing at the gag gifts they had received. The first rounds of incoming hit nearby, and that night Houser heard shrapnel hitting her bunker. “Now I was scared and praying that night. I think that’s the first time that I had really, really been scared.”Footnote ¹⁹ During the second attack, incoming rockets hit an education center on base, and a sharp piece of iron from one of the rockets pinned a woman colonel to a wall, piercing her through her heart. After receiving the all-clear signal, Houser and some others went to inspect the remains of the education center, and the sight of the colonel shocked her. “I cried. I threw up because I had never seen that before. It was horrible. All my fear came back. My knees were knocking, you know, because I had never seen nothing like that, and the education center just looked like a tornado had gone through it.”Footnote ²⁰ No promise of safety could withstand the reality of what Houser experienced in Vietnam.

Hospitals came under attack during the war, which meant that nurses were often in the line of fire. As Jeanne Holm has written, the dangers nurses faced “were generally greater than those experienced by the clerks, personnel specialists, intelligence officers, stenographers, and others, male and female,” assigned to rear posts in Vietnam.Footnote ²¹ Nine army nurses died in Vietnam, one of whom was Sharon Lane, killed during a mortar attack on the 312th Evacuation Hospital in Chu Lai in June 1968. The rockets hit early on a Sunday morning, one landing directly on the Vietnamese ward where Lane worked. A piece of shrapnel hit her below her collarbone, cutting her aorta.Footnote ²²

Lane’s death was traumatic for nurse Sylvia Lutz Holland, whom Lane replaced in the Vietnamese ward when it was time for Holland to move on to a rotation in the emergency room. A group of corpsmen rushed Lane into the emergency room after the attack, but Holland took one look at her and knew she was gone. “She had a big hole in her neck. She was pale and her pupils were fixed,” Holland remembered. “The surgeon came in and tried to start an IV but there weren’t any veins. Then he was gonna open her chest and massage her heart. I said there was no reason to do it, she’s dead. He kept saying, ‘No she isn’t.’ Then he started crying.” Holland struggled with survivor’s guilt for a long time after Lane’s death, knowing that she would have been the one in the line of fire had Lane not arrived in-country to replace her.Footnote ²³

Donut Dollies

The Red Cross had sent teams of women overseas to work with troops since World War II. They served coffee and donuts, which earned them the nickname “donut dollies.” The Red Cross initiated the Supplemental Recreational Activities Overseas (SRAO) program in 1953 when it sent teams of women to South Korea to work with US troops fighting in the Korean War. In 1965, fearing the impact on troop morale of what was already looking to be a long war, Defense Department officials asked the Red Cross to establish an SRAO program in Vietnam. From 1965 through 1972, nearly 630 women served in Vietnam through the program. Defense officials also requested that donut dollies work at recreation centers. Defense Department authorities noted that it was possible US troops could be in Vietnam for a “long duration” with infrequent combat moments and thus could have considerable idle time. Boredom coupled with isolation could make it “difficult to maintain the morale of trained, combat ready troops.”Footnote ²⁴

Some donut dollies staffed recreation centers established by the army’s Special Services division and the United Service Organizations (USO) where servicemen could shoot pool, listen to music, read, play games, write letters, or sit and talk.Footnote ²⁵ Others traveled, usually by helicopter, to fire support bases in remote areas where troops waited to go into battle. SRAO women traveled in pairs and took games, snacks, soda, and juice with them. In the predeparture training session, Red Cross instructors told the women that they were meant to be a “touch of home” for the troops, a reminder of wives, girlfriends, mothers, and sisters back home. The teams of donut dollies were known as “clubmobile” units, and they were meant to provide a pleasant diversion from the monotony of waiting for combat. They should be the girl next door – cute, friendly, and caring, not sexual. Their powder-blue dresses projected a perky innocence but were impractical in Vietnam’s heat, dust, and mud.

SRAO workers typically lived on or near the US military installation where they worked. On-base billets ranged from Quonset or wood huts with detached bathrooms and showers to air-conditioned trailers with indoor plumbing.Footnote ²⁶ The program was open only to women who were college graduates between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-four, so the women tended to be a few years older and more educated than the average American GI in Vietnam. From 1967 to 1968, the program’s peak year in Vietnam, an average of 280,500 servicemen participated in SRAO activities each month at twenty major bases. Clubmobile units traversed an average of more than 27,000 miles (44,000 km) each month to remote fire bases isolated from larger military installations. The Red Cross estimated that clubmobile teams traveled more than 2 million miles (3.2 million km) during the seven years the SRAO program operated in the Vietnam War.Footnote ²⁷

Women’s motives for joining SRAO were as varied as those of their military sisters. Jeanne Christie headed to Vietnam with the Red Cross in January 1967 to escape Wisconsin winters and the watchful eyes of her parents. It seemed a good way to “break away from home” after she graduated from the University of Wisconsin.Footnote ²⁸ Yet other women joined SRAO because gender discrimination barred them from overseas government work. Nancy Warner, while in graduate school in 1968 at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, dreamed of joining the Foreign Service. But “back then when you went to do something like join the Foreign Service or apply for any of those kinds of jobs as a woman, the biggest part of the application process was, ‘How fast can you type?’ And that was discouraging to me because it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.”Footnote ²⁹ Going to Vietnam was, for her, a perfect solution to postcollege restlessness.Footnote ³⁰ J. Holley Watts, the daughter of a World War II veteran, joined the Red Cross to go to Vietnam because she “was affected by JFK’s inaugural speech,” in which he called on Americans to help spread the ideals of freedom and democracy throughout the world. She also wanted to travel and, when she graduated with a psychology degree from Rosemont College in Pennsylvania, she was interested in neither graduate school nor marriage. When Watts signed up for the SRAO program in the mid-1960s, she had the choice of Korea or Vietnam, and she chose the latter because she had a cousin in the marines who had been deployed there.Footnote ³¹ Jennifer Young left her home in suburban St. Louis in 1968 after graduating from college and joined the Red Cross because she wanted to help the young men sent off to war. She believed it was unfair that women got a “free ticket” out of service in Vietnam. “I just felt so bad for what some of them were having to experience because of the draft,” she said.Footnote ³²

Some donut dollies went to Vietnam specifically to help resolve their own questions about the war. Rene Johnson’s father was in the military and had spent time in Vietnam in the early 1960s. He returned home believing that the United States was “getting ready to make the biggest mistake that it’s ever made. He said he would fight to the death to defend his country, but that’s not what we were doing.” At the time, the Johnson family lived at Fort Benning, Georgia, and Rene was in college at Florida State University in Tallahassee, so she heard the opinions of both sides of the Vietnam debate. The soldiers she knew at Fort Benning argued that the United States was bringing freedom and independence to the Vietnamese, but on campus at Florida State students expressed the belief that the war was unjust and immoral. “As the years went on and I was losing friends, I just ended up deciding I needed to go over and see for myself what was going on,” Johnson said.Footnote ³³

Eileen O’Neill signed up for SRAO because she was curious about the war, and she had dated a man who had served a tour of duty in Vietnam in 1968. Ultimately, though, “it was as much for the travel and adventure as anything else,” she said. She suspected the war “had to be more complicated than either side of the demonstrators were arguing. We’d still hark back to Kennedy’s inaugural address of going places and doing things for the rest of the world, and a lot of idealism and the sense of, this couldn’t be really as bad as it appears.”Footnote ³⁴ By the time Johnson and O’Neill went to Vietnam in the late 1960s, opposition to the war was widespread in the United States, and American women had launched a public challenge to Cold War domesticity. Even before second-wave feminism hit the late 1960s with full force, women had worked within the cultural confines of domesticity to protest nuclear proliferation and war. Groups such as Women Strike for Peace used the maternal ideal to argue that women had a responsibility to oppose conflict. While some women’s activists challenged the domestic ideal, the Red Cross continued to cling to it and exported aspects of it to Vietnam. The irony in the donut dollies’ experiences is inescapable. Many SRAO workers participated in the program specifically to transcend the constraints of the ideal they were supposed to represent. Ostensibly passive embodiments of the values informing US policy, women like Johnson and O’Neill joined SRAO in part to judge the war for themselves.

Recreation centers and clubmobiles were to provide “wholesome recreation, pool, ping pong, games, cards, whatever,” Jennifer Young, a former donut dolly, said. At the centers and on mobile runs out to fire bases, donut dollies usually worked ten-hour shifts. They organized quiz shows and group participation games, served coffee and cold drinks, and talked with soldiers.Footnote ³⁵ Some teams emphasized educational activities, while others tried to encourage group interaction or provide relaxation. If there were enough budding thespians in a platoon, SRAO teams worked with them to stage plays and musicals. If areas were unsafe or the troops stationed there had little free time, donut dollies made mobile runs to drop off magazines and puzzle books. For the soldiers who simply wanted to sit down and write a letter, SRAO staff kept supplies of pens and paper on hand.Footnote ³⁶ According to an army pamphlet for personnel stationed in Vietnam, donut dollies went to the war to support troop morale by providing “a bit of America in Vietnam.”Footnote ³⁷

Smiling was a job requirement for donut dollies, so they had to compartmentalize their own fear and sadness about the war. After her friend Michael Stacy died in a helicopter crash in March 1969, donut dolly Emily Strange stopped learning the names of the servicemen she met in Vietnam. She was stationed in the Mekong Delta with the 9th Infantry Division and Mobile Riverine Force beginning in 1968. She had become close to Stacy because they both played guitar, and they often strummed folk tunes together. After Stacy died, Strange realized that she needed to put distance between herself and the men she worked with. It was frightening to think about herself dying, but it was worse to worry about her friends dying. Long after the war, she believed that there were probably men she knew whose names were on the Vietnam Wall, but she would not have to face the pain of knowing for sure. It was her job to make lonely, frightened soldiers feel better, and she had to show up and do her job despite the fear and isolation she herself felt. She called it putting on her “Eleanor Rigby” face that she kept in a jar by the door.

Race

The racial tensions that marked the Cold War era in the United States influenced the decisions and experiences of African American women in Vietnam. Some Black women enlisted in the military in order to serve Black soldiers. Elizabeth Allen, a graduate of Ohio State University who held a master’s degree in nursing, enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps in 1967 after learning that Black soldiers were disproportionately assigned to combat units. Allen spent her tour of duty at a hospital in Pleiku, the first US hospital to be bombed during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Others sought to escape the limited options available to them and the racism that marked their daily lives in their hometowns. Looking for a way out of Jim Crow Alabama, Marie Rodgers enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps in 1952 and served in Korea. In 1967, Rodgers volunteered for Vietnam and was assigned to the 24th Evacuation Hospital at Long Bình, where she earned a Bronze Star for her service under fire. For some, the military not only provided an escape from the Jim Crow civilian world but also challenged the concept of racial inequality. Air Force Captain Juanita Forbes was one of 350 air force nurses who rode on medical evacuation missions in Vietnam. As part of her job, Forbes supervised a team that included two female nurses and three white male medical technicians, a structure that would have been rare in the civilian employment world of the United States in the 1960s.Footnote ³⁸

Although the SRAO program was supposed to offer reminders of home to troops in Vietnam, its racial makeup was fairly homogeneous. The vast majority of American women who joined the SRAO program were white. As Rene Johnson remarked, “We were about as WASP-y as you can get.”Footnote ³⁹ It was not until 1967 that the Red Cross sent an African American donut dolly to Vietnam. Barbara Lynn, a graduate of Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and a former Peace Corps volunteer, arrived at Cam Ranh Bay in July 1967. “As soon as I had arrived, the word spread like wild fire that there was a ‘soul sister’ at the Red Cross Recreation Center,” Lynn told a reporter from Ebony. “Many fellows told me that it made them feel good to know that they had someone there to remind them of home. The white girls at the center were nice, they said, but seeing a ‘sister’ when you came back from the rice paddies was something else.”Footnote ⁴⁰

A fellow Peace Corps volunteer had told Lynn about SRAO, and to her it sounded like a chance to travel, serve her country, and learn at first hand about the Vietnam War. Lynn’s father had served in World War II, and he supported her desire to join SRAO. Her grandmother also encouraged her, viewing it as an opportunity that had not been available to African American women when she was young. In Vietnam, Lynn was a unit director, managing about eight donut dollies and acting as the liaison between the Red Cross and the platoons her unit served. Her presence was significant not only because she was the first Black donut dolly stationed there but also because, throughout the war, disproportionate numbers of Black men were drafted and placed in combat units sent to Vietnam.Footnote ⁴¹ Black GIs she met in Vietnam told her that they “thought they had been forgotten, that the women back home didn’t care for them or maybe were not being invited to come over” to Vietnam. Although donut dollies worked with all GIs regardless of race, African American soldiers sought Lynn out for companionship.Footnote ⁴²

In August 1968, Major General Charles Stone, commander of the 4th Infantry Division stationed in the Central Highlands, wrote a letter to Quinn Smith, director of the SRAO program in Vietnam, asking for an African American donut dolly. Stone told Smith that African American troops made up nearly 14 percent of his division, and he thought those men would be more likely to participate in SRAO programs if African American women were there. Stone assured Smith that the white donut dollies did not discriminate against Black soldiers, but he noticed that the Black servicemen often seemed reluctant to participate in the SRAO activities. He thought Black women would make them feel more comfortable taking part in the games and entertainment.Footnote ⁴³

Red Cross officials, working to address these racial issues, encountered problems tied to the changing conditions on the homefront, especially after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., which sparked a sharp increase in racial tensions among troops. In the summer of 1968, Lieutenant General James Lampert, the deputy assistant of the Manpower Reserve Affairs division of the Defense Department, visited US military installations in Vietnam to get a sense of the morale and welfare of the troops. When he met with John Gordon, the director of operations for the Red Cross Southeast Asia division, he asked how many African American women worked in the SRAO program. One, Gordon told Lampert, emphasizing that the Red Cross had launched recruitment campaigns aimed at attracting more Black women to sign up for tours in Vietnam. When Barbara Lynn returned home from her tour of duty, the Red Cross made her a recruiting specialist focused on African American women. Also, the Red Cross public relations office had pitched stories to various media outlets, especially African American publications such as Ebony.Footnote ⁴⁴

Red Cross recruiters contacted Black colleges, the National Council of Negro Women, the Urban League, and African American employment agencies. The Red Cross also amended its rule about the number of SRAO workers who could be stationed at a site to allow SRAO units to exceed their quotas if an African American applicant needed a placement.Footnote ⁴⁵ Despite the efforts, by August 1968, only 1 of the 113 SRAO women stationed in Vietnam was African American.Footnote ⁴⁶ “We are very concerned about the lack of Negro staff in this particular Red Cross program,” Smith wrote to Stone. “Unfortunately, there have always been difficulties in recruiting young Negro women for service in the SRAO program, and these difficulties have been unusually severe in recruitment for Vietnam. Even the most concerted efforts to attract the qualified young Negro woman have met with only minimal success.”Footnote ⁴⁷ By the end of December, not only had the Red Cross not recruited many more Black women for the SRAO program in Vietnam, but it had “lost two of our fine young Negro women” to marriage.Footnote ⁴⁸ Pondering the difficulty of recruiting Black women for SRAO, Robert C. Lewis, a Red Cross vice president, observed that “it is interesting to note that SRAO has had an integrated staff from its very beginnings, but it has been far more difficult to obtain recruits from young Negro college graduates in the last five years because there are so many other opportunities now being made known to them.”Footnote ⁴⁹

While the Red Cross justified its recruitment difficulties as a byproduct of the civil rights movement’s success, increasing Black anger over the perceived failures of the movement probably was a more important factor. As Gerald Gill has demonstrated, Black women had criticized US intervention in Vietnam as early as 1964. Some women, including Coretta Scott King and veteran civil rights activist Diane Nash, appealed to a maternal instinct to protect children from combat and to resist foreign policy maneuvers that caused wars.Footnote ⁵⁰ Nash, who traveled to Hanoi in December 1966 and met with members of the government of North Vietnam, including Hồ Chí Minh, explained that a photograph of a Vietnamese woman holding a wounded or dead child inspired her to go to Vietnam. “I saw myself in this mother’s place,” said Nash, herself a mother. “The death and destruction I witnessed was far worse than any picture could communicate.” In an article in Muhammad Speaks, Nash recounted her meetings with Vietnamese mothers who lost children in the fighting and stated that “the people of Vietnam identify and sympathize with the struggle of black people in America.”Footnote ⁵¹ Other African American women denounced the war as a waste of Black men’s lives. Still others considered it an imperialistic act of aggression by white America against people of color.Footnote ⁵² To participate in the war effort, then, likely would have seemed traitorous to Black women who opposed it.

In January 1971, in hopes of boosting recruitment for the year, the Red Cross set a quota of four positions in the summer recruiting drive for Black women.Footnote ⁵³ Red Cross public relations also continued its press campaign, preparing articles profiling African American SRAO workers like Vivian Hayes, a graduate of North Carolina A&T University. When she arrived at Camp Eagle, where the 101st Airborne Division was stationed, Hayes made it a point to work with African American GIs. “I think it’s only natural,” she said. “I’m going to say hello and visit with them especially because I think they often feel sort of left out.” The only Black member of SRAO in Vietnam at the time, Hayes believed the program would be limited in its usefulness to Black soldiers until it sent more Black women to Vietnam. “The men want to see more black girls over here,” Hayes said. “If I were talking to a Sister, trying to persuade her to come over here, I would say, ‘You’ve got Brothers over here who need your help. They need to know we care.’”Footnote ⁵⁴ Vivian Hayes’s statement that she would encourage other Black women to join SRAO because Black servicemen needed them reveals a sense of responsibility regardless of her opinion of the Vietnam War. Hayes’s call to Black women to let Black troops “know we care” would not have been far removed from the Black Nationalist self-reliance advocated by the Black Panthers and others. Behind a cloak of feminine domestic concern, women like Hayes performed their own forms of activism.

Conclusion

The American public memory of the Vietnam War is a male-dominated tale of combat, that traumatic, life-shattering experience of war: walking point, ambushes, booby traps, seeing friends die, narrowly escaping death. Combat is central to American movies, memoirs, novels, and oral histories about the war even though, as historian Meredith H. Lair has documented, most US troops in Vietnam served in rear-echelon, noncombat positions.Footnote ⁵⁵ Yet even if combat dominates American public memory of the war, American women should still be central to that story. Military nurses, Women’s Army Corps personnel, and civilians who served with the Red Cross saw the consequences of combat regularly. For nurses, and to some degree for SRAO women, dealing with combat was their job, from bandaging the stumps of amputated limbs to holding a serviceman’s hand while he cried because he had lost half his platoon in an ambush. Nurses treated soldiers’ physical wounds, and Red Cross women worked to boost the morale of troops, tending to their emotional wounds. Their jobs were to care for servicemen emotionally and physically, and they had to figure out how to do their jobs while managing their own mental trauma. American women who served in Vietnam were small in number compared to the men who served but, because of that, their exposure to combat and its consequences was concentrated. They were there to help lighten the burden of servicemen, but they had to be so much to so many, without any release for themselves. Though small in number, the majority of American military and civilian women who served in Vietnam experienced combat indirectly.

It has become an article of faith among neo-orthodox observers who want to picture the Vietnam War as a United States victory that the guerrilla enemy was defeated. In some formulations this goes so far as to claim the insurgents were vanquished on the way to the defeat of the North Vietnamese main forces by American air power. Let us postpone that overarching question while laying the groundwork to consider it by looking at “pacification,” which in Vietnam came to mean organized efforts to root out the adversary’s apparatus across the broad extent of South Vietnam. The story is both more complex and less clear than neo-orthodox proponents would have it; and the record is also more nuanced than the views of those who favor the insurgents, the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF).

The American war in Vietnam is often described as a struggle for the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people. This chapter will examine United States efforts to stimulate Saigon’s government in this enterprise. It will also look at “nation-building,” a complementary set of foreign assistance and aid programs that Washington intended to create a robust Republic of Vietnam that could offer an attractive alternative to the NLF. The approach will be partly thematic and partly chronological, opening with the definitional problem and a general description of the conflict terrain, then turning to a narrative showing the progression of how various Saigon regimes and American actors gradually shifted to a countrywide focus on a “war in the villages.”

What Were the Americans Up To?

The first problem is one of definition. Despite probably millions of words, even pages, devoted to this topic, in public speeches, secret documents, and oral briefings, during the war there was no generally accepted definition of “pacification.” The September 1974 edition of the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, for example, contains no entry on this key principle of the war.Footnote ¹ A standard source such as Spencer C. Tucker’s The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War gives this meaning: the “array of programs that sought to bring security, economic, development, and local government to rural South Vietnam.”Footnote ² That text fails to define pacification as a process, but merely pictures it as a collection of programmatic elements. Similarly, the history crafted by Richard A. Hunt, a foremost expert on the subject, reports that “Pacification encompassed both military efforts to provide security and programs of economic and social reform and required both the US Army and a number of US civilian agencies to support the South Vietnamese.”Footnote ³ In essence pacification remained in the eye of the practitioner – and the pulling and hauling among different actors with differing interests and perceptions of the task bedeviled this effort throughout the period.

Richard Hunt’s description has the virtue of pointing to the Saigon government. The United States may have been the main actor in pacification but US actions were in support of the South Vietnamese, who held the real responsibility. Never could the United States do whatever it wanted, and from beginning to end the South Vietnamese commitment remained problematic. Former CIA officer Thomas Ahern, author of the agency’s official history of pacification in the war, quotes Saigon’s deputy defense minister’s telling comment to the CIA’s chief of operations for South Vietnam. This was late 1954, and the two were in Vĩnh Long city, a Mekong provincial capital, for the baptism of a child of Ngô Đình Nhu. The CIA man asked how far out from Saigon the government’s control extended. “As long as we’re here it’s this far, but when we go back to Saigon it goes back with us.”Footnote ⁴

On the American side, the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower took a conventional view of developing the South Vietnamese military, but did provide economic aid aimed at subsidizing land reform, and other elements that would become elements of pacification. President John F. Kennedy may not have had a comprehensive definition of the phenomenon, but his promulgation of a doctrine of “counterinsurgency” offered a readymade framework with which to understand the struggle. It was counterinsurgency, rather than pacification, that would frame early United States efforts. This subsumed “civic action” – a limited form of relating to people – but was largely built around security tactics. Counterinsurgency would be applied as the United States induced Saigon to fight the NLF guerrillas on their own terms. Later, President Lyndon B. Johnson, champion of the Great Society in the United States, devoted major attention to nonmilitary aspects of the conflict, and this “other war” became the foundation for the comprehensive pacification attempted at the midpoint of the Vietnam War. At its highest level the development inherent to the other war would be called “nation-building.” In the villages at the micro level the sides contested the loyalties of the South Vietnamese people.

This other war was a fundamentally political conflict in which pacification, or the push to uproot the adversary’s networks in the villages, became a primary warfighting mechanism. Nation-building sought to create and improve South Vietnamese institutions and productive means sufficiently to give the populace a stake in supporting the Saigon government. One important scholar of the process has labeled it “inventing Vietnam.”Footnote ⁵ Counterinsurgency continued to be pursued, identifying specialized forces and means, acting alongside the social and political aspects of building popular support. While all these elements had formed part of the South Vietnamese struggle from the beginning, their application varied in depth and over time. The sides thus began to implement strategies and tactics that were not fully understood, under leaders and commanders who varied in their approaches to the problem.

The Era of Special Warfare

The early months following the 1954 Geneva Agreements, when the government of Ngô Đình Diệm was busy establishing itself, pushing out from Saigon, in the way that Ngô Đình Nhu did for his son’s baptism, were a major piece of the action for pacification. The first big pushes were into Cà Mau province, at the southern tip of Vietnam, and Bình Định on the central coast. Already, American advisors were promoting a “people first” approach while French officers – still in Vietnam at the time – emphasized security. By 1956 the French were forced out. Consolidating his power, Diệm relied on military force. South Vietnamese civilian agencies did not seem to understand that people had any role at all, while US aid focused on more conventional assistance.Footnote ⁶

President Diệm’s approach successfully wore down the South Vietnamese political–religious sects, and the former Việt Minh cadres who had stayed in the South after Geneva were shrunk to a small, hard kernel. By the end of 1957 an estimated 65,000 people had been arrested and several hundred killed. A government decree imposed the death penalty for membership in the Communist Party. Executions later averaged 150 a month.Footnote ⁷

Cadres begged Hanoi authorities for permission to take up arms, permission that only came in 1959. By then the pent-up energy among this cadre was enormous, and their upsurge exploded across South Vietnam. The Southern resistance built considerable strength in the villages by creating “parallel hierarchies” of interlocking movements – from farmers’ or women’s groups and health cooperatives to quasi-governmental entities that performed functions identical to Saigon government organs. Thus it enlisted people in ways that compromised them insofar as Saigon was concerned.

At the end of 1960 the Southern resistance gave itself a fresh, united-front cloak by creation of the National Liberation Front (NLF). The NLF supplemented its organizational efforts with forceful acts against official government representatives, in effect closing Saigon officials out of many areas of South Vietnam. The relative strength of the government versus NLF hierarchies defined progress.

Early experts who believed in people-first approaches held out for supplies of potable water, blankets, mosquito nets, and the like. This became known as “civic action.” Major initiatives established medical clinics or centered on land reform. Several ordinances, culminating in No. 57 of October 1956, sought to provide “land to the tiller,” going one better over the Việt Minh, who had enjoyed good success during the French war with a program of this type (in contrast to the North’s disastrous mid-1950s attempt at collectivization). In the early 1960s Saigon claims for land expropriated from rich landowners ranged as high as a half-million hectares. Later study showed the households benefiting from the program to be a tiny fraction of the millions of peasants who lived on the land.Footnote ⁸

Another Diệm program, called “land development,” even better illustrated the direction Saigon had taken. Here the proposition was to homestead wilderness, or underutilized land, and build a new class of Saigon loyalists by giving them title. Washington subsidized land development to the tune of $10 million. Most of the land “developed” was in the Central Highlands or the western Mekong Delta. The “plateaux montagnards du sud,” the Central Highlands, were largely tribal lands belonging to a range of primitive societies that cohabited South Vietnam with the Vietnamese. In French colonial times the Highlands, and the “Montagnard” peoples who lived there, had been administered separately from lowland Vietnamese. This minimized contact between Montagnards and lowlanders – just as well since Vietnamese frequently viewed Montagnards in racialist terms. The western Mekong lands were those of the sects Diệm had overpowered in 1955. In fact, in both arenas development had a political content. Diemist land “development” effectively annexed Montagnard or sect land to distribute to Vietnamese homesteaders – often members of the diaspora migrating from North Vietnam. Put differently, the most significant land redistribution in South Vietnam amounted to an act of imperialism – Vietnamese seizing land from tribes or religious minorities to hand to other, favored, Vietnamese. Ngô Đình Diệm visited the Highlands only once, when he went to Buôn Mê Thuột in February 1957, and it is not surprising that an attempt was made to assassinate him there.Footnote ⁹

President Diệm’s policies illustrated the dichotomy that persisted between United States and South Vietnamese pacification leaders throughout the conflict. Americans were torn between different visions of technique, and they may not have had a clear definition of the process or their goal, but the Saigon hierarchy had different purposes and objectives altogether. This dichotomy played out in pacification efforts throughout the Vietnam War.

Despite President Diệm’s strenuous efforts, the resistance that opposed him scored gains quite quickly once it took to the field. Members of the Southern resistance openly say that the Diemists whittled them down practically to the nub, a fact that only underlines the degree of their success. By April 1959 – a month before Hanoi even approved the creation of the Trường Sơn Strategic Supply Route (known to Americans as the Hồ Chí Minh Trail) – the CIA was already reporting the resistance had achieved nearly complete control of whole villages and districts in Cà Mau province, the part of South Vietnam furthest away from Hanoi’s control. This was more than eighteen months before the rebels created their NLF. Here they perfected the techniques of parallel hierarchies and political struggle (đấu tranh) they would use throughout.

Pacification as conventionally pictured started right then. Diệm approved a program for population relocation into so-called agrovilles, theoretically separating peasants from the Liberation Front cadres seeking their support. The arrangement also permitted Saigon’s security forces to keep an eye on suspect villagers. Proponents claimed the “agricultural villages” would enable the Saigon government to furnish goods and services which peasants had never had access to. Peasants disliked being uprooted from their land, and living in the agroville but farming as before they had even further to travel to and from work each day. The promised goods and services proved thin, and late. Worse, Saigon officials sought to finance the agrovilles internally – with peasants contributing labor to build communal facilities and forced to buy their new plots of land and even to dismantle their own village homes to build the new houses. The failure was such that, within six months of its March 1960 inception, the plans were scaled back by 75 percent. Fewer than 50,000 people – a tenth of the original anticipated number – finally lived in agrovilles, which were effectively moribund by early 1962.Footnote ¹⁰

Diệm and his officials were largely responsible for the agroville formula. After that, counterinsurgency experts followed with all kinds of possibilities. Many were impressed with the British campaign in Malaya, where an ethnic Chinese insurgency movement was being progressively defeated, and “population relocation” – the strategy of moving the people off the land, now given a formal name – was seen to have played a major role. Robert Thompson, a veteran of the Malaya campaign, arrived in Saigon in 1961 as chief of a British Advisory Office, and he urged on Diệm a new variant of population relocation. In Vietnam, Saigon leaders and Americans would call it the “Strategic Hamlet Program.” North Vietnamese observers coined the name “special warfare.” Thompson with Diệm, and CIA station chief William Colby with Ngô Đình Nhu, Diệm’s brother and éminence grise, proposed new population defense schemes which merged into the Strategic Hamlet Program and got underway early in 1962. By then John Kennedy, the apostle of counterinsurgency, was sitting in the White House, and the United States was supporting the Saigon government’s program.

Ngô Đình Nhu chaired the committee of Saigon officials who led the program, and Nhu spoke of social transformation through relocation. Colby had similar ideas, and US aid supported some modest improvements in the standard of living for the peasantry. But forcible relocation, corruption, poor security, and failure to engage the populace to explain Saigon’s intentions collectively revealed the inadequacy of implementation. North Vietnamese adversaries worried about the roughly 12,000 strategic hamlets that were created, but many of them were really no more than bamboo barriers surrounding peasant shacks, without even radios to summon help. The hamlet defenses required insurgents to mass for attacks, affording the South Vietnamese army opportunities for countermoves, but that was a limited gain, especially if Saigon troops, due to poor communications, never learned of the guerrilla threats. The showcase for strategic hamlets was Operation Sunrise, begun in the spring of 1962 to pacify a notorious Liberation Front hotbed north of Saigon, the sector called War Zone D. Six months into the effort just four of fourteen projected strategic hamlets had been set up, and the first one was already falling apart. Countrywide, the program had come to a standstill by the summer of 1963, and after the coup that overthrew Diệm the strategic hamlets were largely abandoned.Footnote ¹¹

The coup against President Diệm ushered in a period of intense political infighting in Saigon. Immediate successors, the military strongmen Dương Vӑn Minh and Nguyễn Khánh, made halfhearted efforts to reenergize pacification programs but were obliged to keep much of their attention constantly on Saigon politics. There were seven military coups or attempted coups between November 1963 and mid-1966. American enthusiasm for pacification stumbled on Saigon’s inward focus. CIA authority Thomas Ahern observes, “the six counterinsurgency programs sponsored or encouraged by CIA in concert with the Diệm government all achieved their greatest effectiveness by late 1962. Thereafter a variety of causes inhibited further progress.”Footnote ¹²

The Other War

In addition to the overthrow and murder of Ngô Đình Diệm, November 1963 brought the assassination of President Kennedy. LBJ, his vice president and successor, came to the table with a very different attitude. Johnson had made his way in American politics with social and economic programs, all the way back to the 1930s, such as rural electrification and the Tennessee Valley Authority. LBJ appreciated – more than had Kennedy – the importance of giving South Vietnamese citizens a stake in the conflict. If Johnson could have bought the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese peasantry, he would have.Footnote ¹³ This president not only devoted more attention to these elements of the conflict, he also coined the term the “other war” to connote this aspect.Footnote ¹⁴ Indeed the first summit conference between American and South Vietnamese leaders took place at Honolulu in 1966 specifically to focus on economic and social features of the war. President Johnson’s efforts led to the elaboration of actual management structures on the US side of the pacification mission.

A structure to actually conduct pacification operations was a Johnson-era innovation that had not even been dreamed of before. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge actually took the first steps in the autumn of 1965, when he created a committee within the US mission under Deputy Ambassador William J. Porter.Footnote ¹⁵ In Washington, the Vietnam Coordinating Committee chaired by the State Department began parallel deliberations. Early in January 1966 a conference at Warrenton, Virginia, brought together officials from both sides of the Pacific, crystallizing thoughts of providing more structure – a single manager – for pacification initiatives. This thinking was taking hold when LBJ held his summit at Honolulu in February.Footnote ¹⁶ Shortly thereafter, on the National Security Council staff, the president designated Deputy National Security Advisor Robert J. Komer as his point man for all things related to the “other war.” Johnson also affirmed Lodge’s choice of William Porter to pull together pacification elements within the US mission to South Vietnam. In National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 343 of March 28, 1966, LBJ put his instructions in a formal directive. This directive – almost the last NSAM on Vietnam strategy President Johnson would ever approve – indicates the seriousness with which he saw this matter.

By December a more formal entity, the Office of Civil Operations, had been created within the mission structure. For the first time this brought the related elements of the CIA, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the spin doctors of the Joint United States Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO) together for a coordinated effort. But pacification work still suffered from a relative lack of resources compared to those for fighting. Komer argued that until military resources could be funneled into pacification few hearts or minds would ever be won. The result, in May 1967, would be creation of an organization directly subordinate to General William C. Westmoreland, the US military commander in Vietnam. Called Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), the organization provided a command center for all aspects of pacification activity. President Johnson appointed Komer to lead CORDS as a deputy to Westmoreland and with protocol rank of ambassador. In 1968 CIA official William E. Colby came to CORDS as Komer’s assistant, succeeding him that summer. Komer and Colby became the sparkplugs of US pacification efforts.

In the field, meanwhile, various people from the CIA and USAID were busily crafting tactics and techniques, and had been since Diệm’s time. Oftentimes formulas devised in one place seemed quite successful, but failed badly when applied across the board. Other times Saigon officials objected to projects, appropriated money the United States had intended to finance initiatives, or dragged their feet when implementing both US and South Vietnamese programs. A partial list of the programs and devices would include armed militias (such as Sea Swallows, Civil Guard, Combined Action Platoons, Regional Forces/Popular Forces), strike teams (CounterTerror Teams, People’s Action Teams, Provincial Reconnaissance Units), encouragement of defection projects (chiêu hồi, Kit Carson Scouts), territorial control efforts (chiến thắng, hợp tác), forcible relocation into defended villages, information-gathering and village surveillance teams (Census Grievance, Revolutionary Development), neutralization of the guerrilla hierarchy (Phoenix, Phượng hoàng), and more.

A critical element remained the fuzziness of the strategic picture. Judgments on control over the districts and provinces had long been based on the simple opinions of Saigon officials as reviewed by their American advisors. The softness of this data was plain. After an October 1966 visit to the war zone, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara asked CIA director Richard M. Helms to craft a more refined method. Brainstorming overnight at CIA headquarters, with officers including some from the Special Assistant for Vietnam Affairs (SAVA), others of the Saigon Station, and USAID officials, came up with a report card schema, subsequently refined by SAVA Philip Carver and approved at the US Embassy two months later. American advisors along with their South Vietnamese counterparts would complete monthly reports grading their areas on ninety-seven different political, socioeconomic, and security criteria. As a check on Vietnamese overoptimism the Americans in addition filed separate report cards.

The data was compiled in Saigon and used to rank villages in what became known as the Hamlet Evaluation Survey (HES). Hamlets were graded A through E, with the ones labeled A considered fully loyal to Saigon, B hamlets slightly less well controlled, C ones relatively stable, then D and E were contested in worsening degrees. Liberation Front–controlled hamlets were not graded. While elaborate, HES could not escape from subjectivity – or from the exigencies of war. Beyond dispute the Tet Offensive set back pacification. In its wake CORDS initiated Operation Recovery to regain the lost ground, while a programmatic response called the Accelerated Pacification Campaign soon appeared. As part of the latter, the HES report cards were stripped down, losing grades for land reform, transportation improvement, public health, eradication of illiteracy, and agricultural improvement – and eliminating the requirement to identify corruption among South Vietnamese officials. Meanwhile, it turns out, roughly 20 percent of the 67.2 percent of villages rated as secure (graded A to C) at the time of Tet had not actually been evaluated at all. In 1970 the “secure” percentage was arbitrarily reduced but soon reached a staggering 95 percent. There was an improvement from pacification but it remains difficult to identify precisely – the provinces and districts across South Vietnam that were considered dangerous had long been so. There was a Vietnam data problem that persisted throughout.Footnote ¹⁷

At the same time the growing violence of the war itself had the effect of destroying many hamlets and villages and driving people off the land. Between 1964 and 1972 the proportion of South Vietnamese living in the cities increased 13 percent. Excepting Saigon, where much migration had occurred before 1960, large fractions of the population had arrived within the past five or ten years. The number of urban centers with 100,000 to 299,999 citizens increased from two to six during the stipulated period, and ones peopled by up to 100,000 people grew from fifteen to twenty-eight. The military correlation is clear: questioned as to why they had moved, from 1964 to 1966, 55 percent gave war-related reasons and another 16 percent wanted more opportunity; in 1967–8 the war-related figure rose to 63 percent. In 1969–71 war-related migrants diminished to 36 percent but those who had left the land for opportunity’s sake remained high at 14 percent.Footnote ¹⁸

Another complicating element in the picture was the evolution of US strategy and politics. After 1968 it became perfectly evident to all sides that the United States could not afford to send additional ground troops to South Vietnam. Peace negotiations telegraphed the United States need to end the war. American politics made apparent the diminution of US power. Yet it was at that same time that CORDS hit its stride and the Americans began an intensive campaign of pacification. Much like the North Vietnamese army, the Liberation Front had an incentive to wait out Vietnamization and the US withdrawal. It is simply not possible to determine how much of what could be observed in the pacification data was attributable to guerrillas’ deliberate strategy versus actual improvement.

One observable was the recorded level of terrorist incidents. This figure increased steadily after 1968, more than doubling by the time it peaked in 1971. In their councils the American commanders viewed this as the Liberation Front, increasingly desperate, trying to attain by violence what it could no longer do by political struggle (đấu tranh). But there was a half-empty/half-full problem with the water in this glass. The data could equally well be read as retaliation for the counterinsurgent violence of the Phoenix Program. Or the statistic might mean something different from how it was taken. Thừa Thiên province included the city of Huế, certainly making it a priority pacification sector. Statistics kept by the senior US advisor in Thừa Thiên show that levels of all kinds – from terrorist incidents to NLF armed attacks – were virtually identical for the month before 1968’s Tet Offensive and the one before 1972’s Easter Offensive.Footnote ¹⁹ A CIA report one month into the Easter Offensive reported damage to pacification programs in places where major fighting was in progress, but also in Bình Định province and in the Mekong Delta. The report observed, “In a short time, the Mekong Delta has changed from the most secure and prosperous part of the country to a source of considerable apprehension.”Footnote ²⁰ Whatever pacification had accomplished does not seem to have affected the raw military capability of the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) or the North Vietnamese at their side.

Figure 5.1 Vietnamese women and children huddle together as US soldiers enter their village (May 12, 1967).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

Uphill Battle

In the early days of CORDS the Americans engaged in what they called Project TAKEOFF, which was an effort to create a more solid footing for a variety of pacification initiatives. This included elements ranging from building more prisons to house enemy suspects, to greater efforts to induce defections from the Liberation Front, to increasing capacity to handle refugees, to police and military support and mounting a dedicated attack on the NLF infrastructure, to land reform. Those things the United States could do on its own moved ahead, albeit with the kinds of internal conflicts within the US mission already mentioned. Those things that depended on the Saigon government did not exactly languish, but they were not pursued with the energy the Americans deemed appropriate. For someone like Robert Komer, whose antics earned him the sobriquet “Blowtorch Bob,” that state of affairs had to be extremely frustrating. But Komer continued to work as a booster for Vietnam pacification, reporting in 1971 that total US/South Vietnamese funding for pacification had mushroomed from $582 million in 1965 to more than $1.5 billion programmed for 1970.Footnote ²¹

The analyst who compiled the portion of The Pentagon Papers which dealt with this aspect of the war trenchantly commented, “the Vietnamese have not yet convinced many people that they attach the same importance to [pacification] as we do.”Footnote ²² This was apparent in many ways, every day. The field agent Frank Scotton, whom superiors sent to take the temperature of South Vietnamese officers on the possibility they might fear the expansion of local militias, found the chief of the army’s Political Warfare Department entirely concerned with being a watchdog for army loyalty.Footnote ²³ A National Intelligence Estimate in January 1969 concluded that “Saigon now seems finally to have accepted the need for a vigorous pacification effort. However progress may still be hampered by the political situation.”Footnote ²⁴

Or take the case of Trần Ngọc Châu, among South Vietnam’s most successful practitioners of the art of pacification, whose efforts had largely succeeded in pacifying Kiến Hòa province in the Mekong Delta. The techniques Colonel Châu pioneered included the “Census Grievance” and “Revolutionary Development” initiatives, which the Americans picked up but which were viewed with suspicion in Saigon – no Saigon leader after Diệm ever showed up in Châu’s province. The CIA funded a school at Vũng Tàu to teach these methods. Châu was taken away from his province to head it. General Nguyễn Đức Thắng, head of a new Ministry for Rural Construction, issued the order, which Châu later decided had really emanated from his American counterparts.Footnote ²⁵ Although he was among the Vietnamese most dedicated to the effort, Châu soon found the CIA and others had completely different recipes for what he should be doing – and they held the purse strings.Footnote ²⁶ He was soon obliged to try and put a Vietnamese face on a student strike by South Vietnamese trainees at the Vũng Tàu school, even while General Thắng was caught in between Saigon pretenders Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu and Nguyễn Cao Kỳ in their power struggle. Kỳ wanted to make Thắng’s ministry the focal point for programs, while Thiệu wanted to locate pacification within the National Police.

A 1967 reshuffle sent Thắng to the Joint General Staff, where he complained that South Vietnamese corps commanders were sabotaging pacification.Footnote ²⁷ In December 1967 a set of province rankings prepared for Ambassador Komer put Châu’s province, Kiến Hòa, so successfully secured in Châu’s time, as the ninth worst among the South’s forty-four provinces. After the Tet Offensive, a CORDS survey ranked it among the most adversely impacted provinces.

The CIA’s historian of pacification identifies a “gradual drift toward conventional operations.” Commenting on versions of the hunter–killer teams that were attacking local NLF, Trần Ngọc Châu found them to be merely improved versions of similar programs Saigon, or the French before that, had run. Châu estimated that, as a rule of thumb, every cadre killing “created at least five new hard-core National Liberation Front supporters, often more.”Footnote ²⁸ That was nevertheless the tactic CORDS proposed, and Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu’s government approved, for neutralizing the NLF apparat in the Phoenix Program.

The Phoenix Program (which the South Vietnamese called Phượng hoàng) sought to weaken the Liberation Front’s administrative structure by arresting or killing NLF operatives in the villages and the higher-up district or province committees. In July 1968 President Thiệu issued a decree establishing the program and locating it within the Saigon bureaucracy. The CIA and Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) assisted with intelligence, training and weapons, small-unit leadership, and advice. Interrogation centers at district and province levels, as well as in Saigon, would develop new information and feed the dossiers that supposedly identified enemy cadres. The interrogations generated attendant charges of torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and other abuses. United States authorities remained uncomfortable with these charges and, when “Vietnamization” became US policy, progressively scaled back their participation. The CIA ended its official support in 1970 although it continued to serve as a conduit for US funds to the South Vietnamese engaged in these activities. A few agency officers continued to liaise with Saigon’s Phượng hoàng apparat. MACV ended the service of its Phoenix advisors in 1971, although in August 1972 more than one hundred military personnel were still helping the Vietnamese in some capacity.

President Thiệu not only approved Phoenix, he also designated goals for the number of NLF cadres to be neutralized, and he located a central bureau for the program within his own office. That changed in May 1970 when Thiệu relocated the Phoenix office within the National Police. The program had to surmount numerous obstacles, including early goals more ambitious than could be handled, a lack of trained lawyers and of prosecutors for those arrested and put on trial, arbitrary criteria for judgment, corruption, limited space to house prisoners, and so on. Building more prisons had been a goal of Project TAKEOFF, the CORDS precursor to Phoenix. Another precursor had been the Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation (ICEX) program, which sought to overcome the biggest obstacle, a lack of detailed knowledge of the NLF apparatus. Creating the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs) was another headache, but ultimately a force of more than 4,400 soldiers was mobilized in units nominally under South Vietnamese command but in practice often led by Americans.

The quality of intelligence remained the most important determinant in the success of Phoenix against the NLF infrastructure. The intelligence remained uneven throughout. Orrin DeForest, a former detective who had joined the CIA and previously worked in Japan, took charge of the spy info for the III Corps region, the portion of South Vietnam that covered the areas outside Saigon and in the Mekong Delta. He believed in classic techniques rather than torture, tricking enemies into revealing key information.Footnote ²⁹ Statistics indeed show that III Corps proved the most successful in neutralizing actual NLF higher-ups rather than just bodies – studies using data from the end of 1970 projected that III Corps, though “neutralizing” about the same proportion of the NLF as other regions, had gotten twice as many cadres ranking at the district level or higher. Over South Vietnam as a whole there were 19,534 neutralizations in 1969 but fewer than 150 were of high-level cadres, and just one was an NLF official Phoenix had specifically targeted. Of 22,341 neutralizations in 1970, high-level cadres more than doubled (to 357) but those eliminated specifically from the NLF hierarchy were reduced (to an estimated 7,800). Considering that these identifications were based upon soft data, that the NLF infrastructure was believed to number between 65,000 and 80,000 people, and that the United States had little understanding of the NLF’s ability to replace its losses, the Phoenix results are indeterminate at best.

In March 1969 the PRUs were designated an element of Saigon’s National Police. By 1971 the CIA station was reporting that the police executive was passive, leaving all decisions back with Saigon’s prime minister. Meanwhile Phoenix became steadily more controversial in the United States, with charges that it was an assassination program.Footnote ³⁰ Hearings in the US Congress challenged William Colby, and the sinister reputation made Phoenix increasingly problematic.Footnote ³¹ At length, as part of Vietnamization, US military personnel were withdrawn from CORDS, Phoenix, and the PRUs. The CIA removed the last of its people in summer 1972. South Vietnam continued Phoenix as the Phượng hoàng program but, judging from the large numbers of Liberation Front agents and supporters who bubbled up from the populace during the last days of Saigon, Saigon’s special effort proved little more successful than the American one.

Counterinsurgency in the Vietnam War ended more or less where it had begun, with the bulk of efforts devoted to security measures. The kinds of social and economic programs that might have gained the loyalty of South Vietnamese peasants were given lip service, and discontinued whenever resources were thin. Corruption diluted whatever was left. Differences between the United States and the Saigon government on the importance of these programs also weakened them. The opportunity to drain the sea in which the guerrilla fish swam was lost. If Saigon was going to emerge victorious from the war that had begun with Ngô Đình Diệm’s repression, that outcome would not be the result of pacification.

The Vietnam War had many beginnings. One of them was a three-story villa of French design that now stands at 606 Đ. Trần Hưng Đạo in Hồ Chí Minh City. Built in the early 1930s at what was then 96 Boulevard Galliéni, the property featured high ceilings and shuttered windows that saturated the interiors with light and vented the heavy, tropical air. Outside, a stately fountain greeted arriving visitors who ascended a broad central staircase to a portico with massive wooden doors. The portico was flanked by elegant curved staircases that swept dramatically around to the front. For the next forty years, the building had a knack for appearing to be more or less than what it was. It looked like a house, but no family ever resided there. It featured a red tile roof and ochre exterior walls – the aesthetic signifiers of French colonial authority – but it was not a government building. Its original occupant did, however, seek to implement a key French colonial policy: the so-called civilizing mission. The Société pour l’amélioration morale, intellectuelle et physique des indigènes de Cochinchine was a state-sanctioned French charity lottery that raised money to “improve” the “moral, intellectual, and physical” stature of Vietnamese people in the southernmost portion of French Indochina. Tenants of the building in the 1940s and early 1950s are unclear. But, as of 1954, the villa housed the US Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), the first Americans dispatched to Vietnam to bolster French and then Vietnamese forces in the fight against communism. In 1962, when Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) replaced MAAG as the American headquarters from which the coming war would be managed, most MACV staff decamped to a five-story office building on Saigon’s leafy Pasteur Street and then to a modern, custom-built complex at Tân Sơn Nhất Air Base on the outskirts of Saigon. The villa, reflecting its age with chipped paint and missing roof tiles, continued as “MACV II” until 1966 or 1967, when it was transferred to Republic of Korea forces. During this period, security imperatives overwhelmed the property, just as they overwhelmed economic and diplomatic efforts to shape South Vietnam. The welcoming fountain disappeared, the curved staircases were straightened, and the decorative perimeter wall ceased to be decorative and became seriously defensive. Photographs of the villa from the 1960s show it surrounded by sandbags, fencing, and barbed wire stacked twenty feet high. War had come to 606 Trần Hưng Đạo.Footnote ¹

The evolution of this little piece of real estate reflects so much of American occupation in South Vietnam. When US officials first toured the property, they surely noted its ample square footage, its safe setback from the street, and the authority its grand staircases and imposing roofline asserted to passing Vietnamese civilians and departing French officials. Like southern Vietnam itself, whose long coastline and natural harbors offered strategic access to Chinese shipping lanes and future Southeast Asian battlefields, the villa suggested a good enough place to begin. Americans then set about continuing the work that the villa’s occupants had performed since its first stone was laid: offering help to rural South Vietnamese people – help that they did not request, in a manner that they did not support – from the comparatively modern confines of a European-style city. Nation-building was the top American priority in South Vietnam at the time, and building a Vietnamese national army to defend the nascent state was but one constituent part of it. In Inventing Vietnam, historian James Carter summarizes the effort: “The projects consisted of installing a president; building a civil service and training bureaucrats around him; creating a domestic economy, currency, and an industrial base; building ports and airfields, hospitals, and schools; dredging canals and harbors to create a transportation grid; constructing an elaborate network of modern roadways; establishing a telecommunications system; and training, equipping, and funding a national police force and a military, among others.”Footnote ² It was an overwhelming to-do list that speaks to the depths of French colonial neglect and the ambition of American policymakers.

Security soon trumped all of these tasks, as Vietnamese resistance to both the Saigon government and the growing US military presence triggered a gradual reconsideration of American priorities. In October 1957, insurgents injured thirteen American servicemen and five civilians in three bombings around Saigon – including one outside the MAAG advisors’ villa.Footnote ³ In the early 1960s, armed resistance continued and accelerated under the aegis of the National Liberation Front (NLF), as North Vietnamese troops began streaming southward in ever greater numbers. The United States responded in kind, escalating its development of South Vietnam, especially ports, roads, and airfields capable of receiving the eventual arrival of American combat troops. Soon the size, scope, and lethality of the US military mission in South Vietnam surpassed what could be managed from an old French villa. For American officials, improvisation gave way to planning, adaptation of existing infrastructure gave way to new construction, and MACV replaced its villa headquarters with a high-tech air force base. For fear that political instability and security threats would topple the Saigon regime, the US military mission overwhelmed American nation-building efforts by 1965, spawning what Carter terms “the paradox of construction and deconstruction.” American military personnel and private contractors built staggering military and civilian infrastructure in just a few years’ time, which the US armed forces, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), Free World Military Forces, the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), and the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) took turns destroying at equally staggering cost.Footnote ⁴ By 1966, the barbed wire that first protected Americans at 606 Trần Hưng Đạo had wound its way deep into the South Vietnamese countryside. There, it entangled millions of impoverished rural people, forcing them to navigate a highly militarized landscape dominated by American soldiers, spaces, and violence.

Little Americas at the Edge of the World

The United States was not alone in militarizing the South Vietnamese countryside, for the region had experienced almost continuous war since 1940 and endured a French military presence for decades before that. According to historian David Biggs, Việt Minh leaders in the Mekong Delta “realized the importance of claiming the slower-moving, everyday routes of movement – footpaths, canals, and creeks – not because this was all they knew but because it gave them advantages over the faster-paced, heavily mechanized forces of the French.” The National Liberation Front continued to rely on this “weblike infrastructure” a generation later.Footnote ⁵ In the 1950s, the regime of South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm “remilitarized” the Central Highlands by developing new ARVN bases and repurposing old French military infrastructure. Cần Lao Party operatives, under the direction of Diệm’s brother Cẩn, used a French bunker complex as a torture and interrogation center that supported a secret police and business network. And throughout South Vietnam, NLF and PAVN forces built networks of trails, roads, tunnels, and defensive positions. Long before American troops arrived in force, villagers in affected areas had learned to navigate military checkpoints and barricades that could lead to interrogation, forced labor, or enlistment for one side or the other.Footnote ⁶

Vietnamese militarization of the Southern landscape was considerable, but American militarization dwarfed it in every respect: size, sophistication, complexity, cost, and waste. American base development in South Vietnam was a spectacular exercise in environmental control, as Navy Seabees and US Army engineers etched firebases into narrow mountaintops and sculpted islands of dry land out of the Mekong Delta’s sodden soil. The decision to create a US base, of any type, was tactical, determined by enemy activity, local geography, and the mission. American bases always started spare, with construction personnel living in tents and exposed to the elements. Security, of people but also hardware, trumped comfort in the early days. But, once perimeters were secure, once the earth was tamped into runways and helipads, then construction priorities shifted to improving living conditions. Next came permanent billets, showers, laundries, and dining facilities, plus stable supplies of electricity and running water. Recreation and retail options were usually last, though command concern about troop morale and local civil–military relations sometimes drove on-post recreational facilities higher up the list of priorities. In relatively secure areas, off-duty soldiers liked to venture into local communities to shop and visit bars and brothels. These sojourns placed American soldiers at risk, more so from crime (drunken fights, getting robbed) than from enemy attack, though insurgents did target businesses patronized by American soldiers throughout the country, throughout the war. Given that only one-third of US forces in Vietnam were true volunteers, commanders were particularly concerned about the effects of boredom and antimilitary sentiment on soldier compliance and job performance. Both troop morale and security were best served, then, by building retail outlets and entertainments on American bases, even on forward bases directly engaged in combat operations. Over time, American bases in South Vietnam developed on a clear trajectory toward more and better: more amenities, better housing, and narrower disparity between warzone living and a stateside quality of life. The result was an archipelago of little Americas on the edge of a frontier that was defined, fluidly, by its proximity to violence.Footnote ⁷

An undated photograph from the archives of the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, the oldest and largest of the Department of Defense’s retail operations, succinctly makes American life in the Vietnam warzone legible.Footnote ⁸ It depicts a US Army soldier in a Vietnam PX in the late 1960s. At first glance, the cramped appearance of the facility indicates that it was a small store, and the soldier’s helmet – a requirement in contested areas but not on rearward bases – suggests not a large base on the coast or near Saigon, but rather a small installation further inland and closer to danger. Though small, the PX was probably very profitable, for comparable facilities sold tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise every month. At the peak of the PX system, the Vietnam Regional Exchange (VRE) managed 310 retail stores and 189 snack bars, and carried more than 3,000 items. With sales in excess of $1.9 billion for fiscal years 1968 to 1972 combined, the Vietnam PX system was effectively the third-largest department store chain in the world.Footnote ⁹

The goods in the photograph are also instructive, of American soldiers’ retail preferences. The soldier stands next to a shelf topped with cases of Juicy Fruit gum and baskets filled with M&Ms and potato chips. In one hand, the soldier manages two cans of Welch’s grape juice and some packets of crackers or cookies. In his other hand, he holds a stack of magazines. The magazine on top, Man Deluxe, promises “A Naked Feast,” a pull-out poster, and “Delicious Nudes!” In its cover image, a topless blonde woman kneels seductively on a chair. The soldier’s purchases (and the photograph of Planters Old Fashioned Peanut Candy that some concerned VRE staffer airbrushed into the photograph to conceal the pinup’s naked breasts) are entirely consistent with PX sales trends in Vietnam. In 1967, two years before US troop strength peaked, VRE was importing 120,000,000 pounds of consumer goods per month to meet American soldiers’ needs, including 260,000 cans of peanut products. The “nudie magazine” was one of millions sold to GIs in Vietnam, yielding $12,000,000 in annual sales. Behind the soldier in the photograph is a wall of suitcases, another common purchase, with VRE selling up to 300,000 pieces of luggage each year. American soldiers needed new luggage to cart home the purchases they made in the warzone, including souvenirs, custom-tailored clothing, and high-end consumer goods such as jewelry, watches, and cameras purchased at significant discount (relative to stateside prices) from the PX or its companion catalog. The US military’s generous “hold baggage” policy also provided free shipping for large items such as furniture, appliances, and stereo systems. Taken together, the PX system and myriad command policies affirmed that US troops in Vietnam were likely to carry home significantly more personal property than they arrived with at the start of their tours. The ability to shop was the linchpin of morale-building initiatives on US bases, making consumption a strange yet essential part of the American Vietnam War experience.Footnote ¹⁰

Depending on where the shopping soldier was stationed, his leisure hours were likely filled with copious amounts of alcohol. The US military’s beer ration allowed a soldier to purchase up to five cases per month, plus there was no limit on drinking at open mess clubs, the soldier-run drinking establishments (often with slot machines and live adult entertainment) that mushroomed throughout the occupation.Footnote ¹¹ At the system’s peak, more than 2,000 open mess clubs on US bases in South Vietnam generated an annual gross income of $177 million.Footnote ¹² There were wholesome forms of recreation, too, with the US Army building more than 1,300 athletic facilities by 1971. Most were graded fields and multiuse athletic courts, but they also included swimming pools, bowling allies, and golf courses. Day rooms, dark rooms, craft shops, libraries, entertainment centers (some with repertory theater companies), indoor and outdoor movie theaters, on-post steam baths and massage parlors (run by Vietnamese contractors), and recreational beaches rounded out the military’s war on boredom.Footnote ¹³

Though the soldier in the photograph is augmenting his diet with snacks, the US Army’s massive food program, which served all branches of the US armed forces in South Vietnam, tried to keep him well fed. The army’s model menu provided each diner with 4,500 calories per day, and 90 percent of meals served in Vietnam were hot, even if they had to be airlifted by helicopter to men in the field.Footnote ¹⁴ The US Army’s food effort involved erecting a dozen field bakeries to provide fresh-baked bread, with the largest capable of producing 180,000 loaves per day. Two private US dairy firms built plants in South Vietnam that were capable of processing 1.4 million gallons of milk, 160,000 gallons of cottage cheese, and 2 million gallons of ice cream for American soldiers every month. The US Army moved so much perishable food through the warzone that the largest American-built structure in all of South Vietnam was a massive cold storage warehouse in Quy Nhơn the size of six football fields.Footnote ¹⁵

The photo of the shopping soldier provides a window into the material conditions of daily life for Americans in Vietnam, but it also hints at the challenges of warzone military service. The soldier is a young man, but he looks tired. His uniform is big on him, suggesting he may have lost weight, as soldiers did on remote bases where they performed manual labor in stifling heat. (Soldiers on rearward bases in sedentary jobs tended to gain weight.) He also looks vaguely stunned – presumably the surprise of a flashbulb going off in his face while picking up sundries at the PX. But, given the capriciousness of the draft, a lot of American soldiers were stunned – to find themselves in the military, let alone in Vietnam, where they faced a year of soul-crushing challenges: monotony, military discipline, degrading tasks, awareness that stateside friends and family were moving on without them, proximity to violence, and an oppressive uncertainty about the future. Given the lack of control they must have felt, is it any wonder that GIs sought to exercise a little dominion over their lives by making choices in how to spend their paychecks? This juice, that magazine, this camera, that stereo – choosing what to consume made Vietnam seem a little more like home.

Some truths of the Vietnam warzone lay beyond the edges of a single photograph. Perhaps the most American aspect of US bases in South Vietnam was how they reflected and enshrined inequality. Just as regional, class, and racial disparities affected income and standards of living in the United States, these factors translated into disparities among the American soldiery in Vietnam. Bases most subject to enemy assault were the least well developed, so soldiers serving in contested areas suffered greater danger but also greater deprivation than personnel stationed in the rear. Militaries are inherently hierarchical and therefore classist, so officers (who were disproportionately white) always lived better than enlisted personnel stationed at the same installation. Race and class also played decisive roles in where and how soldiers served in the Vietnam War. Poor men who lacked formal education were more likely to serve in combat roles in contested areas. Until the army made major policy adjustments in 1968, African Americans were overrepresented among the ranks of the infantry. They also had fewer opportunities to advance in rank or access skilled assignments that would keep them safe. Due to inequities in the draft’s design, wealthy and well-educated men were unlikely to serve in the military at all, let alone in Vietnam. For example, of more than 29,000 graduates of Harvard, MIT, and Princeton’s undergraduate programs between 1962 and 1972, only twenty died in Vietnam. Meanwhile, poorer Americans were 68 percent more likely to die in Vietnam than richer Americans.Footnote ¹⁶ The American war machine could deliver on-post security in most places, most of the time, and it could deliver consumer goods and ice cream to the farthest corners of South Vietnam. But it could not create fairness or consistency for American military personnel. They counted down the days until they could return to “the World,” in constant and full awareness that the warzone’s deprivation was not equitably distributed, that its suffering was not universally shared.

The Collision of Wealth, Waste, and Poverty in South Vietnam

American military personnel may have regarded one another with envy – support personnel expressed respect bordering on awe for combat troops, while combat troops deeply resented so-called REMFs (“rear echelon motherfuckers”) for the relative comfort and safety that they enjoyed. But they united in shock and dismay at Vietnamese poverty, especially in rural areas. “I still can’t believe how these people live,” Paul Kelly wrote to his mother in 1969. “They’re just like animals. Way out in the middle of nowhere. There isn’t even a road for miles. It’s all just unused rice paddies,” he conveyed with a cruel and truly American understanding of “unused.” For John Dabonka, rural Vietnamese poverty was a lesson in gratitude. “I’m real glad I have what I have,” he wrote his parents. “It seems poor to you maybe, and you want new things because you think our house doesn’t look good, but after seeing the way these people live, there’s no comparison. We are more than millionaires to these people – they have nothing.” Sharing Kelly’s dismay, but not his contempt, Dabonka concluded, “I can’t see how people can live like this.”Footnote ¹⁷

The aesthetics of Vietnamese poverty were one thing, the consequences quite another. David Donovan, who served on an advisory compound in the Mekong Delta, recounts a horrifying story of preventable illness in his memoir. Twice, a mother brought her baby to the compound for assistance. The baby was covered with infected ringworm lesions, because the mother could not afford soap and firewood to boil water. The advisors provided a bar of soap and a shot of penicillin to address the baby’s secondary bacterial infection, but they did not have anthelmintic drugs to kill the ringworm. On the mother’s second visit, the baby she carried in her arms was dead.Footnote ¹⁸ Donovan’s story is a testament to US military priorities in South Vietnam, and also to the limits of American power: American advisors could summon an airstrike to kill insurgents, but they could not provide medication to kill worms. And they had no means to address the region’s crippling poverty, a key factor that drove South Vietnamese people to support the revolution, which promised land redistribution and modern improvements in rural areas after the war was over.

The United States did not create poverty in South Vietnam, but the US occupation certainly exacerbated it. By relying on massive firepower to disrupt the activities of the NLF and PAVN forces, the US military rendered much of South Vietnam’s countryside too unsafe for civilians to remain in their homes. As David Hunt’s study of Mỹ Tho shows, the war’s violence arrived in rural areas like a churning tide, casting about people who had tended the same plots of land for generations. Fear of American bombs caused some peasants to leave their villages, where homes were clustered together, and build isolated “field huts” in the middle of their paddies. (A single hut was a less enticing target for US Air Force spotters.) Others moved into government-run “new life” (strategic) hamlets, where they were safe from both American bombs and insurgent retaliation, but they were forced to service the hamlet itself, and they became dependent on short-lived government largesse to survive. Some families split up, with one or two members remaining behind in the ancestral family home while the rest moved to field huts or even to new locales in search of work. It was common for family members not to see one another for years.Footnote ¹⁹

The violence in the countryside had profound effects on South Vietnamese life, as one-third of South Vietnam’s population became displaced at some point during the war. South Vietnam went from being a primarily rural society to being a primarily urban one in just a few years, as millions of rural people took their chances on cities for the first time. The South Vietnamese economy also shifted from a primarily agricultural economy, in which 90 percent of the population were subsistence farmers, to a service economy that catered to Americans and wealthy Vietnamese. As journalist Philip Jones Griffiths observed in his 1971 polemic Vietnam Inc., “The only industry that exists in Vietnam is the ‘servicing’ of Americans,” because they were the largest group with disposable income.Footnote ²⁰ Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people took jobs on American bases at one time or another. Women with education provided clerical support in American offices, but displaced farmers – primarily women, youths, and elderly people, since most able-bodied men were in military service for one side or the other – had only their strength to sell. They lined up outside bases each morning hoping to be selected for a day’s work digging trenches, filling sandbags, and performing unskilled labor as needed to keep American spaces tidy and secure. Others found a living in providing services directly to American soldiers. On post, “hooch maids” cleaned barracks, did laundry, and shined boots for $5 per soldier per month. Off post, Vietnamese people of all ages peddled wares, from handicrafts to heroin. Bars, car washes, and massage parlors offered steady employment providing legitimate services to American soldiers, but these businesses were also deeply entangled in the sex trade. Work of any kind was scarce, so a single Vietnamese worker – whether typist or professional girlfriend – might support a dozen family members. It was a fragile existence, with little hope of future prosperity but preferable to dying in an airstrike.

The services Vietnamese people provided to Americans situated their poverty alongside unimaginable abundance, divided by a hard boundary that American officials policed with vigor. Inflation in South Vietnam was rampant, with the cost of rice (a principal economic indicator) rising 385 percent between 1965 and 1970.Footnote ²¹ The spending of American soldiers on the Vietnamese economy was a primary driver of inflation, which US officials addressed by creating dining, entertainment, and retail options to confine American spending to American bases. But US officials also tackled inflation at the expense of impoverished “local national workers.” They set their wages below market rate, then supplemented the artificially low wages with rice. Americans further contributed to Vietnamese poverty by coming down hard on workers accused of “theft.” Vietnamese kitchen staff might scrape “from a single troop’s discarded tray enough to live on for a week in the Vietnamese scheme of things,” as one American veteran recalled.Footnote ²² But if they took even one soggy hamburger bun home, they would be fired. American military police searched Vietnamese workers for pilfered items before they left US bases, even items pulled from the garbage. Even garbage outside American bases was off-limits to Vietnamese scavengers, who combed American dumps for any item that could be used, eaten, or sold. This scavenging could theoretically benefit insurgents, who fashioned discarded canteens and spent shell casings into lanterns and improvised explosive devices. But more commonly, desperate people compiled bits of aluminum to recycle for cash, or they used discarded materials to build improvised shelters. Some base commanders booby-trapped the dumps or set them ablaze to discourage this behavior. The United States preached initiative, self-reliance, and the acquisition of property to Vietnamese people as part of its nation-building efforts. Then it punished them for doing just that.Footnote ²³

The war’s violence, displacement, and inflation met with American exploitation to degrade Vietnamese people and, in turn, their culture. Traditional Vietnamese culture revered learning, prized chastity, honored the elderly, and emphasized duty to family. The sacred obligation to family was the last to go, as Vietnamese people did what they must to sustain their loved ones. In her memoir, Dương Vân Mai Elliott recalls how urban, elite South Vietnamese lamented “that the American presence had turned society upside-down”:

Jones Griffiths documented this inversion of values in Vietnam Inc. His photographs capture disturbing scenes of Vietnamese debasement: prostitutes soliciting customers on the street, adolescent boys working as pimps, child pickpockets rifling through off-duty soldiers’ pockets, elderly people warehoused in Catholic-run institutions, children collecting discarded Budweiser cans by the hundreds from an American dump, families living in shacks made from soggy C-ration boxes, and displaced people using a Đà Nẵng graveyard as a communal toilet. “Prevailing economic conditions make it necessary for most Vietnamese to steal, simply to live,” Jones Griffiths explains. “The closer they are to the Americans with their ‘waste economy,’ the easier it becomes.”Footnote ²⁵ In her memoir, Elliott similarly observes otherwise good people rationalizing their actions. “Taking from Americans was not really wrong, first of all because they were foreigners and normal ethical principles need not be applied to them, and, second, because they had so much that they would not miss what they lost.”Footnote ²⁶ Elliott’s observation was prescient, for the United States poured nearly a trillion dollars into the Vietnam War, yet it failed to achieve its principal objective: an enduring, independent, noncommunist South Vietnam. The loss of American life, though, was surely noticed – and deeply felt – by the American public. But American material abundance in South Vietnam hardly drew care or critique in the United States, to say nothing of remembrance, even though American soldiers were dying for it.

Abundance versus Austerity in the Vietnam War

Though the American public recalls the Vietnam War principally through combat operations and regards the iconic Vietnam War experience as that of an infantryman humping the boonies, the numbers tell a different story. The American way of war requires a robust logistical apparatus to facilitate the combat arms’ lethality, complicating efforts to fight efficiently. US forces’ “tooth to tail” ratio in Vietnam was lopsided throughout the war. In the early 1960s, when US efforts focused on hardscaping the Vietnamese landscape in anticipation of wider war, construction battalions, private military contractors, and officers charged with advising South Vietnamese forces dramatically outnumbered American troops capable of producing violence. As US involvement escalated between 1965 and 1967, the increase in American combat troops triggered a disproportionate increase in the number of American support personnel. By 1967, only 49,500, or about 10.5 percent, of more than 473,000 American troops in South Vietnam were infantry. Combat support personnel – artillerymen, combat engineers, and airmen – comprised an additional 14 percent. The vast majority of US troops – 75 percent – were combat service support. They cooked food, repaired appliances, facilitated communication, provided entertainment, moved paper, and otherwise managed what went where. The ratio continued to widen, with support and administrative personnel topping 90 percent in 1972, when only 2,400 of the remaining 50,000 American troops in South Vietnam were capable of fighting the enemy on the ground. As historian Michael Clodfelter concludes, “The United States tried to fight a war in Indochina with eight times as many clerks, cooks, truck drivers, and telephone operators as grunts, cannon-cockers, tankers, and other combat personnel.”Footnote ²⁷ American technology and firepower enabled a relatively small concentration of combat troops to inflict staggering damage on Vietnamese people and property, but securing South Vietnam’s long-term future proved elusive.

As striking as the statistics are, the relatively low number of American combat troops was not the problem, as evidenced by their ability to cause high North Vietnamese, insurgent, and civilian casualties. Rather, the problem was the high number of support personnel, whose presence in the warzone complicated civil–military relations and siphoned critical resources away from the shooting war. The abundance with which American troops were kitted addressed, but did not resolve, low soldier morale. At the same time, it was a heavy drain, necessitating incredible resources to ensure its security, which in turn affected local Vietnamese people. As American bases expanded in area, perimeters required increasing numbers of troops to guard them. As US forces occupied more territory, roads and bridges required constant maintenance to resupply them. And the materiel circulating throughout the warzone – the weapons, ammunition, equipment, MREs (meals ready-to-eat or field rations), and gasoline that supplied the shooting war, but also the beer, perishable food, consumer goods, and entertainments designed to insulate American military personnel from hardship – required US soldiers to prevent theft or destruction. At the same time, the US occupation had devastating effects. A nearby American base might mean security for villagers who feared the NLF and jobs for those displaced from their land. But that base also foretold combat operations that dispensed indiscriminate violence, local markets dominated not by affordable necessities but by expensive black-market goods, and the proliferation of bars and brothels to service American soldiers. The American war machine drove South Vietnamese people to support the revolution, or at least to withhold their support from the Saigon government, which amounted to the same thing. The process was both cyclical and spiral: the resources with which the United States fought the war necessitated ever greater resources to protect them. The larger the American footprint in South Vietnam, the more difficult the campaign to win Vietnamese hearts and minds.

Figure 6.1 A shopper carrying merchandise purchased on the black market, which traded in US Army–issue items as well as general American goods (August 15, 1970).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

The 101st Airborne Division’s security plan for a performance of a United Services Organization (USO) show at the Phu Bai Eagle Bowl, a massive outdoor amphitheater, demonstrated American military capabilities and priorities in action. Titled “Project Denton Beauty,” the base commander named the plan for the show’s star attraction, Miss America Phyllis George, who hailed from Denton, Texas. With a crowd estimated at 8,300 US servicemen, the security plan’s first priority was safely funneling area soldiers into the venue by deploying military police to direct traffic and conduct spot-checks of audience members for weapons and explosives. Project Denton Beauty also addressed external base security to protect both the audience and performers from enemy attack. Plan elements included aerial reconnaissance flights and ground patrols to detect enemy activity in the greater Huế–Phú Bài area, aerial rocket artillery fire to suppress enemy forces, three helicopters and a medic on standby to evacuate Miss America in the event of enemy attack, and a “chase team” of helicopters and combat units to pursue hostile forces.Footnote ²⁸ These resources – the envy of PLAF or PAVN troops who lacked airpower, transportation, and a steady supply of ammunition – provided security only during the show. The show itself demanded additional resources: an enormous plot of land sculpted into a US base, seating for 8,000 people, a full-service stage with dressing rooms, sophisticated sound and lighting systems, transportation and housing for the performers, and reliable utilities to pull it all off. Miss America’s performance at the Eagle Bowl was among the grandest productions on the entertainment circuit in South Vietnam, but the circuit itself was vast. The USO sponsored some 5,500 performances during the war, and the US Army’s Special Services sponsored thousands more. Whether elective or essential for morale, these entertainments exacted a cost: soldiers and airmen risked their lives to keep audiences and entertainers safe.

The broader American security effort in South Vietnam enjoyed mixed success. On the one hand, Miss America and the vast majority of entertainers who toured the warzone experienced nothing of the shooting war. (The same could be said of most American military personnel.) On the other hand, US forces were often powerless to prevent war materiel from going astray. A robust black market developed alongside the capitalist, consumerist economy American policymakers hoped to build, as black marketeers purchased, peddled, and stole for profit, politics, or a bit of both. American logisticians’ “push” method of supply, which flooded South Vietnam with goods, created two areas of opportunity for criminals and insurgents alike: ports and trucks. In South Vietnam’s ports, the United States imported more war materiel than port workers could efficiently unload, leaving shipping containers stacked up and largely unguarded for weeks at a time. Once supplies were offloaded at South Vietnam’s ports, private contractors drove them up-country in convoys of heavy trucks, including eighteen-wheelers. The US Army provided security to prevent hijackings en route, but goods still disappeared at a staggering rate. Cornelius Hawkridge, a security employee of Equipment Incorporated,Footnote ²⁹ conducted his own informal investigation of corruption in South Vietnam, culminating in testimony before a US Senate subcommittee. He reported an incident in which one convoy, despite having a US military escort, lost forty-two of sixty-eight truckloads of cement in one night.Footnote ³⁰ Profits, not patriotism, account for the trucking contractors’ indifference to their losses: US taxpayers insured 100 percent of private shipping in the warzone.

Missing cement was not the half of it. Missing gasoline, stolen from private stores but also from the US military’s fuel supply, was a problem throughout the war. In 1971, the US Army provost marshal reported the illegal “diversion” of 1.3 million gallons (4.9 million liters) of fuel from US military stockpiles into the civilian economy in the Saigon area alone.Footnote ³¹ In 1969, Life magazine reported that 10–12 percent of all cargo transported in South Vietnam by a single trucking company was lost to pilferage or hijacking in 1967 and 1968. Life’s interviews with American contractors also reveal startling information about the 1968 Tet Offensive: “just before the Tet offensive, hijacking of C-rations and medical supplies reached an all-time high.” As one American transport foreman put it, “When the Tet offensive came, we fed ’em, shot ’em and then we provided the medicine to treat ’em.”Footnote ³² US military authorities knew the danger the black market posed, because they constantly entreated American servicemen not to participate. As a typical GI newspaper warned readers, “In effect, the money you place on the black market could purchase the weapon used to kill you.”Footnote ³³ Hawkridge, an ardent anticommunist himself, questioned whether a war so corrupt was worth fighting. American military personnel died providing security for goods transported through the warzone. When military commanders wrote to grieving mothers about their sons’ sacrifices, Hawkridge wondered, did the letter “say that their son had gladly given his life for twenty thousand cocktail shakers?”Footnote ³⁴

For all the abundance the United States could direct toward soldier morale and the war effort, the United States’ ARVN ally operated primarily from a position of scarcity. To be sure, the United States spent billions trying to recruit, train, equip, and support the ARVN, but that investment did not often reach the average ARVN soldier. The Saigon government relied on an oppressive draft to staff its armed forces, which deprived impoverished rural families of essential support from their sons for years on end. Conditions on active duty were bad. ARVN barracks were overcrowded and poorly maintained, and ARVN soldiers reported that they seldom had enough to eat, which contributed to high rates of illness. Medical care was inadequate, especially for those injured in combat. Adding insult to literal injury, ARVN soldiers had the cost of food deducted from their pay, which was so low to begin with that food alone accounted for one-third of their annual salaries. Perhaps most concerning, ARVN training usually consisted of being read to from American manuals. Infantrymen sometimes drilled with broomsticks, and combat training seldom involved live-fire exercises. The first time many ARVN soldiers fired their weapons was in actual combat, when their lives depended on it. As a result of these deficiencies, which were compounded by inadequate political education, ARVN soldiers suffered terrible morale, which in turn led to poor performance in the field and devastating rates of desertion.Footnote ³⁵

And what of the revolution’s soldiers and supporters? How did American abundance sit with them? Most obviously, it meant that US forces could direct incomprehensible firepower at even a lone NLF insurgent, a practice that spared American life but led to astonishing Vietnamese civilian casualties. Civilian casualties in turn stirred anger toward American and Saigon soldiers, while civilian displacement affirmed the revolution’s messaging about South Vietnam’s lopsided distribution of wealth. Indirectly, the American presence altered the contours of South Vietnamese life in ways that tended to benefit the revolution. The proliferation of Western consumer goods, even in rural areas, shifted Vietnamese customs and aesthetics: modern clothing, contemporary music, long hair for men, big hair for women, and, for the wealthy, surgically altered eyelids that offered a more Caucasian appearance.Footnote ³⁶ The alteration of Vietnamese culture further underscored the urgent need to drive the “foreign aggressors” from Vietnam, because Vietnamese identity itself was at stake. Ultimately, American success or failure in the war did not rest on the production of violence – at which US forces excelled – but rather on the United States’ ability to win the support of the Vietnamese people. Prioritizing the shooting war impoverished efforts that could have – in theory, if implemented thoroughly and without corruption – created generalized prosperity, instead of fast fortunes for South Vietnamese elites.

Compared to the decadence and corruption of South Vietnam’s ruling class and the wealth of the American occupier, the asceticism of the average North Vietnamese or NLF recruit was both pronounced and politically charged. The revolution’s soldiers usually shared their ARVN counterparts’ lean material circumstances. PAVN and PLAF fighters were lightly equipped with materiel carried overland via the Trường Sơn (Hồ Chí Minh) Trail or smuggled into South Vietnam by boat. The choice to throw a grenade or fire a rocket was made carefully, given the difficulty of resupply. Food was often inadequate. North Vietnamese forces had to forage on the march, and insurgents planted cassava to survive. Medical care lagged far behind what American or even ARVN units could provide, given the lack of timely evacuation from the battlefield. The revolution’s field hospitals and clinics lacked medications, equipment, and power, with some determined medical staff peddling bicycles to power lights for surgery. For seriously injured soldiers whose war was over, the return to North Vietnam meant being carried on a litter for a thousand miles. North Vietnam also deployed an army of porters, laborers, and ordnance disposal specialists to keep Trường Sơn Trail traffic moving in remote areas. Young women returned from years of dangerous nighttime work “hairless with ghostly white eyes” and sterile from malnutrition and disease. Malaria plagued fighters and support workers at such high rates that it was not regarded as a serious malady. The constant threat of American bombs, artillery, and soldiers took its toll. And yet, Vietnamese insurgents and fighters – hunted, hungry, and homesick – did not want for belief. Their enduring morale was sustained through relentless propaganda that North Vietnam’s youth had imbibed since infancy. Heavy emphasis on political education, even in the field (PAVN and PLAF units commonly had a political officer), forged a strong sense of purpose that was strengthened through shared struggle. Vietnamese people who sacrificed for the revolution believed that they had righteousness on their side.Footnote ³⁷

In contrast, US military authorities ceded the moral high ground to the insurgency by shooting and spending lavishly, to prevent American casualties and sustain the morale of American troops – or so it appeared, from the perspective of Vietnamese people whom both sides were trying to sway. The import of this strategy was not lost on insurgent leaders. Vietnamese scholar Nguyễn Khắc Viện describes the role that austerity – abundance’s foil – played in winning adherents to the revolution. For decades, communist militants used the essay “Let’s Change Our Methods of Work” as a manual for how the Southern cadres should comport themselves. Originally published by Hồ Chí Minh under the penname “XYZ” in October 1947, the essay leverages familiar Confucian concepts to explain revolutionary virtues in commonsense terms, the better to appeal to a broad Vietnamese audience. For example, “Let’s Change Our Methods of Work” instructs people to lead lives of simplicity and virtue. The ideal cadre “will not hesitate to be the first to endure hardship and the last to enjoy happiness. That is why he will not covet wealth and honor, nor fear hardship and suffering, nor be afraid to fight those in power.” Viện explains further, “Having integrity [the Confucian concept of liêm] means not coveting status or wealth, not seeking an easy life or not willing to be flattered by others.” In a related essay, Hồ Chí Minh elaborates – pointedly, given the disparity in resources between French and Việt Minh forces at the time – on the relationship between frugality and integrity: “Lavish spending begets greediness.”Footnote ³⁸ Through this messaging, communist leaders made a literal virtue of necessity, which was essential given their impossible task, of resisting an enemy with limitless resources. The rank and file heard them. “Everybody in the world, not the Vietnamese alone, knows that America is a rich country and has all modern weapons,” explained a captured insurgent. “But modern weapons do not make the United States win this war … I think this war will last a long time and the Vietnamese people will certainly win it. The Americans are engaged in an aggressive war which is nonrighteous and they will lose it.”Footnote ³⁹

He was right. The United States lost the war, in that it failed to achieve its political objectives. And yet loss seems to define the Vietnam War, on all sides. South Vietnamese people suffered a loss of identity, as urban Vietnamese culture twisted itself into a simulacrum of American culture that emphasized individualism, consumption (especially of Western brands), and Western aesthetics. Some South Vietnamese people suffered a loss of country when the Republic of Vietnam ceased to exist in the spring of 1975. Vietnamese people on both sides of the 17th parallel lost homes, farms, businesses, and the autonomy those possessions afford. They lost time – years – to spend with family as the war pulled them apart. They lost access to family tombs where they honored their ancestors, they lost loved ones in this life, and they lost their own lives. The losses pile up, one atop the other, so high that it is difficult to discern a victory emerging from the stack. It is also difficult to discern a lesson emerging from the war. Perhaps it is this: Vietnamese people fought with everything they had to repel the “American aggressors” from their country, yet their country lay in ruins after. The United States fought with but a fraction of its wealth yet still managed to saturate South Vietnam with military hardware, consumer goods, and violence. It was simultaneously too much and not enough: too much to defend South Vietnam without altering it irrevocably, yet not enough to silence Vietnamese resistance once and for all.

Coda

The Vietnam War had many endings: the big ones in 1973 and 1975, but also millions of little ones, as individuals succumbed to their injuries, as survivors finally made their way home. When it was all over, the United States left behind so much infrastructure and investment in South Vietnam that it continued to sustain Vietnamese people decades later. In 2006, my dad and I visited the remnants of LZ English (near Bồng Sơn), a mid-sized base where he spent six months late in the war. All traces of the base’s buildings were gone, but the airstrip was beautifully intact, as if prepared to receive a planeload of American supplies and reinforcements at any moment. The locals were using the airstrip to dry cassava, which was laid out in large, tidy squares. A pack of children on colorful bicycles joyfully cruised the level pavement of the wider turnaround, stopping every now and then to eye us foreigners with wariness and amusement from a distance.

A full understanding of the Vietnam War must come to grips with the wartime role played by Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces, often referred to by the more restrictive name of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). While most of the first generation of histories of the war either chose to write off the ARVN and the state it served as bumbling and doomed to failure, recent historiography has taken a longer and more international view of Vietnam’s civil war. New scholarship, focusing on topics as wide-ranging as the nature of the Ngô Đình Diệm regime, to studies of allied efforts at counterinsurgency, to the military role played by Vietnamese women, has transformed our understanding of the Vietnam War and has placed the Vietnamese squarely into the center of that understanding. Within that broader framework, the role of the ARVN in the war is often addressed, which is understandable given that the ARVN was so heavily politicized that it and the South Vietnamese state apparatus were very nearly one and the same. But there are very few works that directly address what the ARVN was, why it was, and why it was seemingly so unsuccessful.

It can be argued that the ARVN was the most critical player in the Vietnam War. An “American victory” in the war was only possible if the ARVN learned to translate battlefield success into strategic sustainability in the service of a South Vietnamese state that had earned the loyalty of its people. Toward that end, Americans could win battles, but could not win the war. South Vietnam and its military had to be able to survive once the Americans returned home. Given the historically dim view of the ARVN’s capabilities, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that the war was hopeless and that the United States had simply “backed the wrong Vietnamese.” But the case was far from simple. The ARVN was at war for the entirety of its existence, from 1955 to 1975, never knowing a day of peace. During its tumultuous history the ARVN certainly suffered its share of ignominious failures, from Ấp Bắc in 1963 to Phạm Vӑn Đính’s infamous surrender at Camp Carroll in 1972. There were also, however, many moments of martial glory, from the recapture of the Huế Citadel in Tet 1968 to the stand at An Lộc in 1972.

The ARVN was huge, numbering more than a million men toward the end of the conflict in a nation that contained a total population of only 18 million souls. As the most functional organ of the state, the ARVN in some ways became the state, with its power reaching down from Saigon and into villages and hamlets. In its war the ARVN lost more than 200,000 dead, and perhaps four times that many wounded. About one in every five soldiers, which translates to nearly one in every twenty adult males in the country, were killed or wounded in the ARVN’s service.Footnote ¹ It is evident that the ARVN fought long and hard, although not always well, in the service of its country. Its service indicates that, while there were famously major sources of resistance to the hamfisted rule of South Vietnam’s government, a deep reservoir of military support for a noncommunist nationalism existed in the new country. Although the ARVN eventually cracked under the pressure, its role in the Vietnam War was central, and it was not merely doomed to failure. Understanding what the ARVN was as well as what it was not is key to understanding the Vietnam War’s eventual outcome.

Coming to grips with the ARVN as an institution, a practitioner of war, and a social driver is a subject best suited to a series of books and a new historiography. This short chapter can only begin to address some of the main questions of the ARVN’s complex history and perhaps pose new questions that might spark future inquiry. Consequently this chapter will first focus on who and what the ARVN was, looking at manpower and ideology. Next the chapter will move into the realm of the ARVN’s kinetic abilities both in the war for the “hearts and minds” of the people and in the big-unit war of search and destroy. Within these two basic areas – of the ARVN as an institution and as a military tool – are keys to understanding both the ARVN’s manifest military abilities and its eventual downfall.

Who and What the ARVN Was

History matters in Vietnam, a land in which the nation’s glorious martial past is learned by every schoolchild and where families revere their long-departed ancestors. Both the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam) and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN, or North Vietnam) did their utmost to tie their causes directly to Vietnam’s storied history, attempting to create linkages to everyone from the Trung Sisters (Hai Bà Trưng) to Emperor Nguyễn Huệ Huệ to cloak their causes in historic legitimacy. As regards Vietnam’s more recent past, the communists’ task was decidedly easier. While brutal and often divisive, Hồ Chí Minh and the Việt Minh could claim legitimacy as victorious freedom fighters against both the Japanese and the French. The ARVN’s claims, though, were harder to stake, a problem that would dog both South Vietnam and its military for the entirety of the war.

The ARVN was saddled with the societal albatross of being a direct descendant of French colonial forces in Vietnam. During their colonial heyday the French had created indigenous units to serve alongside their own forces in Vietnam. Given little authority or independence, these indigenous units held only a limited appeal to a colonized people. Reeling from World War II, and facing the rise of the Việt Minh, the French altered their ruling structure in Vietnam in 1950, beginning the process of helping to raise and train the Vietnamese National Army (VNA) to serve and help legitimize the newly “independent” Vietnam ruled by Emperor Bảo Đại. The new VNA would stand alongside units of the French army in the ongoing struggle against the Việt Minh. Unlike French army units, which were made up of a blend of troops from both France and its many other colonies, the VNA was meant to be a purely Vietnamese affair, a force of local Vietnamese rallied to the anticommunist cause.

A draft call went out to fill the ranks of the new army, but most of the VNA’s officers and men initially were drawn from volunteerism and the indigenous colonial units. Little has been written on the fascinating history of the VNA, which served a hybrid colonial state as the French were arguably looking to wind down their empire. The Vietnamese who served in the VNA, and fought against the Việt Minh, did so for a variety of reasons. Most saw Bảo Đại and the hereditary imperial house as the best truly Vietnamese option to a waning French colonialism. Others were driven by a dislike and distrust of communism and its avowed atheism.Footnote ² Historic linkages to Vietnam’s imperial glory and an aversion to intrusion by the European philosophy of Marxism were powerful cards to play in the important game of legitimacy, but there still remained the problem of the VNA’s service alongside the French, who were not going down in Vietnam without a fight.

The VNA was arguably only just hitting its military stride by the time of the French defeat at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954, having expanded to a force of more than 200,000.Footnote ³ By that stage in the conflict the VNA was much more reliant on the draft and, since it mainly fought alongside and was dependent on the French, had only a rudimentary general staff, no artillery, no heavy armor, no logistic capability, and few Vietnamese officers above the rank of lieutenant. At the close of the French Indochina War, some VNA members simply went home, while others defected to the Việt Minh. For many, though, especially those officers who had trained at Đà Lạt (the Vietnamese National Military Academy) and the enlisted men raised after the waning of French power, a true sense of Vietnamese nationalism – noncommunist nationalism – remained.Footnote ⁴

As the Republic of Vietnam struggled to coalesce in its early days, and as newly arrived Americans jostled for positions of power, the ARVN rose from the ashes of the VNA. The ARVN’s lineage allowed the communists to tar the ARVN with the claim that it was merely a fossil of French colonialism. But, especially early in the new war, the ARVN had a real chance to seize the mantle of being a nationalist, noncommunist alternative to the Việt Minh. From the Catholic minority, to believers in democracy, to student activists, to Buddhist monks, to Cao Đài adherents, to newspaper editors – there was a wealth of potential support for a noncommunist answer to Vietnam’s problems of independence and unity. Both South Vietnam and the ARVN had to seize the moment quickly, though, because their Việt Minh adversaries had a considerable headstart both in terms of legitimacy and motivation.

In the early years of the Vietnam War, before it had morphed into an American war and a superpower conflict, South Vietnam fought a lower-level form of warfare, one that was arguably more locally sustainable given the country’s agrarian wet-rice agriculture economy. While there was already great pressure from the Americans to create an ARVN that prosecuted a First World manpower- and firepower-heavy style of warfare, the ARVN, although it looked Western, was still something that Vietnamese history would recognize. In 1960 the ARVN counted 150,000 troops, fewer than the total that had once served in the VNA.Footnote ⁵ There was compulsory military service for males age 20–22, who owed the nation an eighteen-month commitment.Footnote ⁶ Roughly half of the soldiers were volunteers, and their military commitment was as yet well within the societal realities of a country, the vast majority of whose citizens still worked in the very labor-intensive vocation of rice production.Footnote ⁷ It was in these early days of the Vietnam War, when volunteerism was still high, that the ARVN had its best opportunity to seize a nationalist mantle.

Much of my research on the ARVN has centered on the lives of two of its young stars: Phạm Vӑn Đính, who rose to command of a regiment by 1972 before eventually surrendering in the Easter Offensive and defecting, and Trần Ngọc Huế, who achieved the rank of battalion commander by the time of the Lam Sơn 719 invasion of Laos, was captured, and served thirteen years in prison before emigrating to the United States.Footnote ⁸ My research has also included interviews with many ARVN veterans who served with either Đính or Huế, and has since come also to include interviews with the burgeoning Vietnamese expatriate population in the Mississippi Gulf Coast and New Orleans. I also worked extensively in the rather underground world of Vietnamese expatriate writings and in the interview collections both at the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University and the Vietnamese Oral History Project at the University of California, Irvine. However extensive their information, sixty interviews and access to numerous Vietnamese autobiographies and stories provide only the smallest glimpse into the complex reality that was the ARVN’s war. But even this limited sample group can serve as a starting point, a lens through which to envision the ARVN’s experience, allowing commonalities to emerge.

For those ARVN officers and men whose service began during the early phase of the Vietnam War, motivation was high, as was hope for the future. Born in 1937 and 1942 respectively, both Phạm Vӑn Đính and Trần Ngọc Huế were from middle-class families, Đính from a Catholic background while Huế was a Buddhist. Đính’s father, Phạm Vӑn Vinh, and Huế’s father, Trần Hữu Chương, both served in the VNA. The patriarchs of both families saw communism as an outside, European influence in their nation. Both families also boasted a martial history that traced back for generations. Men in the families had always been warriors, and for Vinh and Chương fighting for the VNA of Bảo Đại had seemed the most Vietnamese way to express their martial nationalism – a lesson that both men passed on to their many children.

As was common across Vietnam in its civil war, both Đính and Huế had relatives in the Việt Minh, but both came to believe that it was the VNA and later the ARVN that best represented Vietnamese nationalism. For Phạm Vӑn Đính the decision to support a noncommunist nationalism just seemed natural. It was his patrimony and his duty to both family and country. Trần Ngọc Huế had a more visceral reason to support a noncommunist form of Vietnamese nationalism, having witnessed the Việt Minh burying captive VNA soldiers alive following a battle near Huế. Đính and Huế thus began their wars from the same place: from a nationalism that fired many of their generational compatriots. Phạm Vӑn Đính entered Thủ Đức Reserve Officers School in 1961, and Trần Ngọc Huế entered the Vietnamese National Military Academy at Đà Lạt in 1962.

Having relatives who served in the VNA was a common bond for many who chose to serve in the ARVN. The father of Nguyen Van Lanh, born in Quảng Trị in 1941, had served in the VNA, and had been captured by the communists at the end of the French Indochina War. Lanh would always remember how his father had been mistreated by the communists and saw North Vietnam as an existential threat to Vietnam and things Vietnamese. In his mind he fought for freedom and saw nothing but enthusiasm and wholehearted service in those early years of the war. Born in Saigon in 1935, Nhut Van Tran joined the VNA in its last days, realizing that the French would soon be on their way out of power. He believed that the VNA would outlive the French and would be the way forward to a noncommunist future. He felt that he was fighting for the “real Vietnam.” Similarly, the father of Trần Thanh Chiêu, born in 1927 in Tam Kỳ, was a politician in an anti-French but noncommunist political party. With politics all around him growing up, Chiêu first joined the Việt Minh, until Bảo Đại was made the head of the French-aligned Vietnamese state in 1950. At that point Chiêu changed allegiances, joining the VNA toward the end of its short life and then moving into the ARVN. Having seen the Việt Minh from the inside, he believed that it was South Vietnam that offered his people a more viable Vietnamese solution to their problems.Footnote ⁹

As Vietnam began a long and violent transition in the wake of French defeat, there were many decisions to be made about what it meant to be Vietnamese. Many chose not to choose, and others chose to follow the successors of the Việt Minh. Millions, though, chose a different path, one that is often dismissed by historians: adhering to a form of nationalism that did not follow the communist ideals of the Việt Minh, a choice not invalidated by its eventual defeat. The experiences and viewpoints chronicled above do not preclude counterexamples of Vietnamese soldiers who served unwillingly and perhaps poorly. But these few examples stand as representative of a new military generation that was not beholden to the French, but was dedicated to the idea of a noncommunist, independent Vietnam, and part of a US-centric military. These men represented the ARVN’s future – a future that was especially bright in its early years.

As the Vietnam War intensified, though, its appetite for bodies – American, Vietnamese, Korean, Australian – grew by leaps and bounds. By 1963 the ARVN had grown to 250,000. By 1969 it mushroomed to more than 800,000 strong, with the majority of males between sixteen and fifty called up for military service, with some owing a seven-year enlistment to their country. The results were devastating to a Vietnamese society that relied on men to work the fields to plant and bring in the rice crop. As the war sputtered on with no end in sight, punctuated with disastrous moments in time such as the Tet Offensive of 1968, there is little wonder that volunteerism could do little to keep up with the ARVN’s appetite for new recruits. The result was an ever more draconian draft system, one that preyed especially on rural laborers and one that resulted in one of the most heavily drafted armies in modern history. It was a staggering effort, with one US official reporting that if the United States had mobilized a similar proportion of its adult male population that it would have sent 8 million men per year to Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁰

Maintaining ARVN morale for the long haul of the Vietnam War in the face of so many challenges – lengthy service when soldiers were needed at home to bring in the rice harvest; year after year of grueling war; few signature victories coupled with tremendous attrition; a state that was rife with discord and political infighting; a superpower ally who was progressively more tired of conflict – required a unifying ideology and a positive call to arms to fight in service of a South Vietnamese state that was worthy of sacrifice. That the government of the Republic of Vietnam and the ARVN failed in this regard was perhaps the deciding factor of the war.

As the government in Saigon provided little leadership, lurching from crisis to crisis, and with no workable solution emanating from Washington or Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), those within the ARVN realized early on that problems of motivation and perception were deadly serious. Both Phạm Vӑn Đính and Trần Ngọc Huế realized as young officers that the ARVN had begun its life at a disadvantage, not in tactical prowess but in the critical psychological war for both the motivation of the ARVN’s troops and the “hearts and minds” of the people. The ARVN’s communist adversaries could claim to have gained victory over the French and to be the purveyors of a national war for independence. The ARVN, though, could be seen as a relic of the colonial past, which gave the communists a critical edge.Footnote ¹¹ As a result Đính believed that the ARVN had to do a better job of convincing the people of the evils of communism and of the righteousness of its own cause. That task had to begin with the soldiers who made up the rank and file of the ARVN: the men who would defend the state of South Vietnam as well as function as the most compelling image of that state. However, since the Saigon government lived in constant fear of a military coup, nationalism and patriotism played an insignificant role in ARVN training. In the words of ARVN enlisted man Nguyen Van Chau, “Most soldiers that I knew understood little about why we were fighting. Anticommunism was more abstract to us than scientific political theories. Not once did any of my instructors mention a proactive political agenda.”Footnote ¹² When he was drafted after Tet ’68 enlisted man Dan Nguyen remarked, “I followed orders and went blindly but didn’t know why I had to go. We had to go because the war came. No one questioned it. No one thought about the reason they were forced to go.”Footnote ¹³

While the communists concentrated much of their efforts into indoctrinating their soldiers regarding the need for their fight, the ARVN continued to concentrate its efforts on the mechanics of training, which left ARVN soldiers technically sound but at a critical disadvantage against their more politically astute foes in the areas of morale and leadership. Every ARVN expatriate officer and enlisted man I have ever interviewed has mentioned a lack of indoctrination and a unifying political will as being key to the ARVN’s dismal fate. Historian Robert K. Brigham found much the same in his own work. Former ARVN intelligence analyst Cao Van Thu recalled, “The Communists did an excellent job in ideological training, even if the party’s message was pure propaganda. In South Vietnam we did nothing to prepare the countryside for the needed sacrifice.”Footnote ¹⁴ Nguyen Van Thanh explained, “When I first joined the army in 1962, I did so because I was patriotic. I loved my new country of South Vietnam and hated the Communists. Over time, however, I had a hard time explaining the political nature of my country. So many leadership changes in Saigon and dependence on the Americans made it impossible for me to talk about the nation.”Footnote ¹⁵

Figure 7.1 Soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (1968).

Source: Stuart Lutz/Gado / Contributor / Archive Photos / Getty Images.

As the French withdrew after Geneva, and hope was high in the South for a noncommunist form of nationalism, volunteerism had been high, attracting millions of true believers like Trần Ngọc Huế, Phạm Vӑn Đính, and Nguyen Van Thanh. Other nations had been born in war, but the ARVN arguably never coalesced into a military force possessed of a unifying political ideology. The war progressed and morphed into a superpower conflict that, by 1974, saw 1.1 million men serving in the South Vietnamese military. Lieutenant General Đồng Vӑn Khuyên recalled that “South Vietnam had scraped the bottom of its manpower resources. Every household, therefore, had at least one member in the military service.”Footnote ¹⁶ Without a unifying ideology – a positive motivator for the fight – that phenomenal level of sacrifice was untenable in service of a war that had dragged on for nearly twenty years. Even the mighty United States had tired of the conflict after far less cost.

The War in the Villages

As a military force, after 1965 the ARVN largely served as an adjunct to its mighty American ally. The main battlefield effort during General William Westmoreland’s high-tempo years of warfare fell to US units, which sought to lock main-force People’s Army of North Vietnam (PAVN) and People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) units into battle and destroy them. Although there were many levels of cooperation, the ARVN was essentially moved aside as US forces endeavored to win their war for them. From the Mekong Delta to the demilitarized zone, the ARVN was there in most of the major battles, but in a purely subsidiary role – never central to the planning or prosecution of the mission. But, in the main, ARVN field units were relegated to a second level of warfare. US units were first tasked with driving enemy forces from an area; the ARVN was then tasked with not allowing them back. In a war with no frontlines, the ARVN’s role was still deadly serious, but without agency. In its new role the ARVN did not really function as divisions or corps, but instead was broken into far smaller groupings – better with which to search for and destroy local PLAF and PAVN forces. Relying on the primacy of US-provided fire support, the ARVN won the vast majority of its battles, but many of the ARVN’s best commanders chafed at their lot in military life and wondered aloud if the ARVN was being used to the best of its abilities.Footnote ¹⁷

Trần Ngọc Huế was a company commander, while Phạm Vӑn Đính had risen to the rank of battalion commander during this stage of the war, and both suspected that the ARVN’s conduct of the war was flawed. Their units would drive the remaining National Liberation Front (NLF) forces from an area, declaring it “pacified.” Once the ARVN departed, though, the NLF would return to live with the people, earning or forcing their support, and quite possibly governing them. While search-and-destroy tactics seemed militarily effective, both Đính and Huế realized that ARVN tactics achieved little meaningful success in the war for the hearts and minds of the people. The ARVN in their view was “fighting the wrong war.” Đính and Huế represented many young ARVN officers in their belief that the ARVN should make better use of its territorial forces, locally raised units who were of the people and intimately familiar with the area, to provide true and meaningful rural security.Footnote ¹⁸

The South Vietnamese had founded the Civil Guard and the Self-Defense Corps, groupings of paramilitary forces, in 1955, initially tasking them with internal security duties while the ARVN focused on stabilizing the new state. The South Vietnamese supported the creation of these local territorial forces in the hope that they could play a significant counterinsurgency role alongside the ARVN. The idea, though, was largely stillborn, with the United States focusing mainly on a more traditional military force in South Vietnam, initially leaving the territorial forces out of the Military Assistance Program. It was not until 1964, long after the communist insurgency was well underway, that the territorial forces were even integrated into the ARVN command structure, becoming known as the Regional Forces (RF) and the Popular Forces (PF). In their new incarnation the RF/PF enjoyed a somewhat less chaotic command structure, and assumed their roles as defenders of the provinces, districts, villages, and hamlets of South Vietnam. However, the attention and improvement had come ten years too late and could not quickly overcome years of neglect and stagnation.Footnote ¹⁹

Only recently reclaimed from the military scrapheap, the RF/PF suffered from a nearly complete lack of training.Footnote ²⁰ In units often made up of luckless draft evaders and deserters who had got caught up in police sweeps, those with military experience were left to instruct those without “on the job” training.Footnote ²¹ After 1964, with the belated American recognition of the important security function of the territorial forces, there began something of a crash course of training for RF/PF units, but that training still lagged up to 60 percent behind desired goals.Footnote ²²

Leadership was always a problem for the RF/PF, in part because their commanders were the district and province chiefs – ARVN officers who also ruled as local political governors. The blending of tasks left the RF/PF often split between two functions: the military and the political. Making matters worse, the RF/PF carried outdated weaponry, receiving US armament of World War II vintage including the M-1 carbine only after 1960. At the same time NLF units began to receive AK-47s and RPG-7s, seriously outclassing the organic firepower of the RF/PF, which also received the lowest priority for fire support of all kinds, and thus could not even normally call upon the massive US/ARVN preponderance in artillery and airpower to tip the balance of battle in their favor. When all else failed for US or ARVN units, firepower could save the day, but not so for the RF/PF. A study of III Corps in 1967 revealed a disturbing reality that, of 234 RF/PF friendly-initiated actions in which calls went out for fire support, in nearly 200 cases no such support was forthcoming.Footnote ²³

Spread thinly across the countryside in their stationary tasks of protecting hamlets, villages, and bridges, RF/PF outposts quickly became a favorite target for massed PLAF or PAVN attacks. The situation was at its worst in 1968 as some 477 RF/PF outposts were overrun during the first month of the Tet Offensive.Footnote ²⁴ Additionally, while ARVN and US divisions, brigades, and battalions could rest and recuperate, or even just find a time of lull in their combat duties, the same could not be said of the small-unit war of the territorial forces. In a war with no frontline, the RF/PF were always on the frontline, with no safe haven and no rest and recuperation. Instead the RF/PF faced a war of constant engagement, always on patrol and always on alert for an enemy that could be anywhere – even in their own villages and hamlets. For the RF/PF war was the state of daily life, a slow and never-ending attrition lasting in some cases for twenty years.

In 1967 Phạm Vӑn Đính took over as district chief of Quảng Điền district outside Huế. Quảng Điền district contained a population of some 46,000 people in 8 main villages and a collection of scattered subsidiary hamlets. As was all too common in South Vietnam, Đính found that two territorial companies in the district and the territorial platoon fielded by each village were in disarray, leaving the NLF dominant in half of the villages and hamlets of the district and in control of much of the area’s resources. The units’ leaders were often absent, the units themselves were chronically understrength due in part to desertion, and the soldiers were poorly armed and had no training whatsoever. The situation was so bad that Đính had to stand down his territorial units and start from scratch.Footnote ²⁵ Local studies of the actions of the ARVN and the RF/PF in South Vietnam indicate that what Đính found in Quảng Điền district was far from an isolated situation and that the tactics, training, and kinetic utilization of RF/PF forces remained a real issue long after US forces embarked on a crash course of training for the RF/PF in 1968.Footnote ²⁶

For all of their faults and foibles, the RF/PF fought hard in the Vietnam War. In the period 1968–72, when some of the most intense fighting of the war took place and the RF/PF had risen in importance both to the Americans and to the ARVN, RF/PF losses were 69,291 killed in action (KIA), compared to the ARVN’s loss total of 36,932, and American losses of 30,005.Footnote ²⁷ Motivated by the fact that they were defending their home provinces and villages against communist attack, RF/PF troops often fought hard and well, against seemingly all odds. General Ngô Quang Trưởng remarked: “In spite of apparent lack of adequate indoctrination the RF/PF continued to fight valiantly and without remiss until the final days of the drawn-out war … As local combatants they fought to protect their home villages where they were born and where their ancestors were buried.”Footnote ²⁸ Given their military lot in life it is amazing that the RF/PF fought as long and hard as they did. Even poorly trained, even poorly armed, even at the bottom of the logistic chain, even poorly led, the RF/PF fought on, indicating a local strength of support for the Republic of Vietnam and a noncommunist nationalism that is often missed in the bigger picture. Leaving the territorial forces relegated to the sidelines for so long ultimately crippled the war efforts of both the ARVN and the US military in the Vietnam War – a mistake that was rectified far too late and that helped to doom both the American war effort and South Vietnam to defeat.

Kinetic Abilities

From chronic desertion and graft, to the underutilization of its territorial components, to rampant politicization, the ARVN had its flaws – some of which might have indeed been fatal. Bright young officers such as Phạm Vӑn Đính and Trần Ngọc Huế, and their seniors, such as Ngô Quang Trưởng and Vũ Vӑn Giai, knew that neither the ARVN nor the state that it served could win the war singlehandedly. Their greatest hopes by far were pinned on the notion that the ARVN and the Republic of Vietnam would reform and come of age while US troops provided a shield of defense against communist aggression. In some ways, though, the intervention of US ground forces into the war had the opposite effect. The ARVN was vastly overshadowed in its own war, relegated to second place, where its commanders had little opportunity for strategic learning or tutelage. On one hand the ARVN military staffs had little chance to learn their operational craft at anything above a company or perhaps battalion level, stymieing military growth and maturation especially at the senior levels. On the other hand, at the highest political and military echelons, where the ARVN needed systemic reform, there was no urgency whatsoever. Why did the ARVN or the state it served need to go through the painful process of reform when the United States would always step in to save it from itself and destruction? There grew in the ARVN, especially at its politicized pinnacle, a decided tendency to “let the Americans do it all.”

Regardless of whether or not it was maturing and preparing for its eventual military independence, the ARVN kept right on winning battles in its subsidiary role alongside the Americans during the height of the Vietnam War. US firepower, as it happened, was the great equalizer. General Ngô Quang Trưởng, perhaps the ARVN’s most gifted combat leader, commented:

Firepower, as it turned out, was addictive. It made the ARVN supreme on the battlefield over its communist foes. However, its use, alongside the tendency to let Americans do it all, merely served to paper over the ARVN’s considerable flaws.

Even though their efforts were well intentioned, the US advisors who served with ARVN units became part of the institutional problem. US advisors often maintained warm relationships with their ARVN counterparts, and their counsel often proved of immense value. The advisor’s chief role, though, was to serve as the conduit to American firepower. When locked in battle, ARVN officers turned to their advisors to request, plot, and deliver the firepower that so often proved decisive. The relationship between US advisor and ARVN counterpart was often tactically productive, but came at a steep institutional price. General Cao Van Vien remarked:

After the American withdrawal from Vietnam began in the wake of the Tet Offensive, there were real efforts on the part of MACV and advisors all over the country to help the ARVN come of age and wean it from its reliance on US firepower. However, after so many years of fighting as an adjunct alongside its superpower partner, the ARVN’s problems were so ingrained as to frustrate quick fixes. Those problems, along with the ARVN’s considerable abilities, were perhaps best displayed in the 1971 Lam Sơn 719 invasion of Laos.

Battle

The ARVN that invaded Laos in 1971 was a military force that was built imperfectly on the American model. It was a military force that was trained to act as an adjunct to the American war effort – a force accustomed to operating in small units against a local enemy while the Americans fought the “big-unit war.” It was a military force that had become dependent upon advisors and the firepower they provided. It was a military force built for a specific purpose that now embarked on a multidivisional campaign against a determined and well-prepared foe in the biggest battle to date of the “big-unit war.” American national furor over the 1970 invasion of Cambodia meant that the ARVN had to operate in Laos without its American advisors, without its lifeline to firepower support. Making matters worse, ARVN plans for the invasion of Laos rested on something of a best-case scenario, hoping that the PAVN would not defend the area vigorously but would instead fall back to avoid losses as it had in Cambodia the year prior. Instead, though, the North Vietnamese decided to stand and fight, and the South Vietnamese invading force of approximately 17,000 men squared off against a North Vietnamese force that was estimated at 60,000 troops consisting of 5 divisions, 2 separate infantry regiments, 8 regiments of artillery, 3 engineer regiments, 8 sapper battalions, and 6 anti-aircraft regiments plus rear service and transportation units.Footnote ³¹

Under the auspices of the ARVN’s I Corps, Operation Lam Sơn 719 aimed at the destruction of Base Area 604 in and around Tchepone – a main terminus of the Hồ Chí Minh Trail. Operations began on February 8, 1971, and initially progressed well with the 1st Armored Brigade making a relatively rapid advance down Route 9 to A Luoi under the flank protection of ARVN Rangers and Airborne, which seized hilltop firebases to the north of Route 9 and the ARVN 1st Division, which performed the same function in the south. Within four days, though, the situation began to deteriorate and become desperate. The armored thrust bogged down, while to the north the PAVN laid siege to the firebases held by the Rangers and the Airborne. As the ARVN armor disobeyed orders and essentially sat stationary on Route 9 and spectated the battle, several of the northern firebases were overrun, leading to heavy losses and a media nightmare as US helicopter pilots – braving their own personal hell – returned with some desperate ARVN soldiers even clinging to skids of the overloaded craft. Although communist forces in Laos were taking a fearsome beating from US airstrikes, Lam Sơn had gone awry.

Realizing that the prestige of the ARVN, and South Vietnam, was on the line, I Corps commander Lieutenant General Hoàng Xuân Lãm in consultation with President Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu chose to take a great risk. Instead of withdrawing in the face of massive communist resistance, and against advice from many of the ARVN’s forward commanders, Lãm and Thiệu chose to continue the advance, utilizing troops from the 1st Division, which to this point had been spared the worst of the battle.Footnote ³² The audacious plan involved a series of successive heliborne leaps from hilltop to hilltop south of Route 9. The advance initially caught PAVN forces in the area off guard, and on March 6 120 Huey helicopters (often known as slicks) landed in Landing Zone Hope outside Tchepone in the single-largest airmobile operation of the entire war. For four days ARVN troops plundered the PAVN logistics hub unmolested. Next, though, came the most difficult part of the operation, a withdrawal under enemy fire with no flank support as the PAVN massed for a series of counterattacks.

Soon many of the isolated 1st Division firebases that dotted the ridge lines south of Route 9 found themselves surrounded and facing overwhelming odds. Heavy anti-aircraft fire thwarted the best efforts of US helicopter pilots to evacuate many of the ARVN outposts. As a result some ARVN units, including Trần Ngọc Huế’s 2nd Battalion, 2nd Regiment, had to fight their way through successive rings of encircling communist forces in an attempt to escape the deathtrap. In a fate common to many ARVN units stranded in Laos, Huế’s 2nd Battalion suffered prohibitive losses. Of the more than 400 men who had entered Laos, the 2nd Battalion’s advisor counted only 26 stragglers returning to friendly lines in South Vietnam. Trần Ngọc Huế was badly wounded and spent nearly thirteen years in prisoner-of-war and reeducation camps.Footnote ³³ After its highs and lows, Lam Sơn 719 drew to a close on March 25.

The media, feasting on a steady diet of compelling images generated by the withdrawal, portrayed Lam Sơn as an inglorious failure, while US and South Vietnamese political and military leaders trumpeted the invasion of Laos as a costly but important victory. The historical truth, as is so often the case, lies between the two reactive extremes. The ARVN, constructed as it was to fit neatly into the American matrix of the Vietnam War, exhibited the exact strengths and weaknesses to be expected of a military that had been shunted aside into a backwater of its own war for so long but had suddenly been thrust into the fully fledged reality of the “big-unit war.”

It is little wonder that the overly politicized ARVN, which had never operated as coherent divisions, much less a full army corps, was beset by critical leadership failures during Lam Sơn 719. Some upper-level ARVN military leaders, who had in the past often been more concerned with elements of pacification or even political infighting, found the transition to full-out ground warfare difficult. In some ways the command gaffes in Lam Sơn 719 are reflective of an ARVN leadership that was overly protective of its political power and slow to change. In his retrospective on the campaign, Major General Nguyễn Duy Hinh reflected:

Hinh went on to note that the ARVN’s signature reliance on US firepower support further haunted its actions in Laos:

Even with its failures of leadership and tactics, Lam Sơn 719 must also be remembered as demonstrating how the ARVN could function effectively. After years of being sidelined, the ARVN was able to extemporize an operation outside its national borders in an area where the PAVN held virtually every advantage. During the operation, ARVN units and soldiers fought hard and well – exemplified by the experience of Huế’s regiment, which fended off overwhelming enemy attacks for days before its commander was badly wounded. Such incidents of bravery abounded during Lam Sơn 719, bravery that went unreported then and remains unchronicled by Western historians to this very day. During the fighting the ARVN, aided by the might of US airpower, forced the PAVN to pay a fearsome butcher’s bill for the retention of its base areas in Laos. Though the raw numbers remain controversial, at a cost of 3,800 killed in action the ARVN inflicted some 13,000 battle deaths on the PAVN.

Both the strengths and weaknesses of Lam Sơn 719 foreshadowed the future of the conflict in South Vietnam. The operation proved that, for all of its flaws, the ARVN had great potential. On the other hand, though, the multiple command failings of the ARVN and the resiliency of the PAVN indicated that the former was incapable of shouldering the burden of the Vietnam War. That Lam Sơn 719 brought about “profound repercussions” among the South Vietnamese people is revealing. Again General Hinh comments:

Conclusion

What, then, was the “ARVN experience” of the Vietnam War? Although its role in the Vietnam War is often either dismissed or underreported, the ARVN’s place in the outcome of the conflict was perhaps paramount. Understanding the ARVN’s role in the Vietnam War is essential, in part because this remains a lacuna and in part because its history and fate seem both contradictory and complex. On one hand, the ARVN was born from the wreckage of French colonialism, which seemed to place it at a very nearly fatal disadvantage when pitted against its communist foes, which claimed easy links to legitimacy. Even with that perceived stigma, the ARVN was able to command the loyalty and sacrifice of a sizable chunk of the South Vietnamese population, demonstrating a linkage to a noncommunist form of Vietnamese nationalism. Although the ARVN only partly understood the war of pacification, leaving territorial units poorly trained, partly motivated, and badly undergunned, RF/PF forces fought long and hard, absorbing heavy losses and dealt out considerable damage to their communist foes. For all of its many problems the ARVN’s reach into South Vietnam’s localities through the RF/PF was real and profound. Arguably the ARVN was built for the wrong war, was shunted aside by its American allies, and was vastly overreliant on the primacy of US firepower – problems that were on full display in Operation Lam Sơn 719. In spite of these systemic issues, the ARVN achieved considerable battlefield victories throughout its brief history, and even the Laotian debacle was peppered with reminders of what the ARVN could be and might become. The ARVN labored throughout the conflict under the weight of crippling disadvantages and failed comprehensively in 1975. However, that the ARVN sparked loyalty from so many, and fought so long and paid such a heavy price, indicates that there was something there. The ARVN had potential: perhaps potential enough to have won its war under different circumstances. Writing the ARVN off as a historical mistake will no longer do. Understanding the ARVN for the complex entity that it really was, and for the potential it had, is key. A short chapter like this one can but suggest that the ARVN had potential. Seeing the ARVN as a topic worthy of study is the first step.

The National Liberation Front (NLF), derogatorily called the Viet Cong by its enemies, was born in the mangrove swamps of Thanh Ninh province in South Vietnam on December 20, 1960. It was a classic front organization, founded by Vietnam’s Communist Party to harness the growing radical peasant movement in South Vietnam and to overthrow the South Vietnamese president, Ngô Đình Diệm, by force. Anyone, communist or noncommunist, could join the NLF as long as they shared the party’s goals. This was how united fronts, tactical organizations that mobilized all disaffected elements of society, had worked in Vietnam for decades. In practice, the NLF brought together trade union members, student associations, religious groups, political activists, lawyers and other professionals, and peasants, all in a temporary alliance to highlight political opposition to Saigon’s rule. Historically, these temporary alliances had helped the party achieve its objectives by putting enormous military and political pressure on the enemy, but they also neutralized potentially dangerous internal elements, especially among the intelligentsia.

To gain maximum advantage in the political war against Ngô Đình Diệm, the Communist Party carefully concealed its control of the NLF. The NLF purposefully created the impression that it was free and autonomous to exploit world opinion and frustrate the United States and its Saigon ally by making it impossible for them to build a cohort of supportive or at least sympathetic allies. By the mid-1960s, several world leaders and international organizations were convinced that the NLF was an independent actor in South Vietnam’s civil war. Postwar memoirs by some NLF members confirm this view. Trương Như Tảng, a founding member of the NLF, declared that he was never a communist and that it was Diệm’s repressive policies that had in fact contributed to the formation of the NLF by creating a groundswell of animosity throughout the country. That Tảng came from a privileged background provided even more evidence that Diệm’s policies were widely despised. According to the NLF’s own record, therefore, it had risen out of the tinder-dry paddy fields of South Vietnam in opposition to Diệm with little outside influence.

In sharp contrast, policymakers in Washington claimed that Hanoi alone directed the armed struggle in South Vietnam. Key members of the administration of John F. Kennedy argued that the flow of men and supplies from north to south kept the insurgency against South Vietnam alive. Stop this externally supported insurgency, they insisted, and South Vietnam could stand on its own. Almost all of the official policy papers released by the Kennedy administration on the insurgency in South Vietnam used the same title: “A Threat to Peace: North Vietnam’s Effort to Conquer South Vietnam,” which provided a rationale and justification for American intervention. According to the document’s several authors, the NLF was nothing more than a puppet on a string. They argued that communists in Hanoi had gone to great lengths to conceal their direct participation in the program to conquer and absorb South Vietnam.Footnote ¹ Kennedy officials claimed that North Vietnam had violated the spirit of the Geneva Agreement of 1954, which had temporarily divided the country at the 17th parallel, by launching an insurgency against South Vietnam. Because of Hanoi’s actions, Diệm had the right to ask for and receive US military aid and assistance. This aid would be used by the Saigon government to launch a massive counterinsurgency program against the NLF.

These official interpretations put forward in Washington policy papers clouded the complex nature of the NLF, however, making it more difficult to create an appropriate response. Kennedy administration officials often overlooked the fact that Vietnam’s Communist Party was unified and nationwide. Kennedy’s team also purposefully downplayed the widespread opposition to Diệm. These problems were magnified by the unfortunate choice by US policymakers to call anyone connected to the Communist Party’s leadership “North Vietnamese.” Kennedy’s analysts did, however, correctly stress the role of the party in creating the NLF. But deciding that the NLF was both Southern and communist, and that it had broad-based support from noncommunists, was something that the Kennedy administration was not prepared to do.

Critics of American intervention in Vietnam have long argued that the insurgency in South Vietnam was essentially a civil war and that the NLF was free and independent of the Communist Party. Antiwar scholars and activists suggested that the NLF had risen at Southern initiative in response to Southern demands. The French historian Philippe Devillers, a long-time student of Vietnam, declared that people living in South Vietnam were literally driven by Diệm to take up arms in self-defense. He argued that the insurgency had existed long before the communists decided to take part, and that Hanoi was forced to organize the NLF or risk losing control of the radical peasant movement.Footnote ² In this telling of the founding of the Front, it was Diệm’s own repressive policies, such as Law 10/59, which allowed for arrest of suspected communists without formal charges, that had forced Southerners to take action. Devillers was joined by another Vietnam expert, Jean Lacouture, who claimed that “the actual birth of the National Liberation Front must be traced back to March 1960. At that time a group of old resistance fighters assembled in Zone D (South Vietnam), issued a proclamation calling the prevailing situation ‘intolerable’ for the people as a result of Diệm’s actions, and called upon patriots to regroup with a view toward ultimate collective action.”Footnote ³ Devillers, Lacouture, and many other antiwar scholars may have overstated the independence of cadres in South Vietnam in their relations with the Communist Party and its Central Committee, but they did understand that Diệm was pushing many people into the NLF fold.

Figure 8.1 National Liberation Front soldiers watching a film in Củ Chi, South Vietnam (1972).

Source: Pictures from History / Contributor / Universal Images Group / Getty Images.

In short, the NLF was both Southern and controlled by the Communist Party. This gave the NLF a distinctly Southern worldview, but it also meant that the Front adhered to party diktats from the Central Committee in Hanoi. This often led to tension within the party, as those who favored building socialism in the North clashed over tactics and strategy with those within the party who favored increasing support for the Southern revolution. This tension was a key feature of the inner workings in the corridors of power in Hanoi and sometimes resulted in dramatic actions against those who disagreed with the party’s primary stakeholders, like Lê Duẩn, its future secretary general, and Lê Đức Thọ, a member of the party’s Politburo.

The Direction of the Revolution

These tensions existed before the NLF’s formation and led to an intense five-year debate over the future of Southern revolution. From the division of Vietnam at the 17th parallel in 1954, party leaders struggled to balance its competing revolutionary goals. Throughout the newly created South Vietnam, Ngô Đình Diệm’s national security police had been particularly effective in destroying party cells, and by 1957 cadre levels had fallen off dramatically. Diệm’s success against party cells forced the debate in Hanoi. Many party leaders wanted to continue trying to liberate South Vietnam by political means alone, following the Soviet Union’s model put forward at Moscow’s 20th Party Congress in 1956, when Premier Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin and outlined a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West. Khrushchev announced that the transition from capitalism to socialism could be peaceful if parliamentary means were applied adequately. In Vietnam, this meant that the party would try to build up socialism in the North while using political measures to overthrow Diệm, like the scheduled elections following the protocols of the Geneva Accords.

Many Southern leaders within the party, especially Lê Duẩn, the secretary of the Nam Bộ Regional Committee – the party’s southern-most organizational structure – thought that the Central Committee was being too cautious. He argued that the only way to build up cadre levels and overthrow Ngô Đình Diệm was through armed violence. With Lê Duẩn at the helm, the Nam Bộ Regional Committee concluded:

One of Hanoi’s official histories of the war claimed that Lê Duẩn had effectively tipped the balance within the party in favor of a greater commitment to the revolutionary movement in the South through sheer force of will and a dogged determination to see the revolution enter its next phase. It concluded that “At the end of 1956 the popularization of the volume by Comrade Duẩn entitled ‘The South Vietnam Revolutionary Path’ [Đường lối cách mạng miền Nam, c. 1956] was of great significance because the ideological crisis was now solved.”Footnote ⁵

Lê Duẩn also drafted a number of important policy guidelines that shifted the party’s priority from building socialism in the North to armed resistance against Diệm, including his crucial report to the party at its 15th Plenum in January 1959, convincing it to form the NLF. By the time of the party’s 3rd National Congress in September 1960, Lê Duẩn’s power and influence were clear; he replaced Trường Chinh as the party’s secretary general, the most important leadership position in Hanoi. With Lê Duẩn at the helm, Vietnam’s Communist Party dramatically increased the tempo of revolutionary activity in the South, beginning with the founding of the NLF in December 1960. The birth of the NLF, therefore, signaled the Communist Party’s willingness to move to revolutionary violence to liberate South Vietnam and reunify the country. By giving the green light to armed rebellion, the party sought to capture and control the growing radical peasant movement inside South Vietnam and to harness middle-class resentment against Diệm on the part of students and professionals. The party also sought out sympathetic Catholics and Buddhists, who opposed Diệm, but who may not have supported the party’s long-term objectives. Party leaders hoped that the NLF and its military wing, the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), could topple the Saigon government before the United States enlarged and escalated the war. Failure to achieve this goal meant that the NLF/PLAF and its allies in North Vietnam had to endure years of fighting and bombing to finally take Saigon by force in 1975.

Launching the Revolution

Once the NLF was formed, the level of violence in South Vietnam increased dramatically. By late 1961, US intelligence estimated that the PLAF’s main forces numbered nearly 17,000. These troop levels were to grow to 23,000 in 1962, 25,000 in 1963, and 34,000 by late 1964. The NLF also controlled some 72,000 village self-defense and regional defense forces. By January 1964, the party’s Central Office in South Vietnam, COSVN, claimed it had 140,000 total armed forces at its disposal along with People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN, or North Vietnamese army) troops who had infiltrated into South Vietnam. During these early days of the PLAF, its units were platoon-sized and took orders from party committees at the district and province levels. There was little command and control within the PLAF at this time, making it nearly impossible for its revolutionary forces to do much more than mount quick strikes on isolated South Vietnamese outposts and provide security for party cadres. By the end of 1962, however, three main-force PLAF regiments came together in the Central Highlands, ushering in the process of independent platoons and companies coming together into larger units. This process continued to unfold throughout the war.

The NLF buildup convinced the Kennedy administration that Diệm now faced an active insurgency and that Saigon was in a battle for its very survival. At every turn, the NLF seemed to score significant victories against Diệm, forcing Washington policymakers to dramatically increase the US level of support for South Vietnam. In a program called Project BEEF-UP, the Kennedy administration doubled its military assistance to the Saigon government from 1961 to 1962 and tripled the number of American advisors to the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN, or South Vietnamese army). The intensified US effort was brought under the control of a new command structure, the Military Assistance Command–Vietnam (MACV). The goal was to halt the NLF’s progress in the countryside and give Diệm’s counterinsurgency programs and US political and economic aid a chance to take a foothold in South Vietnam. Success against the NLF remained elusive, however, so some of Kennedy’s advisors argued that the president had to approve sending US combat troops to South Vietnam in order to save Diệm’s government.

Kennedy rejected the call for US troops – as did Diệm – and instead increased the counterinsurgency effort against the NLF. On November 30, 1961, Kennedy also approved the use of defoliants and herbicides to defoliate the jungle in NLF-controlled territory. Initially, Kennedy held tight control over the spraying program, but by late 1962 Diệm had convinced the US president to relinquish control to the US mission in Saigon, allowing for more liberal spraying against NLF strongholds. Thus began Operation Ranch Hand, which from 1962 through 1971 would spray more than 19 million gallons of defoliants over South Vietnam.

Along with the military buildup, Kennedy also endorsed a political and economic program to help stabilize the Saigon government and thwart the NLF’s effort. Kennedy’s advisers pressed Diệm to make meaningful political reforms, such as loosening the reins on the military and secret police, hoping that democratic reforms might win back the middle class. When Diệm refused, the noncommunists in the NLF became even more enraged. Not only did Diệm have to deal with a counterinsurgency in the countryside, but his refusal to bend politically meant that he also had to confront urban unrest in South Vietnam’s major cities. Of course, all of this was front-page news as the international press swarmed Saigon to cover the war. The party grew quite skillful at exploiting Diệm’s weaknesses on the political front.

Diệm thought he could quiet his domestic opponents and resist American calls for reform by scoring significant military victories. By the summer of 1962, the South Vietnamese armed forces claimed a number of successes that improved the mood in Saigon and Washington and bought Diệm some respite from the Kennedy administration’s criticisms. The ARVN, paired with US helicopters, enjoyed some success against the PLAF in the Mekong Delta and northwest of Saigon. The ARVN offensives were aimed at key villages that seemed to be NLF strongholds. Coupled with these military operations against the NLF, Diệm’s government also introduced the Strategic Hamlet Program, designed to mobilize peasants into active support of the government through a redistributive land reform program and self-defense. NLF leaders acknowledged that the program enlarged key areas under Saigon’s control and interfered with their cadres’ access to the rural population of South Vietnam. The ultimate objective, as Kennedy’s advisor Roger Hilsman suggested, was to reduce the NLF to a “hungry, marauding band of outlaws devoting all of their energies to staying alive” and to force the communists out into the open where the ARVN could destroy them.Footnote ⁶ For a short time, the Strategic Hamlet Program did stabilize the situation in South Vietnam. Buoyed by the good news from South Vietnam, Kennedy even instructed his secretary of defense, Robert S. McNamara, to draw up plans to redeploy 1,000 US military advisors elsewhere. This move was born out of Kennedy’s optimism that Diệm was gaining ground against the communists, not out of his desire to withdraw from Vietnam altogether.

Kennedy’s optimism quickly gave way to pessimism, however, as the ARVN suffered an apparent setback against the PLAF in early 1963. At Ấp Bắc, a tiny hamlet in Mỹ Tho province eighty kilometers south of Saigon, about 2,000 troops from the ARVN’s 7th Division encountered 300–400 well-entrenched PLAF regulars. Caught in an ambush by the waiting communist troops, the ARVN called in helicopters, armed personnel carriers, and US advisors to assist in the battle. The PLAF shot down five helicopters and reportedly inflicted 190 casualties on the ARVN while it claimed to have escaped with only 12 combat deaths (the number was probably significantly higher). Despite the fact that the ARVN had actually acquitted itself quite well and eventually secured Ấp Bắc as the PLAF withdrew, US advisors could not help but conclude that the ARVN was no match for the communists. Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, a key ARVN advisor, called the battle a “damned miserable performance.” Another American advisor went even further, claiming that “Time after time I have seen the same Vietnamese officers and troops make the same mistakes in virtually the same rice paddy.”Footnote ⁷ The US Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that the ARVN had made little progress in its war against the PLAF, despite enjoying numerical superiority.

The US press declared that Ấp Bắc was “a major defeat” in which “communist guerrillas shot up a fleet of United States helicopters carrying Vietnamese troops into battle.”Footnote ⁸ The Washington Post printed Neil Sheehan’s firsthand account of Ấp Bắc on its front page. Sheehan wrote that “angry United States military advisers charged today that Vietnamese infantrymen refused direct orders to advance during Wednesday’s battle at Ấp Bắc and that an American Army captain was killed while out front pleading with them to attack.”Footnote ⁹ Top US military leaders, including General Paul Harkins, the MACV commander, feared that Kennedy was not getting a complete picture of the battle of Ấp Bắc or the ARVN’s counterinsurgency program against the NLF. Harkins warned the president that it was “important to realize that bad news about American casualties filed immediately by young reporters representing the wire services” did not represent the true facts about Ấp Bắc. He also concluded that “it hurts here when irresponsible newsmen spread the word to the American public that GVN [South Vietnamese] forces won’t fight and, on the other hand, do not adequately report GVN victories which are occurring more frequently.”Footnote ¹⁰ While the debate over what really happened at Ấp Bắc raged on in Saigon and Washington, the NLF celebrated its windfall by launching more ambushes against the ARVN in the Mekong Delta and increasing its membership dramatically. It appears Sheehan was right.

The NLF’s leadership also scored some significant diplomatic victories during the Diệm–Kennedy years. The Front created a foreign relations commission that sent diplomats to Europe, to North America, and to many nonaligned nations to convince world leaders that the NLF wanted a coalition government in Saigon. The NLF’s top diplomat, Nguyễn Vӑn Hiếu, declared that the NLF was willing to engage in negotiations with the Saigon government to produce a “peace-loving and democratic government.”Footnote ¹¹ Few in the party expected the Kennedy administration or the Diệm government to accept the call for a coalition government, but it did put international pressure on Diệm to launch reforms to make South Vietnam more just and inclusive. The NLF turned up the diplomatic heat when Diệm’s brother, Ngô Đình Nhu, used his secret police to raid Buddhist temples to rid them of suspected communists throughout the summer of 1963. The crisis was a public relations nightmare for Kennedy, who hinted that Diệm needed to make drastic reforms if he wanted to continue to receive US aid. The crisis came to a head in the summer of 1963, when Nhu wondered out loud if the United States knew what it was doing in Vietnam and then opposed the further expansion in the number of American advisors.

The NLF took advantage of the crisis by reaching out to Nhu to see if he might be interested in negotiating an all-Vietnamese solution to the conflict in South Vietnam. The not-so-secret contacts infuriated the Kennedy administration, though it is likely that the NLF understood the limits of the back channel. Nhu hoped to use the contact with the NLF to loosen the US grip and save his brother’s government, but Kennedy was unmoved. The administration was aware that French president Charles de Gaulle had also tried to open secret contacts between Nhu and the communists. On September 15, 1963, de Gaulle had instructed the French ambassador in Saigon to promote the idea of a coalition government between the NLF and Diệm. The ambassador, Roger Lalouette, contacted the Polish representative to the International Control Commission, Mieczyslaw Maneli, who approached the communists and Nhu on the possibilities of a real bargain. Maneli felt encouraged by his first contact and pursued the matter until Diệm and Nhu were assassinated by their own officers on November 1, 1963. President Kennedy was assassinated three weeks later.

The NLF at War

Lê Duẩn hoped to capitalize on the chaos and confusion in Saigon following Diệm and Nhu’s assassination by ushering in a new phase of the war that would rest heavily upon the NLF’s ability to launch a general offensive and general uprising. The goal was to launch military offensives in the countryside combined with political uprisings in the cities of South Vietnam to secure a victory against Saigon in 1964. Lê Duẩn was convinced that the Saigon government was sitting on a powder keg that was ready to explode. At the party’s 9th Plenum in December 1963, Lê Duẩn led a movement to commit the revolution to a bigger war in South Vietnam by ushering in a major buildup of conventional forces. There was some opposition in Hanoi to throwing all of the party’s resources behind the war in South Vietnam, but Lê Duẩn carried the day and eventually the Hanoi leadership approved the measure in order to bring the war to a quick conclusion. The new resolution approved sending PAVN main-force infantry units to the Central Highlands and northwest of Saigon and to dramatically increase supply traffic along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail.

This military buildup of PAVN troops inside South Vietnam caused some consternation in Hanoi among those who were devoted to building socialism in North Vietnam, but it also brought the ire of many NLF revolutionaries who complained that building up PAVN conventional forces operating in South Vietnam went against their strategy to win peasants and South Vietnam’s middle class to the revolution’s cause. They suggested that sending a PAVN division to South Vietnam (in this case elements of the 325th), and therefore shifting military operations away from guerrilla tactics, was foolhardy. The NLF victory at Ấp Bắc and its success in building political opposition to the Saigon government was reason enough, NLF leaders concluded, to stick with its guerrilla strategy. Some NLF leaders suggested that such large-scale warfare was not simply premature, but unnecessary. The debate ended with the resolution at the 9th Plenum. Lê Duẩn then named PAVN general Nguyễn Chí Thanh the director of COSVN to oversee the PAVN military buildup. General Thanh quickly moved the revolution’s military footing to a more conventional war strategy, resulting in the first big engagement with US troops at the battle of Ia Đrӑng Valley in November 1965.

While the PAVN joined the fighting inside South Vietnam, the NLF launched an urban movement that played a major role in the revolution’s effort to prevent US entry into the war or, more precisely, to prevent Kennedy’s counterinsurgency war from turning into President Lyndon B. Johnson’s ground war. Beginning in April 1964, the NLF’s revolutionary forces established working control of the majority of legal and semi-legal organizations in and around Saigon. The NLF used the General Student Union and the Representatives of High Schools, for example, to highlight the depth of antiwar sentiment among South Vietnam’s young people. The Ấn Quang Buddhist movement also used party-approved slogans to voice its displeasure with the war and to challenge the Saigon government’s legitimacy. Urban intellectuals and Catholic-supported peace organizations also joined the NLF’s calls for the ouster of the Saigon government and the formation of a coalition government. These urban intellectuals were the backbone of the NLF’s urban movement from 1964 until the 1968 Tet Offensive, when Hanoi decided to push aside middle-class students and professionals to embrace the idea, instead, that only a violent military victory could complete the revolution. Lê Duẩn is reported to have claimed that the Saigon government was violent from beginning to end and that the revolution must therefore be violent. He also believed that victory would come from a general offensive and general uprising: “Tổng công kích, Tổng khởi nghĩa.”

Hanoi’s planning for the 1968 Tet Offensive remains shrouded in mystery, but some analysts have suggested that many NLF leaders may have objected to the party’s go-for-broke strategy, fearing that it was premature to think about a massive, urban uprising ignited by military attacks throughout South Vietnam.Footnote ¹² The war in South Vietnam had ground to a stalemate despite massive PAVN infiltration and increasing numbers of American troops. There was no end in sight to the spiral of escalation, and so some NLF officials worried that a premature general offensive would expose some of the revolution’s weaknesses.

Following Diệm’s assassination, the NLF’s army – the People’s Liberation Armed Forces – spent much of their time at remote bases training and gathering supplies for future battles against the ARVN and the influx of American troops. When they ventured out, it was often in small detachments to aid the political–military struggle in the countryside. Two of the key goals of the NLF in this infantry phase of the war were to bolster the authority of local communist cells and to attack government-controlled hamlets and outposts. The PLAF rarely operated beyond company strength and tried to preserve its force structure by limiting its attacks against its enemies. In the few set-piece battles that did take place in the Central Highlands and north of Saigon near the Cambodian border, the NLF saw its army take heavy losses. The war was quickly reaching a military stalemate, and some leaders in Hanoi blamed the NLF for the need to have the PAVN take on more of the fighting.

Still, Lê Duẩn and Lê Đức Thọ convinced their fellow Politburo members that the time was ripe for a major military move to break the stalemate and force the United States to negotiate the terms of its own withdrawal from South Vietnam. But not everyone agreed with this strategy. General Võ Nguyên Giáp, a senior PAVN leader and the hero of the Điện Biên Phủ victory of 1954, charged that the offensive was premature and would not bring about a quick military victory. He joined Hồ Chí Minh in opposing the idea of a grand offensive when it was first discussed in Hanoi in 1967. Over time, however, Giáp eventually relented, agreeing that a general uprising might be successful if PAVN troops could first cripple the ARVN in big-unit warfare. Lê Duẩn and PAVN general Vӑn Tiến Dũng played a significant role in helping Giáp change his mind. With Giáp on board, plans moved forward in Hanoi to launch a general uprising with PAVN and PLAF troops, hoping to remove Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu from power in Saigon.

On January 30, 1968, combined PAVN and PLAF troops launched a coordinated attack against the major urban areas of South Vietnam. While the PLAF led the urban attacks, the PAVN focused on US bases in the Central Highlands. None of these attacks was more dramatic than what happened at the US Embassy in Saigon. At 2:45 a.m., a team of PLAF sappers blasted a large hole in the wall surrounding the embassy and entered the courtyard inside the gates. For the next six hours, the PLAF sappers battled a small detachment of ARVN and US military police. By 9:00 a.m., all of the PLAF troops had been either killed or captured. Though the PLAF was rather quickly overpowered, the image of the US Embassy under attack cast doubt on American claims that the end of the war was in sight. Some reporters editorialized that the war was going badly and that the American public had been lied to by its leaders.

The American public grew even more restive when Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, the chief of the South Vietnamese National Police, was captured on camera executing a suspected NLF assassin on the streets of Saigon. Eddie Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for his now-iconic photograph showing the moment that the bullet flew into Nguyễn Vӑn Liêm’s head. Liêm, also known to his NLF cadres as Bay Lop, was in charge of a small PLAF assassination squad that targeted members of Saigon’s National Police and their families. Many South Vietnamese officials believed that he had been responsible for the deaths of seven police officers and a handful of their family members during the first days of the Tet Offensive. This was Loan’s rationale and justification for shooting Liêm without the benefit of a trial. No matter the circumstances, the street execution caused an angry outcry from the US public. American public opinion against the war seemed to be increasing along with Saigon’s problems. Winning this psychological war marked the high point of the Tet Offensive for the NLF.

The NLF’s low point, however, came during the second and third phases of the Tet Offensive. The initial planning for the offensive included attacks against the urban areas of South Vietnam throughout the summer of 1968. During the second phase, the PLAF focused its effort on Saigon. The fighting was fierce, and in the end the revolution had managed to destroy much of the city’s infrastructure in its southernmost reaches along the river. However, the NLF experienced unusually high casualties and its offensive failed to produce a general uprising of Saigon’s population against the government. Lê Duẩn hoped that the third phase, scheduled for late August through September, was perfectly timed with the US election to force the Johnson administration to negotiate an end to the war in Paris. Yet again the offensive stalled, however, leading to high PLAF casualties. During this last phase, American B-52 bombers supplied enough air cover for the ARVN to counterattack effectively. By late October, it was clear that Lê Duẩn’s desire for a speedy end to the war was not going to be realized and that the PLAF had suffered significant losses during the Tet Offensive.

For example, in the Mekong Delta city of Mỹ Tho, the PLAF suffered shocking losses. The PLAF had managed to launch an attack inside the city’s borders with eight divisions, but those troops were confused by the urban terrain and were unable to converge on their targets. They were forced to retreat when US and ARVN artillery easily targeted their movements. In the process, the heavy bombing destroyed five thousand residences and forced nearly a third of the city’s population to abandon their homes. The PLAF’s main-force units suffered casualty rates of 60 to 70 percent, and losses among revolutionary cadres may have been even higher. Such huge losses meant that the NLF had to abandon some areas in South Vietnam it had previously held easily and that it became more reliant on the PAVN.

Those losses were magnified by the accelerated pacification program aimed at the NLF’s infrastructure. Beginning in 1969, Saigon’s effort to extend its control of the countryside entered a new phase, the direct attack against what was known as the VCI, the Viet Cong Infrastructure. This effort was known as the Phoenix Program, which grew out of Operation Recovery, an intense MACV and Saigon government program to reclaim territory lost to the revolution during the Tet Offensive. The Phoenix Program used Provincial Reconnaissance Units to identify and arrest or kill key NLF leaders. Phoenix quickly gained the reputation as an assassination program, eventually forcing the MACV and the US Central Intelligence Agency to withdraw its support. Saigon continued, however, and claimed to have neutralized nearly 70,000 VCI. Though these numbers may be accurate, it appears that very few of the NLF’s top leaders were caught in the Phoenix trap. Still, Phoenix created enormous difficulties for the NLF immediately following the Tet Offensive.

One unanticipated outcome of Tet, Operation Recovery, and the Phoenix Program was that the indiscriminate violence in the countryside forced many of South Vietnam’s peasants to flee to the relative safety of urban areas. The forced urbanization of millions of Vietnamese peasants – what political scientist Samuel Huntington aptly described as forced draft urbanization, an artificial urbanization caused by war in the countrysideFootnote ¹³ – disrupted even the most elementary sociopolitical patterns that had developed in Southern villages since the mid-nineteenth century. It was difficult for villagers to remain villagers as war and socioeconomic dislocation threatened their very existence. As the war escalated, millions of peasants became refugees, fleeing to nearby provincial cities for safety and security. The NLF hoped to capture the loyalties of these urban refugees, but so too did the Saigon government. Government officials in Saigon hoped that, once peasants had fled to the cities, the former villagers could be easily controlled as they became dependent on government resources for their very survival. This dependency relieved Saigon of the responsibility for motivating and mobilizing the rural population, which South Vietnamese politicians sometimes struggled with in any case. It also meant that the government could counteract any NLF efforts to mobilize these urban refugees to the revolution’s cause. The battle for the hearts and minds of Vietnamese peasants had become an urban affair following the Tet Offensive and the devastation caused by the Phoenix Program.

Following the Tet Offensive, the party also decided that it needed to elevate the status of the NLF by proclaiming the establishment of the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG). Founded on June 6, 1969, the PRG superseded the NLF in most political and diplomatic functions, particularly the secret negotiations taking place in Paris. The PRG named Nguyễn Thị Bình its minister of foreign affairs, and she became its lead negotiator with the Americans in the Paris Peace Talks. She also replaced Hồ Chí Minh, who died in September 1969, as the symbol of the revolution, or at least she was touted as such by the party. She traveled extensively throughout Europe during breaks in the Paris negotiations, promoting the idea of the PRG as the government-in-waiting in South Vietnam. Her considerable intellect, ease with foreigners, and English-language skills made her a natural spokesperson for Southern dreams and aspirations.

Conclusion

During the war with the Americans, many Southerners believed that reunification between North Vietnam and South Vietnam would come as the result of negotiations between the NLF and the Communist Party. This assumption had been the rallying point for many noncommunists in the NLF and had helped create the political crisis that led to military victory over the Saigon government. Reunification came swiftly, however, and the NLF and the PRG were relegated to the sidelines. The NLF was born in December 1960, and the party ended it in May 1975. It was a classic communist front organized to achieve specific goals and, once those goals were met, it was quickly dismantled and its noncommunist members were tossed aside, or worse. But the NLF played a vital role in Saigon’s defeat, and few in the party could challenge that claim. Eventually, former NLF members rose through the ranks of power in Hanoi. The history remains contested, and the role of the NLF in Vietnam’s modern revolution is still controversial.

The multipartite conflict in Vietnam ended as North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon in 1975 after decades of conventional and guerrilla warfare involving a dozen combatant nations and a civil war among multiple groups within Vietnam. The dramatic ending of the conflict created an exception that rewrote the military rules for asymmetric war between insurgency and counterinsurgency: the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), a poorly supplied force, defeated a coalition of strong allies composed of military forces from the Republic of Vietnam, Australia, South Korea, and the United States – the most powerful country in the world.

Why the North Vietnamese soldiers fought, what their experiences were, and how their perceptions shed insight on the terms of victory or defeat remain controversial questions that lead to polarizing debates. A staple of the discourse on these issues is the fundamental war of memory, divided not only between different persons, but also, more imaginatively and dramatically, within persons and contexts. The anticolonial fighters, in the view of many American combatants, were supermen who could see in the dark and move invisibly over all types of terrain, willingly sacrificing their lives for their cause. At the opposite extreme, others described them as emaciated, subhuman peasants, allegedly brainwashed, who employed terror as a weapon and often struggled to muster the morale to stand and fight.Footnote ¹

During the war, limited studies were conducted on the motivations of PAVN soldiers, primarily through interrogations of defecting or captured soldiers. However, the reliability of these sources is undermined because the testimonies were extracted under threat of torture and death. The PAVN experience remains largely unknown as the bulk of current war studies is unbalanced toward American experiences, with little to no scholarship attempting to understand Vietnamese perspectives. Concurrently, official Vietnamese histories, collective in nature, may not adequately reflect individual stories for political and cultural reasons, eschewing both individual aggrandizement and the evidentiary approach typical in conventional historiography in the East and the West.

There could be no better evidence of the unfiltered experience of North Vietnamese soldiers than dissecting their organic memory. A unique category of historical materials offers new facts and interpretations, each soldier’s distinct narrative shaped by genuine knowledge and a wide array of experiences. Over the past decade, my research has involved a painstaking process of historical inquiry and investigation into the personal memories of the PAVN found in uncensored documents within the Combined Document Exploitation Center (CDEC), captured on the battlefield by US armed forces and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). With its millions of pages of handwritten diaries, missives, journal entries, and political and military reports, to name just a few, the CDEC collection stands as a treasure trove of “the definitive documentation on the revolutionary side in the Vietnam War,” allowing historians to “write a complete and balanced account of the War.”Footnote ² Authored by combatant-eyewitnesses in their native Vietnamese language, these war documents contain vital yet untapped information that could shed light on the fate of many PAVN soldiers and serve as a crucial resource for researchers seeking to gain a deeper insight into the war and its consequences.

These raw materials expand knowledge about the enlistment, deployment, and rationale of the PAVN, as well as political tensions within the communist party known as the Lao Động or Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP) and divergent opinions among the Vietnamese regarding the cause of the war. Importantly, these battlefield documents uncover individual fighters’ feelings of nationalism and familial and individual duty, along with their personal impressions of life during wartime, experiences of depression, and their nostalgia for home and their families.

Vietnamese institutional history concentrates primarily on collective memory regarding the conflict, making these unexpurgated materials unique in offering bottom-up perspectives. They enrich and provide a personal form of history that runs parallel to the official narratives dictated by the controlling authorities. This process enables an understanding of how personal memory may conflict or be compatible with collective memory, as well as how it may be used to shape or even reshape the stories of history.

Through this examination, a new perspective emerges on the frontline experiences of combatants, revealing evidence that challenges the notion of the PAVN as an undefeated force. It illuminates the reality that it was a conscript, rather than volunteer, army, comprising soldiers who were neither robots nor political zealots. Undeniably, the heroism of PAVN soldiers is embodied in their unwavering determination, resilience, and sacrifice against unimaginable struggles. Yet, as human beings in the field, they were often homesick draftees pitted against equally pitiable, equally homesick conscripts wearing US and other uniforms. This chapter exclusively examines Northern-born fighters and does not encompass individuals originating from the Southern region who joined the PAVN.

Path to the War

Writing while still on the battlefield, for the Northern fighters, was an active struggle of individual human beings for the truth. Despite the party’s harsh censorship, they engaged in this struggle to recount their efforts, interpret the reality of events, and create meaning from their impressions. While revolutionary writings tend to be collective, the soldiers’ reflections were deeply personal. This contrast made their writing an actual war of thought, torturing their hearts and minds, because they were forbidden to write about the dark side of the war or express their real feelings in letters sent home, as mandated by the party’s military security discipline.

Cao Vӑn Thơ, a sapper in the 15th Engineer Battalion on the B5 or Quảng Trị front, considered keeping diaries to be a “new way of life.” It allowed him to reflect on truth and facts while nurturing the hidden emotions in his heart. To him, protecting his combat diary was nothing less than fighting for survival. He determined that “protecting the notebook is like protecting our heart and truth.”Footnote ³

At the core of many North Vietnamese fighters’ personal memories lies the conflict between the revolutionary ideal indoctrinated in them by the party and the tragic plights caused by the war. An entry in the diary of an unidentified soldier from Hà Đông illustrates his struggle, juxtaposing the revolutionary ideal against the grim truth of “frenzied death” experiences he faced during wartime. On September 12, 1964, the day he departed from his homeland to join the PAVN, he lamented:

The war in the South, for which the unknown soldier sacrificed his prime of life, was portrayed by the party not merely as a single armed conflict, but instead as a multifaceted class struggle across various fronts. As articulated in the official history of the PAVN, it constituted a “historic confrontation” between socialism and capitalism – a clash between forces of the national liberation revolution and those orchestrating aggression, seeking to enslave all nations of the world under a new form of colonialism.Footnote ⁵

These ideological confrontations were intertwined in a dual war from beginning to end: a patriotic war for the national liberation of Vietnamese revolutionaries against American invaders, and a multipartite civil war among Vietnamese groups within a tempest of diverse motivations and perceptions.Footnote ⁶ Cemented by a dogmatic view asserting that a “revolutionary spirit would enable the insurgent forces to overcome the technological superiority of the enemy,” the hawkish leaders dominating the Central Committee of the VWP remained blind to the realities of inferior military capabilities, human resources, and economic constraints.Footnote ⁷ Their pursuit fixated on waging an asymmetric war of attrition against both domestic and foreign adversaries, irrespective of any costs incurred.

Employing the language of political convenience, the party and its totalitarian system intertwined nationalism and communism, fueled by a fervent socialist patriotism that created a powerful effect on the morale of the nation as it mobilized mass support for the war. To the PAVN, military service signified an “experiment in the political attitude of people from all levels of the national community” during the revolutionary war of the era of Hồ Chí Minh.Footnote ⁸ Central to this political experiment was the evaluation of how the “socialist new men” expressed their “political attitude” in response to the new patriotism of Marxism-Leninism, national independence, and socialism, which differed from the traditional patriotism of the past.Footnote ⁹ The larger-than-life collective heroism and socialist patriotism strongly resonated among soldiers, many of whom hailed from families steeped in revolutionary tradition or were poor peasants, landless laborers, or affiliated with the communist party. The majority of these men and women were former Việt Minh fighters during the French Indochina War (1946–54). Dedicating their lives to the party, the revolution, the fatherland, and the people, the communist-led Northern warriors, according to the histories of the PAVN, embodied a “political consensus.” United as one, they ignored every hardship and sacrifice, and fought resolutely until achieving total victory.Footnote ¹⁰

Trần Vân, an experienced combatant who fought in the protracted resistance war against the French colonialists before 1954, and then against the Americans in the South, expressed in his writing the real-life hardships he had endured, along with his enthusiasm for the national liberation struggles in which he participated. On October 10, 1965, the battle-hardened soldier penned a letter to his brother, Trần Tuân, who resided in Thái Nguyên province, to convey his personal thoughts and motivations. He proclaimed:

Such points of view offer insight into the minds of the communist soldiers, showing their perception and dedication to the revolutionary ideal – an era marked by a new form of combat aimed at liberating the South from American imperialism and its puppets while simultaneously developing socialism in the North. Yet, Trần Vӑn’s revolutionary zeal did not align with what the party deemed the “political consensus,” as North Vietnam was not a monolithic entity, but a contested land.

This divergence was not solely a result of diversified culture and tradition, but was exacerbated by a series of the party’s dogmatic Maoist campaigns. These campaigns encompassed brutalities such as land reform, the repression of the Nhân vӑn–Giai phẩm (Humanity–Masterworks) intellectual movement, and the Anti-Party Revisionist Affairs in the 1950s and 1960s. Their aim was to eliminate oppositional elements that were labeled counterrevolutionaries or antiparty cliques. This resulted in the purging of numerous military and political cadres, patriotic landlords, middle-class peasants, nationalistic bourgeoisie, and intellectuals, and the punishment of deviationists who disagreed with the party’s stance on the war.

Consequently, these repressions triggered a profound crisis across moral, political, military, social, economic, and cultural dimensions, previously unseen in the territory north of the 17th parallel. Such seminal changes contributed to the erosion of Vietnamese national solidarity, causing internal confrontations within the party and dividing opinions among the North Vietnamese communities regarding war policies. These divergences created dynamic yet contested debates, weighing the pros and cons of the revolutionary war, thereby fueling a struggle within the recruitment, fighting, and sustaining motivations among Northern-based soldiers, particularly those who came of age after 1954.

In response to the party’s political campaigns since 1954, the PAVN underwent an accelerated transformation. Initially a united front military army under the Việt Minh banner during the French Indochina War, it evolved into a “tool of proletarian dictatorship” by the time of the Vietnam War, with 40 percent of its cadres and troops being communist party members.Footnote ¹² The burden of conscription weighed increasingly upon Northern citizens, particularly after Lê Duẩn, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the VWP, and his hawks won the vote for Resolution 9 at the 9th Plenum in December 1963. This vote officially rejected Hồ Chí Minh and his doves’ policy of “peaceful coexistence and peaceful competition.” Instead, it favored Lê Duẩn’s formula, advocating armed struggle as the decisive factor in generating a violent general uprising to seize political power “in a relatively short period of time.”Footnote ¹³

Resolution 15 of 1959 was the “opening shot” of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) in its Anti-American Resistance War for National Salvation.Footnote ¹⁴ However, Resolution 9 of 1963 became a pivotal turning point in the conflict across two zones. First, it halted prolonged battles in the South’s path to revolution, elevating Lê Duẩn to paramount leader within the party’s war machinery as he had assumed control of the Secretariat of the Central Committee VWP from Hồ Chí Minh at the 14th Plenum in November 1958. Second, it authorized a more extensive war effort aimed at achieving Southern liberation and national reunification, involving the deployment of PAVN regulars to join the fight in the South.Footnote ¹⁵

To implement Resolution 9 and counter American intervention in South Vietnam, PAVN infiltration significantly escalated from 1964 onward. During this time, only Lê Duẩn and his top officials were aware that, while the first US combat troops were landing in Đà Nẵng in March 1965 to support South Vietnam, preparations were underway for the arrival of the first communist-led Chinese ground forces to bolster North Vietnam. By June 1965 these troops crossed Ải Nam Quan, also known as Friendship Pass, under a “secret agreement” brokered between the DRVN and the People’s Republic of China in December 1964.Footnote ¹⁶ As per this clandestine pact, from June 1965 to March 1968, approximately 320,000 Chinese personnel – combat soldiers, engineers, military workers, and anti-aircraft operators – arrived in North Vietnam. Their objectives varied, from constructing transportation infrastructure to developing anti-aircraft systems and defending strategic positions in territories north of the 17th parallel.Footnote ¹⁷

As North Vietnam secured its territory with assistance from China, the Soviet Union and its bloc of East European socialist allies, and North Korea, which provided financing and military equipment, including sophisticated air defense systems, the North Vietnamese state intensified military infiltration. On March 8, 1965, the PAVN promulgated the Special Resolution of the Urgent Situation and Mission to expand its armed forces. A notable aspect of this special resolution was the implementation of indefinite conscription orders to “increase the regular army forces by reenlisting ex-servicemen, recruiting more draftees, [and] extending the enlistment period” in accordance with combat requirements.Footnote ¹⁸

The party did not simply depend on voluntary efforts to mobilize people for war; rather, it established a Maoist/Stalinist system comprising political–social organizations, public security, and military power to monitor every aspect of life, including the family registration system. This totalitarian policy ensured that every single draft-age male would be enlisted, making military service unavoidable for Northern citizens. More importantly, the authorities tightly controlled people’s living conditions, providing subsidies for food, money, goods, and production tools. They also applied social, economic, and political forms of discrimination, punishing draft evaders while rewarding those who enlisted. In essence, North Vietnamese individuals found themselves in a difficult situation – caught between the “devil and the deep sea” (đi thì mắc núi, ở lại thì mắc sông). Consequently, they compelled themselves to move forward, unable to evade military service.

In reality, many men, whether volunteers or conscripts, especially those from rural areas, joined the army not only due to government conscription but also for the economic and political benefits offered or promised by local authorities. Enlisting in the army provided an opportunity for impoverished farmers to escape their hardship and improve their social standings. The majority of PAVN members were the main laborers or breadwinners of their family. When they were sent to war, their families would receive an immediate allowance, at least 60 North Vietnamese piasters (North Vietnam Dong), before their departure to the South. The immediate or long-term allowances, job security, and sociopolitical conditions varied based on whether families resided in rural or urban areas.Footnote ¹⁹

According to the Journal of Communism (Tạp Chí Cộng San̉), between 1954 and 1975 approximately 70 percent of households in the North had one or two family members in the army.Footnote ²⁰ Thái Binh, a rural province in the Red River Delta, alone contributed half a million soldiers to the war effort.Footnote ²¹ General Vӑn Tiến Dũng, Chief of the General Staff of the PAVN, mentioned in his limited-distribution handbook that, from 1965 to 1975, 1,928,500 individuals mobilized into the armed forces, with 935,500 deployed to the South.Footnote ²²

The Life of a Soldier

Nguyễn Huy, a 26-year-old private first class, drafted on April 24, 1963, in Nam Định province, came from a family of non-Catholic farmers. He was among the initial Northern-born regulars sent to the South following Resolution 9. His testimony revealed that his unit, Battalion 70 of Regiment 9 in Division 304, departed from the North on February 1, 1964, and infiltrated the South in April 1964, marking the first deployment of a PAVN regular unit to the Southern battlefield.Footnote ²³ Nguyễn Huy recounted that 90 percent of the 600 enlistees in his battalion were not volunteers but draftees. Throughout their three to six months of training, he and his inexperienced comrades struggled under unfamiliar military discipline. Although some raw recruits initially displayed enthusiasm upon joining the army, their morale declined during training. The lack of freedom made them lethargic and weary during military drills and political lessons. Despite being indoctrinated about the common duty of the North Vietnamese toward their Southern compatriots, some individuals “requested to stay in North Vietnam.” He further affirmed that, “even if they risk losing their civil rights, or being faced with prosecution before a military court, they were ultimately forced to infiltrate South Vietnam under the control of the cadres.”Footnote ²⁴

Nguyễn Huy’s statement is corroborated by the account of his comrade, Vũ Quang, who was drafted from Thanh Hóa province. A twenty-year-old farmer and Buddhist soldier in Battalion 802 observed that the morale of many soldiers in his unit was “poor,” and they were disinclined to go to the South.Footnote ²⁵ This antiwar attitude did not stem from their training, but arose from the reluctance and disagreement among draftees who were compelled by the mobilization orders to go to war. Vũ Quang disclosed that “before 1962 draftees could return home after two years of military service, but from 1963 the term of military service was indefinite. The youths sent to South Vietnam for combat were haunted by the fear of death.”Footnote ²⁶

The harsh conditions and the looming specter of death at the front caused many enlistees to desert the army rather than march to “B” (the code name for the Southern battlefields). Đinh Vinh, a VWP member who enlisted the army in 1954 and reenlisted in 1965, stated:

The indefinite military service often produced many forced volunteers rather than enthusiastic soldiers. Many men questioned the nature of the war, its immense sufferings and losses, and conscription policies. Vũ Vӑn Lang, a draftee from Hải Dương province in 1965, admitted that his reenlistment in the army under the coercive mobilization of that year was a “harsh responsibility” that forcibly separated him from his family. His diary entries unveiled his lack of enthusiasm as a revolutionary soldier:

Vũ Vӑn Lang’s experience was not unique in terms of the emotional toll exacted by wartime conscription. His plummeting morale finds an echo in the diary of an unidentified soldier conscripted into Regiment 812 of Division 324 in May 1965. Initially enthusiastic about joining the army to become a uniformed man, he could not help but weep for leaving his young wife, uncertain whether or not he would return. He bemoaned:

Regardless of the circumstances of enlistment, the indefinite military service was described as a harsh law within his war memories, as he expressed, “separation has always been painful.” Many North Vietnamese men and women had to leave their homeland for the South without a definite date of return. While the unit cohesion of American combatants was eroded by their twelve-month tour, the morale of PAVN soldiers was equally affected by the protracted war and its open-ended enlistment terms.

Throughout the war, more than 1,300,000 poorly supplied cadres and troops traversed the Hồ Chí Minh Trail, covering a distance of 3,700 miles (6,000 km) on foot along its commo-liaison routes, extending to five fronts in South Vietnam.Footnote ³⁰ These routes formed part of a complex system of military stations spanning the western flank of the Annamite Cordillera, also known as the Trường Sơn range in Vietnam, northeastern Cambodia, and southern Laos.

The march along this trail subjected soldiers to daunting challenges, including jungles, mountain passes, bombings, river crossings, malaria and other diseases, food poisoning, encounters with wild animals, self-inflicted injuries, suicide, starvation, and thirst. On average, a staggering 20 to 30 percent never completed the journey to the South.Footnote ³¹ One study from Vietnam highlighted that many soldiers from new units collapsed on the march due to exhaustion or poor health. In one of the most severe cases, a regiment of 2,800 soldiers departing from the North had dwindled to a mere 1,200 upon reaching their final destination in the South.Footnote ³² In a letter to General Võ Nguyên Giáp on March 31, 1966, General Hoàng Vӑn Thái, Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the PAVN, reported that “we recently sent our armed forces to the South in a disorderly manner, resulting in an increase in deserters. This situation produced many difficulties both in the South and on the trail.”Footnote ³³

The challenging conditions endured in the jungle proved exceedingly difficult for all the common soldiers, even determined ones like Vӑn Linh. The grueling march took a toll on his physical strength, forcing him to “go by his head” as his legs refused to cooperate. This educated soldier expressed his frustration, stating:

Beyond the impact of American bombings, starvation inflicted significant psychological wounds on many soldiers. It remained a persistent issue throughout the war. Nguyệt Quế, in particular, was tormented by relentless hunger. He also grappled with feelings of shame regarding the prevalence of theft within the army, as starvation drove some revolutionary soldiers to desperate measures:

These wartime deprivations resulted in the unjust deaths (chết oan) of many soldiers. The fear of such a death haunted them even before they engaged in actual combat. Bearing witness to the loss of comrades-in-arms in a prolonged war against hunger and disease caused mental anguish among the PAVN’s soldiers. The relentless warfare against the French and the Americans left devastating impacts on the lives of the Vietnamese people. Deprivation has the power to alter a wide array of human characteristics, transforming human thoughts and behavior into those of an animal. Vӑn Linh bitterly compared the two:

While the official state history avoided discussing deserters or the struggles soldiers faced, personal memories of soldiers fill this gap by providing clear evidence on these subjects. In an entry dated February 29, 1968, in Trần Qui’s notebook – which was sent to President Lyndon Johnson for its valuable insights in the lives and motivations of North Vietnamese soldiers – he described more than 300 desertions from Group 926 due to B-52 raids along the route to Khe Sanh in February 1968.Footnote ³⁷ Despite the risk of punishment, this combatant privately expresses a perspective on the motivation of the fighter that diverges from the collective point of view. He stated:

Political Struggle

Trần Qui’s diary serves as a dynamic repository of facts, offering a multifaceted perspective from a PAVN soldier. It delves into his thoughts on the war and its impact on both the military and civilians, stretching across the rear as well as the frontlines. As an educated individual, he acknowledged the crucial role of the party’s leadership and its collectivist ideology in shaping a disciplined army. However, he perceived the party and its propaganda as a politically convenient “sweet medicine” used to manipulate people into joining the struggle against the Americans. One underlying theme in his observations is that, despite the political education and strict discipline maintaining morale, they were not entirely the driving forces motivating the soldiers. For Trần Qui, traditional patriotism and nationalism formed the foundational motivation for the revolutionaries during the war. The PAVN soldiers drew inspiration from national history, fighting for independence, their way of life, their homes, and the survival of their nation.

While the resistance war against the American imperialists was portrayed as an ideological conflict through a totalitarian system of propaganda, Trần Qui’s perspective differed. He fought willingly for a national cause – yearning for powerful sovereignty, a heroic nation, independence, unification, and freedom for the Vietnamese people from foreign aggressors. He resisted being labeled a socialist or communist zealot, unwilling to become a “slave” under harsh military and political rule. His steadfastness is evident as he refused to join the VWP Youth Union six times after infiltrating the South in 1966.

In Trần Qui’s eyes, patriotism was an inherent spirit innate within all Vietnamese, deeply ingrained in the traditional solidarity against foreign invaders. It was not spurred by any specific ideology but by a sense of duty and responsibility to protect and liberate their homeland. The paramount obligation lay in embracing the sacred duty of becoming a warrior when the country faced the threat of war. Trần Qui delved deeply into the history of his country’s national heroes and their historic achievements. During his march to the South, he vividly recalled inheriting the glorious legacy of these ancestors when he had the privilege to go to Nghệ An province, site of the Nghệ–Tĩnh Soviets Uprising, or Phong Trào Xô Viết Nghệ–Tĩnh, a series of uprisings, strikes, and demonstrations in 1930 and 1931 by peasants, workers, and intellectuals against the French colonialists. He took tremendous pride in visiting the temple of Bà Triệu, a revered heroine of Vietnam, cherishing the heroism and nationalism, embodied in her words, “I want only to ride the wind and walk the waves, slay the big whales of the Eastern Sea, clean up frontiers, and save the people from drowning.” Yet, he also experienced sorrow, empathizing with the sufferings and losses of local people in Quảng Bình, the homeland of General Võ Nguyên Giáp. Trần Qui encountered the brutal realities of war, witnessing death and grief even before his departure to the South. He mourned:

This reveals that his genuine motivation is that of a patriotic nationalist, rather than a communist. An even more radical departure is seen in Nguyễn Lập Dương’s “Memories of the Past Two Years, 1964–1965,” a diary captured on November 10, 1966. This soldier, a combatant in Division 325, never mentions the party or its ideological doctrine when describing the cause of the war. The fighting motivation of this soldier originates in his hatred for the Americans, whom he refers to as “white devils.” In his mind, revolution is not a class struggle; it is associated with the resistance against enemies to save the Vietnamese nation. Liberating the South from the invaders was the basis of his determination. This soldier wrote to his mother:

Human will, a sense of duty, and racial animosity transformed personal virtue into a catalyst for the country’s cause, fostering a patriotic fervor that dominated his thoughts. This mindset led to his enlistment initially and continued to drive him to fight vehemently. Duty, honor, and patriotism sustained him in the field, while the impulses of courage, self-respect, and group cohesion motivated him on the battlefield. The prowar soldier recalls:

This fighting motivation was radicalized by Vương Luỹ, a seasoned communist fighter experienced in the Central Highlands. He interwove nationalism with communism, sculpting himself into a dogmatic and radical fighter entirely dedicated to the party. Firmly believing that being human necessitated being a communist, he stated, “I am a human being, I shall be a communist.” He further explained, “since the party had trusted me, I had to devote myself fully to getting the job done, to study hard, to rid my mind of pessimistic and conceited thoughts.”Footnote ⁴² Despite his dislike of “political training, which everyone found more boring than the march,” Vương Luỹ recognized its role in enhancing leadership, and self-discipline among enthusiastic communists, fostering shared experience among comrades. The PAVN soldiers were organized into three-man cells and, managed by a dual system of political and military leadership within each unit, formed a cohesive army. While military leaders commanded fighters in combat, political commissars managed soldiers’ thoughts and attitudes, encouraging collective responsibility and promoting steadfast morale, determination, and a revolutionary spirit. This was done by eradicating pessimism and individualism in challenging situations through ideological training, including “criticism and self-criticism.” As William Darryl Henderson notes in Why the Viet Cong Fought, the concept of “man over weapons” was critical in the techniques used by the North Vietnamese army to bolster motivation, morale, and group solidarity around party norms.Footnote ⁴³ This morale finds reaffirmation in Cao Vӑn Thơ’s resolute language. Reflecting on his initial days in the South, he notes, with a hint of romanticism:

When faced with the fierceness of the American bombings in the Quảng Trị battlefields at the B5 Front, this volunteer soldier candidly admitted, “How terrible it was when I witnessed the B-52 bombardment that night […] I was so frightened that I could not even reach the shelter even though it was only a meter away.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In numerous memoirs, the soldiers revealed how their revolutionary ardor swiftly perished in the Trường Sơn mountains. They encountered horrendous deaths among infiltrators, brutal bombings, bloody combat, tropical diseases, and an inhospitable environment in the field. The grim reality and their frustrating experiences largely permeate the memoirs and reflections of these soldiers, including the diary of Hoàng Vi Mai, which was captured on March 14, 1967, by the US 25th Infantry Division. Hoàng Vi Mai hailed from a “nonreligious” family of “middle-class peasants” before the August Revolution of 1945. He publicly demonstrated his loyalty to the revolution and its class struggle by applying for party membership. Employing the zealous yet soulless words often found in a political petition within the communist world, this farmer-soldier radicalized himself as a “socialist new man” in the pursuit of Marxist-Leninist ideology, aiming to transform his status from an ordinary to a revolutionary fighter. He pledged:

Portrayed as an ardent combatant, wrapped in dogmatic writings, Hoàng Vi Mai surprisingly revealed a deeply introspective side in his private journal, where he shared his observations, reflections, and the stark realities of the war. His diary offers an unorthodox and contradictory perspective, diverging from the typical mindset of Northern soldiers depicted by Trần Qui, Nguyễn Lập Dương, and Vương Luỹ. Trần Qui upholds the national spirit, Nguyễn Lập Dương makes sacrifices driven by revolutionary patriotism, and Vương Luỹ struggles for the party and its ideal, but Hoàng Vi Mai exposes the raw and brutal truths of human actions during the war. His diary concentrated on the “great loss” caused by the violence. He displayed profound concern for the individual destinies of fighters, trapped in a destructive war that inflicted pain upon all Vietnamese youths and their families:

Hoàng Vi Mai’s narrative delineates a gradual decline in morale. More significantly, in his adoption of a strong antiwar stance, he defies the party’s official taboo on discussions of the war. He adamantly believed that the so-called revolutionary war for national liberation was not the “just war” portrayed in the propaganda. Rather, he condemns it as a “murderous war” that has claimed the lives of a tragic generation of youths, describing them as “born in the North to die in the South.” Hoàng Vi Mai portrayed himself and his young comrades as innocent victims manipulated into being part of a war of attrition. He abandoned the pen for the sword, joining the army as a ninth-grader, fully aware of the plight of young people, enduring what he termed the “devastating and poignant war.” In a confession to his brother, this antiwar soldier grievously denounced the party for stealing the beautiful lives of teenagers who suffered the same fate as he had:

Armed Struggle

During their war against the United States and its allies, the communist-led revolutionaries adeptly employed the distinctive strategy of “two legs and three spearhead-attacks” (hai chân, ba mũi giáp công), aiming to incite a general offensive and general uprising in three key areas: rural, urban, and mountainous regions. The term “two legs” referred to the combination of political and military struggles while “three spearhead-attacks” encompassed military and political action as well as propaganda and agitation among enemy troops. This approach was geared toward capturing the hearts and minds of the people while achieving combat objectives. To execute this strategy, PAVN soldiers served as the core forces, enduring countless hardships and shouldering the primary burden of major combat operations, shedding their blood on the frontlines.

From the beginning of the “real war” between 1965 and 1975, the PAVN’s objective was to confront the US armed forces and their allies for a “decisive victory” as envisioned by Lê Duẩn to prepare for the 1965 general uprising in the South.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1966, the conflict escalated significantly following the Politburo’s approval of senior general Nguyễn Chí Thanh’s aggressive strategy. Thanh, Secretary of the Central Office of South Vietnam (COSVN) and political commissar of the People’s Liberation Army of South Vietnam (PLAF), advocated a shift from guerrilla warfare’s focus on small-unit tactics to “massed combat operations and launch[ing] medium-size and large-scale campaigns by our main-force units in the important theaters of operation.”Footnote ⁵⁰ He declared that the armed struggle for national liberation in the South had transformed into a war against American aggression. Thanh emphasized the need to avoid “returning to the defensive and resistive strategies [from the French Indochina War], and instead urged continuous attacks to destroy the enemies, defend and expand our liberation areas, and claim both land and people.”Footnote ⁵¹ Adopting the motto “Determined to Fight, Determined to Win” (Quyết chiến, Quyết thắng), symbolizing the confidence and resoluteness of the revolutionary army, Thanh believed that, even with limited resources, his troops, poor yet courageous, displayed professional and disciplined fighting abilities, ensuring a “decisive victory in a relatively short period.”Footnote ⁵² Despite this ideology emphasizing an offensive stance across all aspects of war – “strategy, operation, and battle”Footnote ⁵³ – the PAVN suffered significant losses in the major battles. However, driven by the offensive strategy, the PAVN and PLAF persisted from 1965 to 1975 in conducting a series of large-scale military campaigns, notably the Tet Offensive of 1968 and the Easter Offensive of 1972, disregarding military regulations and battlefield realities.

Following the battlefield disasters from 1968 onward, the burden of the bloody war of attrition shifted from the PLAF to the PAVN. By the Easter Offensive of 1972, the PAVN was bearing about 90 percent of the day-to-day combat, resulting in increasingly heavy casualties.Footnote ⁵⁴ After the Quảng Trị campaign, Lê Đức Thọ, head of the Central Organizing Commission of the VWP, in discussion with Henry Kissinger, the United States national security advisor, argued that the goal of the 1972 Quảng Trị Citadel battle had been to gain a political advantage in negotiations. He emphasized that, in military terms, a fierce battle for such a small, devastated area is futile.Footnote ⁵⁵ However, as a sacrifice to achieve this political goal, approximately 80 percent of the human power and facilities of the liberation army in Quảng Trị was destroyed. Their forces were rapidly depleted, with regiments reduced to 800–900 troops, and companies dwindling to only 20 to 30 soldiers, some with merely 4 or 5 fighters left.Footnote ⁵⁶ The 81-day fierce battle in the Quảng Trị Citadel and its claimed victory remain a subject of dispute. General Nguyễn Hà, who commanded a PAVN regiment during the operation, admitted that “the result of this battle was of modest significance since it caused a huge loss for the PAVN without contributing decisively to the Paris Peace Accords.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Throughout the war, North Vietnamese soldiers faced a staggering casualty rate, with at least six soldiers dying for every US soldier.Footnote ⁵⁸ To replenish their forces in the South, starting in 1966 the DRVN implemented an extensive military and political mobilization in the North. This mobilization’s objective was to rally soldiers and civilians nationwide to join the war effort.

The US military estimated a significant increase in infiltration: from a previous annual high of 12,900, it surged to 35,300 in 1965, further escalating to 89,000 in 1966, then fluctuating between 59,000 and 90,000 in 1967, and eventually peaking at about 150,000 in 1968.Footnote ⁵⁹ Gerard DeGroot’s analysis suggests that nearly 200,000 males reached adulthood annually in North Vietnam, producing a pool of 120,000 eligible men. However, to meet the demands of the war of attrition in the South, the PAVN extended the age of military service to range from sixteen to forty-five.Footnote ⁶⁰ This urgent recruitment drive resulted in a significant issue: young recruits lacked proper training and were easily killed in combat, while older enlistees faced health problems and perished in the harsh jungle conditions.

As the conflict grew more violent, the soldiers became more depressed. These disastrous developments on the battlefield affected the morale of many soldiers. In his diary, Hoàng Vi Mai began to distinguish between himself and “them,” and his inquiries started covertly criticizing either his immediate officers or the national leadership:

The distressing experiences of Hoàng Vi Mai are paralleled by those of Bắc Thái, a radio operator in Battalion 2, Front 5, in his diary on December 1, 1969. Like Hoàng Vi Mai, Bắc Thái finds neither revolutionary enthusiasm in his duty nor a promising future in his life. In this war, he saw lonely victims rather than heroic fighters. More radically than Hoàng Vi Mai, this educated fighter expressed straightforward reproaches of the leadership:

By defying military discipline and ignoring political theory that required Northerners to dedicate themselves simultaneously to the people’s army and to the people’s war, this soldier continued to lament the immense sufferings endured by the combatants:

In her book Hanoi, Mary McCarthy observes that the North Vietnamese state exuded confidence in the invincibility of the nation. As a result, while amplifying its victories, the government avoided discussing its losses.Footnote ⁶⁴ This propaganda not only encouraged the soldiers to fight in the South, but also fostered a sense of security among the Northern populace, instilling faith in the party and prompting them to send their children to war. However, the exaggerated portrayal of military successes exposed the infiltrators to danger when encountering actual disasters on the battlefield.

Nguyễn Đức Nhuần, a gunner in Battalion 700, Regiment 302, recounted a cruel reality. After two months of arduous marching to the South, infiltrators “faced the truth, which they found to be completely contrary to the propaganda.” They had been told that “two-thirds of SVN [South Vietnam] had been liberated,” but they found no safe shelter and “were compelled to hide day and night in jungle. Their lives were constantly threatened by shelling and bombing from US and South Vietnamese [ARVN] forces, leading to a steep decline in morale.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Consequently, they had no choice but to endure severe hardship, fight to the death, desert their units, injure themselves, or commit suicide. Bắc Thái’s reflections on the war disclose a bitter truth about the destinies of PAVN soldiers not often documented in the historical records of either Vietnam or the United States: some Northern soldiers and cadres resorted to suicide due to the relentless challenges on the battlefield that completely crushed their morale. He remembered:

The fear of death and the atrocities of war drove soldiers to desperation, leading to self-inflicted injuries in the hope of being evacuated from the frontlines or avoiding further combat. This circumstance is evident from captured medical reports from hospitals of the liberation army. Hospital 211 in the Central Highlands alone, from 1968 to the middle of 1969, recorded fifty-four cases of cadres and troops attempting self-inflicted wounds, using AK assault rifles, CKC carbines, pistols, detonators, explosives, and grenades to mutilate themselves by shooting their own feet or hands, or using knives, shovels, and pickaxes to chop off their fingers.Footnote ⁶⁷

The intensification of the war, characterized by ceaseless combat operations blending guerrilla and conventional actions, not only wore down the “aggressive will” of the US combatants, but also eroded the self-confidence of their PAVN adversaries. Instead of celebrating revolutionary heroism or showing pride in the party’s noble cause, they were distressed, lacking hope for a final victory. Hoàng Vi Mai wrote in frustration:

While grappling with diseases amidst the harshness of the jungle, Northern soldiers endured many challenging days in the South, which not only drained their determination in combat but also impaired their physical vigor. These psychological traumas and discontented attitudes are poignantly depicted by an unidentified soldier who recognized how physical exhaustion deeply affects one’s mental state. For him, the war was not simply about killing the enemy on the battlefield, but also a battle against starvation. In his eyes, “Rice is blood. Manioc is tears. Salt is perspiration. How powerful are hunger, thirst, and weariness.”Footnote ⁶⁹

More strikingly, some PAVN soldiers underwent torment due to a “shrinkage of [their] social and moral horizon,” resulting in declining morale and a departure from the ethical principles they had learned before the war.Footnote ⁷⁰ This internal conflict could trigger mental instability. In a sorrowful poem, another unknown regular soldier, grappled with guilt, accused himself of being a criminal rather than a liberation soldier. His perception of the war was not one of national liberation but a civil war plunging the Vietnamese into the bitter plight described as “meat boils in a leather pot” (nồi da xáo thịt). This metaphor, drawn from folklore, depicts the seething anger and the self-destruction inherent in civil war and fratricide. Questioning why he was sent to the South to kill compatriots transformed him from a revolutionary soldier into an antiwar one. The antagonistic introspection pervades every single word:

The contrast between the noble ideals and harsh realities forced him, expected to ardently believe in the revolution, to painfully reassess his political and fighting motivations. Numerous writings and testimonies by cadres and troops revealed internal strife between the North Vietnamese infiltrators and South Vietnamese natives, including members of the National Liberation Front. Lieutenant Colonel Tần Xuyên, Assistant Chief of Staff and Chief of Operation Section of Division X and an experienced warrior who had participated in the battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954, acknowledged that “the contradictions between the Northern cadres and the Southern cadres are truly hard to solve, due to the prevailing envy and dispute within and among groups.”Footnote ⁷² The division between the Northern and Southern sides is further underscored in the writings of an anonymous soldier, who bitterly expressed that he and his comrades did not receive a warm welcome in the South. He observed, “we are not greeted as liberators in the villages. Instead, when we arrive, people ask us to leave, fearing that our presence will attract enemy planes to come and strafe the village. I feel like a leper.”Footnote ⁷³

Figure 9.1 Soldiers of the People’s Army of Vietnam during training exercises (1968).

Source: Sovfoto / Contributor / Universal Images Group / Getty Images.

Amidst the intense combat on the frontline, the souls of the combatants were tormented by homesickness. Nostalgia and melancholy damaged the morale of the North Vietnamese soldiers, but these spiritual factors also served as a source of hope. For them, the prospect of returning home to reunite with their families was the ultimate inspiration, empowering them to face and overcome the challenges of fierce battlefields. Vũ Vӑn Lang, mentioned earlier, yearned for home, his thoughts filled with longing for his mother and his wife. Despite being a liberation army soldier, he penned, “I feel very sad and homesick. My thoughts linger on my homeland, my mother, and my wife. I am certain my wife misses me greatly and perhaps she weeps so somewhere. Oh! I want to return to my wife!”Footnote ⁷⁴

This homesickness deepened the divide and self-destructive situations between the North and the South. Hoàng Vi Mai’s heartfelt sentiments toward his hometown, family, and relatives amidst the bloody battlefield demonstrate that, rather than desiring to fight and die in combat zones, his longing was to return home to the North. He imagined:

Faced with the indefinite enlistment in the rear and enduring the endless horrors of the war’s frontline, North Vietnamese men found themselves ensnared in an inescapable predicament. Returning home was not an option, and fleeing to other regions or nearby countries to evade the conflict was equally impossible due to the intense warfare. Consequently, they were left with no recourse but to fight – not just for the war effort, but for sheer survival. This harrowing reality made them somewhat more fatalistic, acutely aware that their fate within the war would culminate in only one of two outcomes: victory or death. This sentiment echoed in a Vietnamese wartime saying, “Either become green or return with a red chest” (một xanh cỏ, hai đỏ ngực), encapsulating the stark choice between meeting a premature end, symbolized by the green grass of burial on the battlefield, or returning home adorned with red medals, signifying glory and honor.

The anticommunist South Vietnamese and their allies viewed the North Vietnamese fighters as cold-blooded soldiers, while in North Vietnam they were hailed as heroic vanguards of revolution, who were sacrificing their lives for the nation, often portrayed through the lens of stereotypical heroic–romantic myths. Neither of these historical perceptions fully aligned with the Northern fighters, who perceived themselves as ordinary soldiers whose motivations were similar to those of the combatants of any other war. Vӑn Linh, for instance, did not see himself as a revolutionary or cold-hearted warrior, but rather a “fledged bird flying into a storm and rages of the winds.” The war ended with victory for the North, achieving the goals of liberating the South and reunifying the country. However, in his introspective writing, this young soldier questioned his own sense of national duty, confronted individual hardship, and pondered the rights and wrongs of the war, which was consuming the prime of his life. On March 21, 1966, he poured out his inner turmoil:

Conclusion

The above questions posed by this PAVN soldier about the war persist across multiple generations. His deep concern underscores that the war is not merely a festering wound in the American national psyche; it is also an enduring pain at the heart of the Vietnamese experience. In her book Hanoi’s War, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen highlights that, while Washington’s conflict with the Vietnamese communists during the Cold War had “undeniable losers,” the memory of Hanoi’s war for peace and unification reveals that “there were no clear-cut victors.”Footnote ⁷⁷

The authentic documents from North Vietnamese combatants challenge the implanted perception and history of the war, reshaping its myths through the war of memories. These unique materials indicate that the PAVN was not entirely composed of enthusiastic volunteers dedicated to the revolutionary cause. While some were fervent communists, many shared emotions akin to those of soldiers in wartime – patriotism, heroism, antiwar sentiment, brutality, frustration, loneliness, homesickness, and boredom.

The divergent motivations and morale among them demonstrate that the war they fought was not solely a people’s war; it was, to a large extent, the party’s war. Instead of molding revolutionary heroes, it transformed numerous innocent youths into conscipted soldiers, sufferers of a prolonged war, both in the North and in the desolate landscapes of the South. Understanding the depths of their ideologies and experiences can contribute to a new and nuanced comprehension of victory or defeat from various, deeply personal perspectives. As this issue continues to resonate, the personal memories of PAVN soldiers who endured the war are not merely vehicles of personal remembrance; they represent a force that still shapes the history of the Vietnam War. They offer insights into the motivations, challenges, and perceptions of any war during any period in history.

During the Vietnam War, Vietnamese women acted in pivotal roles on every side of the conflict. They served the war effort as politicians, soldiers, diplomats, covert agents, employees, and active civilian voices. They shaped foreign relations through their encounters with foreign men as friends, lovers, and wives. The line between civilian and combatant blurred throughout the war and in the decades since, causing inconsistency in how or if women have been addressed in relation to the war. The absence of their stories from the narrative of Vietnam War history left a noticeable gap that many scholars have sought to recover in recent years. The contributions of women are best understood when read as a part of the larger war. Women did not live and work in a vacuum detached from the conflict. For some, their drive to participate in the conflict began long before American escalation, rooted in the colonial and revolutionary history of Vietnam during the first half of the twentieth century. Others found themselves tied to the war for pragmatic reasons. Regardless of motivation, Vietnamese women, both on and behind the lines of combat, represent critical figures in the framing of the conflict.

The accounts in this overview focus largely on events that occurred between the fall of the French colonial government in 1954 and the fall of Saigon in 1975. The division of Vietnam along the 17th parallel and the subsequent increase in American support for the government of Ngô Đình Diệm in the South led the two territories to approach women’s involvement in different ways. Tracing how gender norms in Vietnam changed at the outbreak of the war brings the roles of women during the conflict into sharper focus. In the North, women worked actively and openly in military squadrons, on recovery and medical teams, and as diplomatic agents. Soldiers trained in co-ed units, with women taking part in grueling jungle warfare and serving in units sent to retrieve bodies or lay mines. The consequences on women’s bodies of working in swamps and jungle conditions had lifelong impacts that led to birth defects, infertility, and struggles with disease caused by poisoning from Agent Orange and other toxins. Laws sought to define and preserve traditional ideals of marriage and the family. The involvement of diplomatic women such as the foreign minister of the National Liberation Front (NLF), Madame Nguyễn Thị Bình, helped forge the Paris Peace Negotiations.

In the South, American soldiers stereotyped Vietnamese women as prostitutes, hooch maids, and/or NLF spies. These women certainly existed, and not in small numbers, but these beacons of popular memory hardly tell the whole story. The Ngô Đình Diệm government passed laws prior to escalation to limit immoral behaviors in an attempt to reduce negative images of the South. Following the ouster of Diệm and American escalation, many women legally worked in war industries and helped with the logistical needs of the US military forces through the cities. As most troops stayed behind the frontlines, their operations required considerable upkeep. The laundry, cooking, cleaning, and entertainment industries flourished. The South Vietnamese economy was crushed under wartime inflation brought on by thousands of GIs arriving each month beginning in 1965. New bars and restaurants catering to Americans opened their doors and saw a period of relative prosperity in the early years of escalation. Marriages between foreign soldiers and civilian women troubled both governments, which sought to limit such unions and any mass exodus that might be related. As the war expanded, accounts of rape also increased, driving antiwar protests. To keep morale high and open new avenues of opportunity for Southern women, American female service members participated in the formation of a South Vietnamese Women’s Army Corps (WAC).

Women operated with great agency during the war, dictating not only the actions of nonstate actors, but also military movements and diplomacy. In both the North and the South, women who remained behind the lines took on the responsibilities of earning necessary income while acting as fulltime caregivers for their families. Those outside government and military work who engaged in personal relationships with soldiers drove nations to change laws and frustrated foreign policy. Antiwar groups adopted imagery of the treatment of women by foreign soldiers to use as a powerful tool in their efforts to end the conflict. In recent years, scholars have begun to acknowledge the critical roles of women in shaping the conflict on both sides. This chapter briefly highlights that scholarship and the key ways that women participated in, and dictated the actions of foreign governments during, the Vietnam War.

North Vietnamese Women

In North Vietnam, more women took on overtly militant roles than women in the South. From actual military training to body recovery, the North utilized women in and around combat operations. In addition to military positions, Northern women also actively participated in diplomatic efforts. Karen Gottschang Turner and Phan Thanh Hao’s 1998 classic Even the Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam shared some of the first accounts of North Vietnamese women’s experiences with global audiences. Based on years of research and interviews with female veterans, their research provided glimpses into the lives of Northern soldiers, militiawomen, and volunteer youth, among others. Through their interviews and accounts, Turner and Hao illustrate the vital importance of Northern women to the communist war effort.Footnote ¹

Communist activists viewed female participation in the war as essential to victory. While women volunteered for service in large numbers, their acknowledgment from men or the party came slower than many would have liked. As the party began to acknowledge the accomplishments of women as soldiers and heroines of the communist cause, they also told male forces that old ways of thinking about women distracted from their potential to support the war effort. Rather than keeping women in subservient roles, all Vietnamese should encourage them to pursue membership and volunteer for war work. Between 1965 and 1969, Turner and Hao write, the number of Northern women working increased from 170,000 to 500,000, with many taking jobs to support the war effort.Footnote ² As with other conflicts, women took on more positions in industry and agriculture to maintain the needs of the military and keep the nation functioning during the war.

Many women in North Vietnam, regardless of their role in the war effort, underwent some form of training in military tactics. Those serving in the militias received training similar to male soldiers, and efforts to draw women into military services were also codified by the North Vietnamese constitution.Footnote ³ The programs involved marching with loaded packs, using weapons, and remaining covert in their movements to prepare for the difficulties of life in the mountainous regions of Central Vietnam and along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail. The lack of proper sanitation and dietary supplies created additional challenges for women working in militias, leading many to struggle with their menstrual cycles. While not deployed as part of regular ground combat units, female guerrillas took on nearly every other available task including operating anti-aircraft guns. In addition, they traveled with units to work as engineers, liaisons, and sappers to keep units moving forward.Footnote ⁴ Beyond the segregation of frontline soldiers, women volunteered for and participated in all other aspects of military life. As Turner and Hao show in their study, however, their presence did not necessarily mean acceptance. Even women known as military heroines faced negative backlash for their actions as society adjusted to the presence of women in roles traditionally associated with masculinity.

Members of organizations such as the Youth Shock Brigades faced extreme conditions related to weather, animal predators, and military bombings. The Brigades, functioning from 1950 to 1975, recruited patriotic young people to participate in support operations including the movement of supplies, clearing or rebuilding of roads, and identification of bomb and mine locations.Footnote ⁵ Scarce supplies and harsh conditions left many members who survived their service with permanent bodily damage. Women suffered injury, mutilation, and infertility because of their work along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail. Others experienced rape and sexual assault at the hands of their fellow soldiers in the field. These challenges did not stall recruitment, however. Women actively participated alongside men in volunteer operations like the Brigades throughout the war.

Women also took on roles as medical professionals, aiding with war casualties in the South. Đặng Thùy Trâm served as a doctor in the Quảng Ngãi province of central Vietnam. She traveled from Hanoi to arrive at her clinic in 1967. Thùy Trâm’s diary, recovered by an American soldier after she was killed, details her treatment of soldiers, her dedication to the party, the treatment she received from others in the resistance who considered her too bourgeois, and the conditions of war including the role of Agent Orange.Footnote ⁶ Thùy’s account as a well-educated female physician offers a different perspective from many in the Youth Shock Brigades, but their experiences with death, sickness, and the destruction caused by defoliants and bombings share many similarities.

Vietnamese women also took on active political roles on the diplomatic side of the conflict. Most notably, Madame Nguyễn Thị Bình, a Southerner, served as the foreign minister for the National Liberation Front’s Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG). In her position as head diplomat for the PRG, Madame Bình took a stance against South Vietnam to promote a revolutionary communist government in its place and remove Americans from the nation. While not directly representing North Vietnam, their eager support of her participation in the negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference highlights the importance of women at the highest levels of North Vietnamese government. As foreign minister, Madame Bình traveled extensively to support the cause and build a public face for female diplomats working against South Vietnam and its Western allies. She notably won support from the Nonalignment Movement in 1970 for the PRG’s cause. Months later, historian Lien-Hang T. Nguyen argues, her status at the Paris Peace Talks took on even more significance as she published an eight-point plan that served as a buffer in negotiations between North Vietnam and the Americans. The efforts of Madame Bình, as a leader and member of numerous women’s and revolutionary groups, illustrate the influence of female diplomats, to whom she referred as “soldiers with long hair,” in the Vietnam era.Footnote ⁷

Not all North Vietnamese women supported the war effort, however. Antiwar activists in the North challenged the efforts put into place by Hồ Chí Minh and First Secretary Lê Duẩn. The Women’s Union of North Vietnam worked across international borders to promote peace, building on what Judy Tzu-Chun Wu has called “a belief in global sisterhood, projecting and cultivating a female universalism that simultaneously critiqued and transcended racial and cultural divides.”Footnote ⁸ For years, along with female activists from South Vietnam and Western nations, the Women’s Union of North Vietnam participated in various conferences to promote peace. The topics tended to focus on the importance of family preservation and covered issues ranging from racial injustice to ending nuclear weapons programs. The conferences reached their height with the 1971 International Women’s Congress. The program combined fights for women’s rights with the peace movement. Wu proves in her work that Vietnamese women did not simply adopt the ideologies of Western female peace activists, but helped to form and shape the movement through their views toward female unity.

In their personal lives, North Vietnamese women faced similar laws and restrictions on family and domestic status as women in the South. Universal concerns over the fate of their children and families dictated the actions of many women related to how they approached their marriage or their stance on the war. New legislation meant to protect family values shifted previous views on marriages based on which men would occasionally take more than one wife. The National Assembly’s Family Decree passed laws limiting marriage to only one spouse. The laws placed stigmas on second wives, like Lê Duẩn’s wife Nga, who was raised in the South and moved north with their children as concern grew over the outbreak of war. Despite her revolutionary training and relationship with Lê Duẩn, members of his first family and the Women’s Union treated Nga poorly because of her status as a second wife, forcing her first out of the country and then back to the South.Footnote ⁹ Although not everyone followed the laws, marriages in North Vietnam tended to remain more traditional longer than in the South, where the influx of foreigners created more opportunities to marry outside villages and against family wishes.

The war shaped the experiences of North Vietnamese women by placing an emphasis on a patriotic and communist duty to the state. The prevalence of women in or near combat operations distinguished them from Southern women, who still saw war on a daily basis, but rarely took up arms in the same way. Women flourished in militia, agricultural, and industrial service, but often suffered physically because of poor working and living conditions and a lack of supplies. Their efforts helped to reshape traditional views of women as inferior for some observers, although others continued to resist the implementation of women in military and party leadership positions. Diplomats and activists also thrived in the North, with many promoting the roles of women as critical to winning either the war or the peace.

South Vietnamese Women

Within the borders of South Vietnam, women took on complicated and dynamic roles. The proximity to foreign soldiers created unique social challenges and raised speculation about women who interacted with foreigners. Even ahead of military escalation of the conflict, the American-supported Diệm government worked to restrict the behavior of its citizens both politically and socially. Despite these efforts, the 1963 coup against Diệm and the arrival of thousands of foreign soldiers starting in 1965 derailed the possibility of maintaining a society free of industries that were perceived as immoral, such as prostitution. The war drove young women into the cities in large numbers where they struggled to find work, leading many to rely on the war economy for income. Outside clandestine activities such as sex work and participation in the shadow economy, many Southern women took administrative or service jobs in government. In some instances, their roles made them vulnerable to attack or manipulation. Political repression of former Việt Minh revolutionaries and negative perceptions of Americans contributed to the rise of the NLF which fought in the name of the PRG. As has been noted, Southern women took on significant leadership roles in the organization. They directed military operations and served as political negotiators. Historian Patricia D. Norland’s work traces the interest in politics starting during the colonial era, with privileged women embracing left-leaning education at high rates starting in the 1940s.Footnote ¹⁰ Women sympathetic to the Southern cause could also join military ranks in the Vietnamese Women’s Army Corps, but mostly served in administrative roles and received considerably less military training than their Northern counterparts. The presence of foreign soldiers in South Vietnam created unique challenges not seen in the North and resulted in the allies spending considerable time negotiating appropriate social relations that kept their fighting forces ready while maintaining a positive image for their respective countries.

Within South Vietnam, the social and political changes triggered by the war altered societal norms. Prior to American escalation, the new government of the Republic of Vietnam that ousted Emperor Bảo Đại worked with US advisors to forge a new government and a security strategy. Unmarried, the newly named president of South Vietnam, Diệm, paired with his brother’s wife (Trần Lệ Xuân, known widely as Madame Nhu) to serve as his nominal first lady. Much of South Vietnam’s social behavior and legal treatment of women arose from laws passed under pressure from Diệm and Madame Nhu. Her policies, mostly guided by the family’s Catholicism and remembered for an unpopular ban on dancing, meant to empower South Vietnamese women by offering them more financial independence and restricting practices that might lead them to sex work.

Despite their role in aiding her family’s ascension to power, Nhu used her power in Diệm’s administration to focus attention on American visitors and military personnel who she felt brought negative values to South Vietnam that distracted the people from the conflict and nation-building. Nhu’s talking points centered on raising awareness of women’s issues, redefining morality laws, and fortifying South Vietnam’s image on the world’s stage. Yet bans on divorce, adultery, and vice activities all but criminalized women. Still, many found a voice within South Vietnam. Whether women supported the Americans or not, protests and fundraisers pushed them into the war’s discourse. In the wake of the war, women suffered for their participation in the South. Reeducation camps violently punished women for associations real or imagined. War widows and mothers of Amerasian children, those born from unions between American soldiers and South Vietnamese women, struggled to survive in the postwar world. Their involvement shaped the direction of policy discourse and made day-to-day life on military bases possible.

Figure 10.1 US brigadier general F. J. Karch is greeted by Vietnamese women in Đà Nẵng (March 8, 1965).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

Before mass US escalation began, Diệm and Madame Nhu enacted two pieces of legislation anchored in their Catholic faith that targeted what they saw as immoral social behavior. The 1959 Code of the Family and the 1962 Laws for the Protection of Morality shaped social relations and made widespread wartime practices such as prostitution and cohabitation illegal. The legal brothel culture under earlier French leadership during the French Indochina War contributed to Vietnamese attitudes of Western men and their expectations of Vietnamese women.Footnote ¹¹ The perception of men seeking out Vietnamese companionship strictly for sex threatened the reputation of any women who engaged with foreigners. While Nhu herself pitched her programs as forms of altruistic religious piety and forward-thinking feminism, historians have illustrated that many of them provided personal benefits for Nhu. Most notably, the first lady pushed for legislation to ban divorce. In creating stricter family laws and opening pathways for women’s rights, she prevented her husband from divorcing her and guaranteed her position in government.Footnote ¹² Nhu took her role in government seriously. She even openly challenged American officials on their behavior and the risks presented by their interactions with Vietnamese women.Footnote ¹³

The Code of the Family offered legislative changes that encouraged independence for married and widowed women.Footnote ¹⁴ New programs to benefit women’s rights included property-ownership laws that allowed women to take sole possession of homes or land. With the changes in property laws, women no longer needed to rely on a male relative like a husband or father to retain a home in the case of separation or death. The “marriage property system” of the code encouraged couples to outline their property rights in a process similar to a prenuptial agreement. In theory, the change made men and women equal in economic status. The passage of legislation failed to create drastic change overnight, however, and many continued to view women as subservient to their husbands despite the changes. Still, over the course of the decade, women began to see more options for employment and economic freedom opening to them.Footnote ¹⁵

Like the Family Codes, the 1962 morality codes targeted behavior deemed immoral or damaging to the global perception of Vietnamese culture and especially of Vietnamese women. Among other things, they banned prostitution, gambling, pornography, beauty contests, sentimental songs, and dancing. In a region largely influenced by Western culture from decades of living with both the French and the American presence, the restrictions felt antiquated to many. The laws mainly targeted young women who worked for, solicited to, or dated foreign men in the cities of South Vietnam. Nhu’s laws were not universally popular among political figures in the South, either. Some feared they might alienate an already struggling sector of the population, tempting them to support the NLF, while others simply viewed the policies as outmoded or too difficult to enforce. Likely, many saw little wrong with the prostitution industry, which catered to both local and foreign audiences.Footnote ¹⁶ As more Americans descended on Saigon and other Vietnamese cities, police struggled to limit the banned behaviors. After Diệm’s death, only prostitution remained a real concern for South Vietnamese leadership.

Following escalation, women in the South found multiple entries into the war economy. They served with the South Vietnamese Women’s Army Corps, worked for Americans in clubs or offices, sold goods and sodas on the streets, or engaged in black-market trade, while others sold their bodies as part of the burgeoning sex trade.Footnote ¹⁷ Some women and girls – not all of those working for Americans had reached adulthood – profited from the freedom and the easy-spending American soldiers. Brothels recruited or coerced workers in diverse ways. In historian Mai Lan Gustafsson’s oral history research, several women later told her that the war had been “the best time” of their lives.Footnote ¹⁸ In addition to their ability to gain more income in the cities than they might otherwise have made in their villages, the relative freedom of living in Saigon or other cities offered an opportunity to achieve independence at a young age.

For women seeking active military participation, the South Vietnamese WAC offered an opportunity for uniformed service. American women who traveled to Vietnam as part of the US WAC took part in the training of Vietnamese women for their own military units. Lieutenant Colonel Judith Bennett of the US WAC recorded an interview about this training in 1966, laying out the similarities and differences between the approaches of the two nations regarding the duties of their female members. Both South Vietnam and the United States relied on volunteers to staff the WAC forces. South Vietnam limited women, unlike their Northern counterparts, to administrative roles to free up more men to deploy for combat. Part of the requirements for Vietnamese women included English-language skills to serve in the officer corps so they could work closely with American forces.Footnote ¹⁹ Tasks for the Vietnamese WAC personnel also involved caring for the dependants of soldiers, participating in “revolutionary development” units to help stabilize insecure areas, and as police officers.Footnote ²⁰ Started in January 1965, the Vietnamese WAC units organized as escalation began in the South. While prohibited from serving in combat, WACs participated in other ways that made them a vital part of the larger war effort.

The highly visible nature of the prostitution industry in South Vietnam overshadowed the work conducted by women serving in legal occupations like the WAC. The industry’s scope created challenges for mediating the impact on the perception of Vietnamese women, foreign relations, and public health.Footnote ²¹ Considered by many in the military as a natural byproduct of war, prostitution created real challenges for military–civilian relations and the local economy. While American leadership hoped to simply minimize the damage, South Vietnam ostensibly worked toward an eradication policy to eliminate the industry all together. A South Vietnamese “Seminar on the Eradication of Prostitution” singled out Americans as the main source of the problem, and identified bars and brothels known to cater to foreigners. Frustrated with the lack of results from eradication programs, panelists assessed that the policies encouraged bar- and brothel-owners to hide the illicit side of their industries.Footnote ²²

Eradication policies and the continued increase in prostitution led to a public health crisis, since officials provided no education or treatment related to safe sex, and Diệm-era antiprophylactic laws banned contraception. Attempts to screen and treat Vietnamese women by American and NGO hospitals showed that roughly half of those seen tested positive for venereal disease, an unsurprising number since 62 percent had told staff that they did not use any form of prophylactics while working. Further exacerbating this issue was that formal education, including any sex education or knowledge of diseases, was severely lacking.Footnote ²³ Like all aspects of society, the quality of health care and knowledge also depended on the type of establishment the women worked in. From exclusive members-only brothels to women who peddled in the streets, the experiences for prostitutes varied widely.

Prostitution was only one part of the black market that threatened the economy in South Vietnam, which was already damaged by inflation. With their close access to Americans while working on military posts, women had a unique opportunity to obtain and sell black-market goods. As Helen Pho has argued, the black-market economy in the South weakened the nation’s ability to govern. The flow of Military Payment Certificates (MPCs) in and out of Vietnamese hands broke military laws and helped the market to flourish. Bar girls and other service industry employees accepted the currency and used it to purchase other black-market items. Through the buying and selling of goods ranging from air conditioners to hair spray, the black market cost both governments millions of dollars.Footnote ²⁴

One of the most abused products on the black market was money itself. Soldiers paid housekeepers, peddlers, and prostitutes in both American dollars and nonconvertible MPCs. Civilian women enjoyed unprecedented access to jobs with the US military during the war, working for low wages that made it impossible for American contractors to compete. Women used their connections with Americans to purchase and trade in foreign goods that could earn them significant profits with local consumers. Violating policies regarding the use of MPCs constituted one of the most common ways American military police could apprehend Vietnamese women, although they turned them over to local authorities. The benefits of working in the black market outweighed the risks of arrest, however, since American goods drew a high profit. The impact of this trade on the economy triggered inflation in an already struggling economy.

The proximity to men that arose from working within American bases placed women at risk of sexual assault. The lack of publicity and accountability for attacks heightened the risk. Soldiers on all sides of the conflict perpetrated attacks, including rape, against South Vietnamese women both on and off the frontlines of conflict. The existing literature focuses on the role of American soldiers, but Vietnamese and South Korean troops perpetrated numerous acts of rape and assault as well. Nick Turse argues that American soldiers conducted rape as part of their strategic operations and following systematic orders to “kill anything that moves.”Footnote ²⁵ Turse’s work sparked considerable debate related to the concept of the violence as systematic and indiscriminate. The nature of sexual violence in Vietnam cannot be summed up that simply. In Europe during and after World War II, as Mary Louise Roberts illustrates, there were patterns or “waves” in rapes in which soldiers perpetrated more crimes than they had in other eras.Footnote ²⁶ Attacks in Vietnam also differed dramatically depending on the location inside or outside cities, the year they took place, or the relationship with the perpetrators.

Within South Vietnamese cities, accounts of rape received considerably less reporting in American media sources, despite accusations starting with the escalation in the number of US troops in 1965.Footnote ²⁷ As more foreign troops flooded into cities, crime and violence increased. The economic and political costs of the disruption caused by soldiers forced the US military to relocate soldiers to a post outside Saigon at a massive facility by Long Bình. The army hired local women to take on service tasks including laundry and cleaning with reasonable salaries, but placed them in vulnerable power positions within the American compound. Reports of assaults indicated that some took advantage of their proximity to female employees to coerce or rape the women.Footnote ²⁸

Outside military installations, attacks in bars and other public places also indicate the risk of violence against women that took place in the rear echelon of combat more than scholars tend to acknowledge. Local papers carried the reports, and military police blotter records pointed to accusations of assault and rape. Most of the reports link the attacks with alcohol use. Encounters between Vietnamese women and soldiers happened most frequently in bars or brothels catering to foreign troops. In some cases, military police noted that they simply let an accused soldier sleep off his hangover before sending him back to his posts.Footnote ²⁹ The typically one-off attacks in the cities failed to garner the same international attention as massacres in villages like Mỹ Lai due to scope, but their existence contributed to a negative perception of foreign soldiers for some in Vietnam. Scholars dispute the number of assaults and the chain of responsibility for rapes, with both difficult to pin down as surviving victims found few friendly audiences to whom to voice their complaints.

Women who bore the children of American servicemen faced stigmatization, and children suffered from harassment. Orphanage numbers swelled considerably during the war, with the number of Amerasian orphans reaching between 25,000 and 50,000.Footnote ³⁰ As the war lingered for a decade with consensual and nonconsensual intercultural relations persisting at high rates, an orphan crisis sparked international attention. The 1987 Amerasian Homecoming Act sought to create opportunities for those left behind, including children of rape, and brought more than 21,000 children fathered by American soldiers to the United States. Still, far more remained in Vietnam. The victims and children of South Korean troops, in contrast, continue to fight for reparations for war crimes including rape.Footnote ³¹

The violence of the war’s battles coupled with the photographic evidence at massacre sites like Mỹ Lai that showed the targeting of women and children only added to the negative perception within antiwar communities. Vietnamese women’s marches highlighted the violence as one of their central themes. One member of an anti-American group recalled the story of the rape and murder of a pregnant woman as her motivation to take to the streets. She reflected, “as a woman and a peasant in the South, I only worked very hard to live. When I witnessed the savage crimes of GI’s [sic] with my own eyes I felt very strongly. In order to defend my own life and the lives of my family, I had no other way but to join other women and to fight back.”Footnote ³² Women’s participation in antiwar or anti-South Vietnamese protests began before escalation, as shown by Norland’s work on South Vietnamese elite women,Footnote ³³ but participation fluctuated in response to the war and the behavior of troops.

South Vietnamese women who participated in communist activities, or otherwise sympathized with the North, also took on powerful leadership roles in the NLF to support the PRG. Nguyễn Thị Định organized the 1960 uprising in Bến Tre province to oppose the Diệm regime in the South. During the 1950s, Diệm targeted former members of the Việt Minh using financial penalties, reeducation camps, torture, and murder. This treatment and proximity to revolutionary forces in villages motivated many young women to support the communists.Footnote ³⁴ Nguyễn Thị Định’s success at Bến Tre made her one of the foremost female members of the NLF. Part of the strategy for women’s roles in the Front played on traditional perceptions of women as weaker or unassuming figures in society. By taking the central role in public protests, Mai Elliott argues, women who marched on local leadership to present complaints typically received less harassment from the South Vietnamese government and military. The rallies and marches attracted large audiences, and officials feared the public might perceive them as weak or cowardly if they attacked or arrested large groups of female revolutionaries.Footnote ³⁵

Following Bến Tre, Nguyễn Thị Định rose quickly through the political ranks. In 1964, she was elected as a leader to several party and women’s organizations, including the post of chair of the South Vietnam Women’s Liberation Association. The following year, the South Vietnam Liberation Armed Forces named her deputy commander.Footnote ³⁶ Women such as Madame Bình and Nguyễn Thị Định represented the political elite, but their roles resonated with their female counterparts through appeals to families and their desire for security. Beyond Vietnam, members of the NLF also appealed to women abroad, particularly in the United States, to help them in their efforts by pressuring for an end to the war at home. Outside political and diplomatic roles, NLF women also took on more militant roles. They received less publicity than their counterparts in the North, but stories of armed female heroism helped fuel propaganda campaigns and encouraged Southern women to join resistance movements.Footnote ³⁷

Not all encounters between American soldiers and South Vietnamese women were negative, however. Couples met and fell in love. They courted in the cities and fought for the right to marry in the face of skepticism from parties on both sides. GI–civilian dating and marriage applications faced scrutiny from families and governments alike. South Vietnamese police harassed women who openly dated American men, accusing them of prostitution to win bribes. American officials worried whether girlfriends and brides held genuine feelings for their partners, or if they were entering the relationships simply for monetary gain, a way out of Vietnam, or even to obtain intelligence as a spy. Regardless of the hassles they faced, many couples successfully navigated the difficult process to remain together.

Developments in how the South Vietnamese government managed intercultural relationships between South Vietnamese women and foreign men created confusion about appropriate legal behavior.Footnote ³⁸ Despite ending enforcement of several of the laws, like those against dancing, South Vietnamese leadership remained critical of the social institutions where interracial relationships bloomed.Footnote ³⁹ To discourage the relationships, South Vietnamese police targeted women as they traveled with American soldiers and threatened their reputations if they failed to produce “cohabitation certificates” or pay off the officers. The harassment grew so prevalent that the Capital National Police Command in Saigon issued instructions warning their police officers against the behavior. In 1972, the American Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) shared the release with their soldiers to warn them against paying the bribes or applying for any requested licensing. The permissive nature of the relationships pressured governments to stop requiring the often-requested “cohabitation certificates” for dating, living together, or traveling together on public transportation. This applied even if the woman in question did work in prostitution.Footnote ⁴⁰

Couples pursuing serious relationships struggled to formalize their unions through marriage. The United States approved more than 8,000 marriages for soldiers during the war, far fewer than during the wars or occupations following World War II or the Korean War.Footnote ⁴¹ The frequency of encounters between soldiers and civilians cannot explain this change; rather a shift in Cold War mentality and immigration laws serve as better explanations. By the start of escalation, military brides no longer qualified for war-bride status that prioritized their entry into the United States. The 1965 Hart–Celler Immigration and Nationality Act focused on existing family reunification rather than “race-based policies” that prioritized or limited specific nationalities.Footnote ⁴² With this shift, the military instituted a long and detailed process that discouraged soldiers from completing them. As the war came to an end, the emphasis on family reunification prompted relatives of those who had successfully navigated the system to use their connections to leave Vietnam for the United States.Footnote ⁴³

In the 1950s, the Diệm administration had opened the possibility to the foreign unions by dissolving the focus on prearranged marriage and allowing for marriages chosen by the participants on the grounds of love. Rates of arranged marriages fell quickly, but filial loyalty encouraged many young women to seek the permission of their family before selecting a husband of whom they might disapprove. Over time, fewer parents arranged marriages for their daughters. Instead, and with the intention of both protecting girls and young women by removing them from rural wartorn villages and finding a source of income for families, many opted to send their daughters to the cities. Even families who hoped their daughters would marry a man of the family’s choice found those men absent during the conflict. For the United States, concerns that the women might work as spies or quickly divorce their husbands once they immigrated represented some of the main apprehensions for Americans, while the Vietnamese government worried about how women fleeing the nation to marry Americans reflected national morality. For those who simply fell in love and hoped to remain united after the war, the hurdles of the marriage policies marked a worthwhile frustration. As with many other policies, the view of wives as the ones who placed both nations at risk reflected the broader suspicions of South Vietnamese women and their relationships with foreign men.

As living legacies of soldier–civilian sexual encounters, Amerasian children played a significant role in the postwar era. Numbers of possible orphaned children are estimated as high as 879,000, although some scholars place the number around 50,000.Footnote ⁴⁴ Efforts to get children out of Vietnam, either as orphans or simply for their own safety, resulted in a rise in adoption requests spurred by groups in Australia, Europe, and the United States. Humanitarian evacuations, like Operation Babylift, and adoption politics faced challenges in the years surrounding the fall of Saigon in 1975, often overlapping with the ongoing refugee crisis.Footnote ⁴⁵

Conclusion

The encompassing realities of war in both North and South Vietnam meant that few, if any, women remained outside the conflict. From military and industrial roles to diplomatic and protest efforts, women helped drive and shape the day-to-day outcome of battles and negotiations. Their personal lives took on political meaning as governments sought to control their sexual behavior and determine the legal limits of their marriages. After the American military forces left, Southern women who had interacted with the foreign military faced reeducation and scorn for their past actions. Many struggled to maintain employment, and those with Amerasian children struggled to protect them. Regardless of their roles in the war, Vietnamese women found ways to survive. Their actions are often discussed, as they are in this chapter, in isolation from the broader conversation on the war. In reality, women’s participation – from the highest levels of political figures to the lowest levels of nonstate actors – influenced the conflict as much as did that of their male counterparts. As their contributions are further engaged in the historiography, the significance of studying the war as an event that fully engaged soldiers and civilians across the region will allow historians to tell a more complete story.

In Our Great Spring Victory: An Account of the Liberation of South Vietnam in 1975, General Vӑn Tiến Dũng quotes his South Vietnamese counterpart General Phạm Vӑn Phú as often saying “Who controls the Tây Nguyên will control all of the South.”Footnote ¹ Literally meaning Western Highlands, the Tây Nguyên is usually called the Central Highlands in English, and alternatively Hauts plateaux du centre or Pays montagnard du sud(-indochinois) in French. This mountainous region in central Vietnam encompasses the Annam Cordillera (Trường Sơn) and high plateaus between the narrow coastal plains bordering the South China Sea to the east, and Laos and Cambodia to the west. Whatever toponym we use, the quote indicates the strategic importance of these highlands for the control of central and southern Vietnam – during both the French Indochina War and the Vietnam War. In this chapter I will explore the role that the indigenous ethnic groups of this region played in the Vietnam War, in particular in its dénouement with the fall or liberation of Saigon in April 1975.

Until 1954 the Central Highlands were primarily inhabited by some twenty indigenous ethnic groups that the French and Americans collectively referred to as “Montagnards” (mountain dwellers); as Montagnards is not a proper ethnonym, I will refer to them as (Central) Highlanders. The main indigenous ethnic groups in terms of population are the Jarai, Rhadé (now called Êđe), Raglay, and Churu (who speak Austronesian languages, like the Malay, Indonesians, Filipinos, and Polynesians), and the Bahnar, Sedang, Koho, Hrê, Mnông, Stiêng, Bru Vân Kiều, Katu, Gie Triêng, Maa, Ta Oi, Cor, and Chrau (who speak Austroasiatic languages). Their combined population was estimated at around 1 million in 1954, and more recently at around 2.5 million. The ethnic Việt people – or Kinh – were until 1954 largely confined to the wet rice-growing plains of lower than 200 meters in altitude: the Red River Delta in the north, the Mekong Delta in the south, and the coastal plains connecting these deltas. Just as the highlands in the north dominated the northern delta, the Annam Cordillera and Central Highlands dominated the central coastal plain and hence controlled overland access to the southern delta areas, including Saigon.

It was the rapid deterioration of the security situation in the Central Highlands that prompted the US Special Forces to lead Highlander warriors. It was an attack by the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) on an American airstrip close to Pleiku in the Central Highlands that prompted the bombing campaign known as Operation Rolling Thunder and the landing of US combat troops near Đà Nẵng in 1965. And it was the surprise attack by communist forces on the Highland city of Ban Mê Thuột (now Buôn Ma Thuột) on March 10, 1975, and its conquest within two days, that triggered the South Vietnamese military retreat from the Highlands and the consequent collapse of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). It was the silent complicity of indigenous militia and populations around Ban Mê Thuột that ensured the element of surprise in the attack by regular North Vietnamese cavalry, and which arguably accelerated the demise of the RVN in the South – although perhaps it did not alter the outcome itself, that is, the reunification of Vietnam. In all these key episodes in the war, Central Highlanders played an outsized role.

In order to understand this historical outcome, we have to go back to 1962’s Operation Switchback, which moved operational control over the Civilian Irregular Defense Groups from the Central Intelligence Agency to the US Army in the course of 1963. But before describing these events of 1963 and beyond in more detail, it is necessary to briefly sketch the history of events leading up to Operation Switchback. After dwelling a bit on the events of 1963 and their immediate aftermath, I will offer a brief and necessarily simplified version of events up until 1975.Footnote ²

Colonial Trajectories and the French Indochina War

When French troops arrived in Indochina, the Highlands were regarded as a largely impenetrable hinterland where few Việt people settled and where the imperial court of Huế exerted little control. Around 1850 French missionaries even managed to set up a mission station among the Bahnar group in Kontum, where they remained out of reach of the court that suppressed Christianity as a potentially seditious religion. In Vietnamese, the region was referred to as rừng mọi (literally forests of the savages), denoting both geographical and physical distance as well as wildness. Because the area was a hinterland that was surrounded from 1893 by three French protectorates (Annam, Laos, Cambodia) and one colony (Cochinchina), it was initially unclear whether the border should run along the watershed of the Annam Cordillera – as was the case north from Quảng Nam – or more to the west, but during the first decade of the twentieth century the territory covered by the current highland provinces of Kontum, Gialai, Đắk Lắk, and Đắk Nông was assigned to Vietnam. In the 1920s the post–World War I rubber boom led to a land rush on the fertile basaltic plateaus, necessitating the imposition of more systematic colonial rule and bringing not just planters and capital, but also Việt (as well as Chinese and occasionally Indonesian) labor. These developments caused discontent among many indigenous Highlanders, as brought out in the long-lasting and violent Mnông rebellion led by N’Trang Lơng (1914–35) and in the so-called Python God millenarian movement encompassing many ethnic groups throughout the Central Highlands (1936–8).Footnote ³

The economic crisis of the 1930s and the emergence of political threats to colonial rule – domestically from nationalist movements and internationally from Japan and Thailand – induced the French colonial regime to coopt Indochina’s ethnic minorities against these perceived threats through a politique d’égards (politics of respect), which began with a change of ethnonym from the offensive term mọi (savage) to montagnard (highlander). The strategic importance of the mountainous regions of colonial French Indochina was recognized early on by French military officers such as Joseph Galliéni and Charles Ardant du Picq.Footnote ⁴ During the French Indochina War (1946–54) the truth of their assessments was shown in the battles of Điện Biên Phủ in the northern highlands and of An Khê in the Annam Cordillera (both in 1954), which forced the French to acquiesce to Vietnamese independence and abandon Indochina.Footnote ⁵ During World War II the French colonial army increased its efforts at recruiting Highlanders for their bataillons montagnards, holding out the promise that the Highlands territory would become an “autonomous zone” under direct French rule by taking steps to detach it from the Protectorate of Annam. Cut off from France, the pro-Vichy colonial regime of Admiral Jean Decoux celebrated the Highlands as the heartland of French Indochina, epitomized by the status of Đà Lạt as the summer capital and by plans to turn it into a federal capital.Footnote ⁶ These plans all came to naught, however, as in March 1945 Japanese forces staged a coup against the French regime, detaining all French military forces and seeking to enlist Vietnamese nationalists in their struggles against the Allies. The rather sudden Japanese surrender in August 1945 plunged the colony into chaos, with many groups vying for power. In a series of events the Việt Minh emerged as the strongest nationalist group, and its leader Hồ Chí Minh declared independence in Hanoi on September 2, 1945.Footnote ⁷

After World War II the French army sought to return to a Vietnam in the grip of nationalist fervor. The majority of the French expeditionary force consisted of Africans, North Africans, and Legionnaires, and the French colonial army recruited soldiers and militias from some of the approximately twenty ethnic groups in the Central Highlands between 1946 and 1954 in order to seek allies against a Vietnamese nationalist movement dominated by ethnic Việt. The indigenous Highlanders were culturally and linguistically very different from each other but even more so from the surrounding Việt, Lào, and Khmer populations, and were induced to fight for the French with promises of some measure of cultural autonomy and territorial control. After carving out a separate Highland territory from Vietnam in the form of the Pays montagnard du sud-indochinois (Highlander country of southern Indochina, better known as PMSI) in 1946, the French authorities attached this territory in 1950 to the person of the reinstated emperor Bảo Đại, as his personal Crown Domain. The French divide-and-rule tactics were never completely successful and split the Highlander populations whose allegiance was divided. In the 1950s the Việt Minh became militarily ever stronger, and in the spring of 1954 defeated the French expeditionary army in the battle of Điện Biên Phủ in the Northern Highlands. Just after Điện Biên Phủ in June 1954, the French elite Groupe mobile 100 of the Groupement de commandos mixtes aéroportés (GCMA) suffered near-annihilation at the Mang Yang pass near An Khê in the Central Highlands, the last major battle before the Geneva Agreements took effect on August 1, 1954.Footnote ⁸

Buôn Enao and Operation Switchback, 1954–1963

At the Geneva Conference the various parties – France, the Việt Minh, rightwing Vietnamese nationalists, the United States, the USSR, and China – agreed to a temporary troop separation along the 17th parallel in anticipation of elections that would never materialize. This eventually resulted in the temporary existence of two separate Vietnamese states, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) in the north and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) in the south, which both claimed sovereignty over the entire territory of Vietnam. The ceasefire and troop separation meant that many Highlander communist cadres such as Nay Đer, Nay Phin, Ksor Ní, and Y Ngông Nie Kdam went north for training at the ethnic minority training school in Thái Nguyên, in anticipation of their return to the Central Highlands, which for some took more than two decades to become reality.Footnote ⁹ In the southern half of Vietnam, with US support, Ngô Đình Diệm replaced erstwhile emperor Bảo Đại as the head of the French-created State of Vietnam under the Fédération indochinoise, and in 1955 established a nationalist, autocratic regime – the Republic of Vietnam – in which important positions were taken by his relatives.Footnote ¹⁰ With the French out of the way, Diệm dispensed with the autonomous Crown Domain in the Highlands and abolished indigenous land rights, customary law courts, and vernacular education in, for example, the erstwhile “franco-rhadé schools.” Diệm also proscribed the use of tribal costume in urban areas and possession of tribal weapons such as spears and crossbows, which Highlanders needed for hunting.

At the same time, Diệm resettled hundreds of thousands of Catholic refugees from the North on lands that were appropriated from Highlanders in a region where until 1954 the comparatively few Việt people were confined to a couple of small urban centers such as Đà Lạt, Kontum, Ban Mê Thuột, and Pleiku, and where the rural areas were predominantly populated by indigenous groups living from swidden agriculture, interspersed with some coffee, tea, and rubber plantations. The resettlement of Catholic refugees from the North in the Central Highlands went hand in hand with a series of programs aimed at resettling Highlanders in politically secure villages and promoting modern, market-oriented, sedentary agriculture instead of the subsistence-oriented, rotational, swidden agriculture that most Highlander populations had been practicing for centuries. In 1957 President Diệm inaugurated the Dinh điền program, which is usually (but according to Stan B. H. Tan erroneously) translated as “land development,” and which had a special subprogram targeting Highlanders (Dinh điền thượng). The idea was to bring Highlanders together in larger clusters where they would be encouraged to adopt sedentary agricultural techniques – or coerced into doing so – with the assumed added advantage that the larger clusters would be more easily defensible against National Liberation Front (NLF) mobilization. According to anthropologist Gerald C. Hickey, the Dinh điền program was highly unpopular among Highlanders, as they were forced from their ancestral lands and made to give up their highly ritualized lifestyles that were synchronized with swidden cultivation. Moreover, state support for resettled Highlanders was minimal because Diệm believed they themselves should invest in their development, while corruption was rife among officials who were mostly ethnic Việt. In 1959 Diệm and his brother Nhu started the agroville program, which sought to concentrate Highlanders in even larger settlements. In the early 1960s the Dinh điền program became the “strategic hamlet” program, which was a more militarized version of the same concept, intended to separate the fish (guerrillas) from the water (population), to paraphrase Mao Zedong’s famous adage. Hickey was one of many observers who linked Highlander discontent to these programs.Footnote ¹¹

Diệm’s assimilationist nation-building programs and appropriation of their ancestral lands alienated the Highlanders, provoking French-trained Highlander intellectuals and civil servants in 1955 to form a protest movement that they called the Highlander Liberation Front (Front de la libération des Montagnards). In 1958 they renamed this Front “Bajaraka,” after the first syllables of the ethnonyms of the four biggest ethnic groups (Bahnar, Jarai, Rhadé, Koho) that demographically dominated the four Highland provinces of Kontum, Pleiku (Gialai), Darlac (Đắk Lắk), and Haut-Donnaï (Lâm Đồng). The movement consisted of representatives of most of the larger ethnic groups (Rhadé: Y Bham Enuol, Y Dhon Adrong, Y Bih Aleo, Y Thih Eban; Jarai: Nay Luett; Bahnar: Paul Nur), but was dominated by Rhadé people, who were considered to be the most educated and hence the most “civilized” among the Highlanders. The main leader was the charismatic Y Bham Enuol, who in the course of the next two decades would acquire almost mythical status among Highlanders. When Bajaraka in 1958 mounted demonstrations in provincial capitals calling for restoration of pre-1955 autonomy, Diệm responded by incarcerating most of the Bajaraka leadership and by intensifying his assimilationist policies, with only the Rhadé leader Y Bih Aleo escaping arrest.Footnote ¹²

In anticipation of the resumption of political and military struggle in the South, ethnic minority cadres who had gone north in 1954 filtered back into the Highlands in the late 1950s with thorough political training. They were accompanied by ethnic Việt, who sometimes adopted the lifestyles of the local populations where they lived, while radio transmissions from the North in the vernacular ethnic languages conducted propaganda against the Diệm regime.Footnote ¹³ In 1959–60, the guerrilla war in the Highlands was renewed with the Trà Bồng rising of the Cor and Hrê minorities in the mountains of Quảng Nam and Quảng Ngãi, reactivating an existing rebel tradition in this area, one that dated back to the 1945 Ba Tơ rising and even further to the Python God movement of the 1930s.Footnote ¹⁴ These events preceded the establishment of the NLF, formed in 1960 on the basis of remaining Việt Minh cadres in the South with support from the DRVN. The NLF capitalized on Highlander discontent by setting up a Central Highlands Ethnic Autonomy Movement (Phong trào dân tộc tự trị Tây Nguyên) headed by the one Bajaraka leader, Y Bih Aleo, who had escaped imprisonment by going underground and joining the communist resistance. As president of its Central Highlands Ethnic Autonomy Movement, he would become vice chairman of the NLF.

Helped by Diệm’s oppressive policies toward the Highlanders, the NLF rapidly expanded its control in minority areas across the Highlands in 1961, thus alarming Diệm’s American allies. In order to counter this development in the absence of a serious US Army combat presence, the CIA tried out a new counterinsurgency concept, forming a Village Defense Program with self-defense militia known as the Citizens’ Irregular Defense Groups, later renamed Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDGs), led and trained by US Special Forces. The program was started by Colonel Gilbert Layton of the Combined Studies Division, a local branch of the CIA operating under the auspices of William Colby. Layton got in touch with a young agricultural engineer with the International Voluntary Services (IVS, a forerunner of the Peace Corps) in Darlac (later Đắk Lắk) province, David Nuttle, who at the time was dating Layton’s daughter Bonnie. Nuttle was fluent in Vietnamese and in the Rhadé language, and was willing to leave the IVS in order to join the CIA. The idea was that he would organize the village of Buôn Enao – close to Ban Mê Thuột city – against the NLF, promising arms, land, and agricultural support, plus medical care provided by a Special Forces medic, Sergeant Paul Campbell. A Special Forces team was then brought in to train and lead the Highlanders, and the Special Forces medic offered medical care and trained young Rhadé women as nurses. Rhadé men were trained in the use of firearms, and built a defensive fence around the village. In addition, Special Forces organized a Mobile Strike Force trained in regular military combat and that would come to offer protection in case a village was attacked.Footnote ¹⁵

Figure 11.1 Members of the Rhadé hill tribe with an American military instructor (1962).

Source: ullstein bild Dtl. / Contributor / ullstein bild / Getty Images.

The program caught on and, radiating out from Buôn Enao, dozens of villages were organized and trained in a similar manner, to the point that by mid-1962 the NLF was no longer a major security threat in Đắk Lắk province and was “rolled back” in other Highland provinces at a time when the war was still a small-scale guerrilla conflict and did not yet involve US ground troops.Footnote ¹⁶ Given the still “irregular” or “unconventional” nature of the war in the early 1960s, motivated and well-armed Highlanders were mostly capable of fighting off NLF attacks. US intelligence reported that the NLF became increasingly unpopular with Highlanders as their soldiers were mostly dependent on local provisions, in particular before the Hồ Chí Minh Trail began to allow for motorized transport in December 1961. This forced NLF militia to requisition, or simply take, food from villagers, who were largely subsistence farmers not producing enough of a surplus that could be bought or confiscated without endangering Highlander food security.Footnote ¹⁷ The combined result of these developments – as detailed in intelligence reports at the time – was an increasing defection of NLF Highlander fighters, who did not want to take food from Highlander villages or seek to control such villages with violence rather than propaganda. In those early days of largely unconventional warfare, these rather small-scale developments mattered greatly even in military terms. For a brief period in 1962, then, Buôn Enao became a success story, visited by high-ranking military officers and diplomats from the United States and Australia and also by Ngô Đình Nhu, the brother of Diệm, who was in charge of security. J. P. Harris estimates “that it was considered, at a very senior level in the US military, to be the most impressive thing Americans had yet achieved in Vietnam.”Footnote ¹⁸ While impressed by the results, most of the officers failed to understand its tactical concept, which went beyond conventional tactics by privileging civic organization. For example, they tended to rely on superior firepower and aerial bombardments even when those alienated local populations.Footnote ¹⁹

Around the same time as, and parallel to, the Buôn Enao program, the so-called Mountain Scout program was set up in many Highland provinces of the RVN. In contrast with the CIDG program, the Mountain Scout program was initiated in 1961 by the RVN’s Directory of Montagnard Affairs in Huế and became operational in 1962, again funded by the CIA. It consisted of small groups of lightly armed Highlander men who would conduct social (civic) action and propaganda along with intelligence gathering and small-scale military action. These small groups were under the command of Vietnamese district chiefs in the Highlands, who were reportedly often scornful of the Highlander fighters under their control, thus alienating the Mountain Scouts and making them much less effective than the CIDG. CIA personnel were also dismayed by the massive diversion of funds and the gradual deemphasis of the civilian aspects of the program, which in 1963 became exclusively military. In comparison with the CIDG, the Mountain Scout program was politically and militarily much less successful.

In spite of the CIDG success in rolling back the NLF, “within a few months the whole enterprise had largely disappeared, leaving a lasting legacy of increased racial bitterness and tension between Highlanders and Vietnamese.”Footnote ²⁰ The high-profile success of the program had raised suspicion among a number of South Vietnamese officers, and ultimately with President Diệm, that armed Highlanders fighting for their own protection practically under US command – and largely in the absence of South Vietnamese soldiers – constituted a return to the days of French colonial divide-and-rule policy of the PMSI and Crown Domain, and hence were a threat to Vietnam’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. Egged on by Colonel Lê Quảng Trọng, commander of the 23rd Division of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) based in Ban Mê Thuột, Diệm ordered that village defenders be disarmed and the mobile strike force be disbanded, and in August 1962 Ngô Đình Nhu withdrew his Vietnamese Special Forces (Lực lượng đặc biệt, or LLDB) from the CIDG villages.Footnote ²¹ By the end of 1962, Operation Switchback had shifted operational control of the CIDG from the CIA to the US Army, which ordered the American Special Forces to resume their role as advisors to their South Vietnamese counterparts.

On the US side, the rapid expansion of the Buôn Enao experiment had made the program logistically too big to finance and handle for the CIA, which in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba had come under increased scrutiny in the United States itself, and had come to be seen as unfit to lead an essentially military operation. The heavy involvement of US Special Forces almost from the beginning of the Buôn Enao experiment and during its expansion made it logical to turn command and logistics over to Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) under Operation Switchback. The decision was made in May 1962 – six months after the beginning of the Village Defense Program – that the Department of Defense would take full responsibility over budget and operations by fiscal year 1963, but already before that MACV had a growing role in the training and command of the CIDG through the Special Forces. Colonel George Morton, incoming commander of the 1st Special Forces, reportedly had a conventional view of warfare, while “MACV commander General Paul Harkins had misgivings about military absorption of the Station’s paramilitary work.”Footnote ²² At the same time the CIDG success whetted the US Army’s appetite for reliable jungle fighters who would be deployable anywhere; hence, “MACV intended to take over CIDG completely and militarize it.”Footnote ²³ Instead of a village defense program, the CIDG militia essentially became a source of tribal soldiers – like the bataillons montagnards of French colonial times – who would eventually fight at the iconic Special Forces camps such as the Plei Me and A Shau camps, where North Vietnamese and American troops fought major battles in 1965 and 1966.

These changes were greatly resented by the Highlander militias, who suffered contempt and discrimination from their Việt commanders and felt let down by their American partners. Simultaneously, the US Army greatly expanded the scope and radius of the CIDG and the Mobile Strike Forces. Its tactical concept was changed from essentially village defense, meaning that villagers were recruited, trained, and armed to defend their home villages against the NLF, to offensive operations from remote military camps far away from their home villages, often in border areas, while seeking to interdict North Vietnamese “infiltration” along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail. This was an important change, not only because the original concept of village defense was abandoned and replaced by a regular military concept that, according to all reports, simply did not work, but also because of the effect it had on the Highlander militias. Instead of forming self-defense militias, Highlanders practically became mercenaries paid by and fighting for Americans, separated from their familiar home environments.Footnote ²⁴ The men became professional soldiers, outside local village and kinship structures – uprooted youth (déracinés), as the French missionary Jacques Dournes had called the bataillons montagnards during the French Indochina War.Footnote ²⁵ In addition, they were commanded by Việt military officers whom they loathed, whereas the US Special Forces only had an advisory status in this equation.

With Operation Switchback, the Highlander militias in the CIDG became disaffected with their military mission. Away from their villages and kin groups, the expanding CIDG became a less effective fighting force, and the NLF mounted more and more assaults on the Special Forces camps in the course of 1963. Harris reports that “when the Communists mounted an offensive in central Darlac in late July 1963, they met little resistance: villagers apparently surrendering quite readily the inadequate armament the government had left them.”Footnote ²⁶ Highlanders complained to Nuttle and other CIA personnel about RVN hostility, about partial disarmament, and about the diminished material benefits. As Nuttle resigned from the CIA, around half of the Highlander militia defected between January 1963 (38,500) and January 1964 (19,000), and by mid-1963 Buôn Enao – now run by Vietnamese LLDB – was no longer a fighting village. While the CIA did not have the resources to run the program and was no longer in control, MACV considered the CIDG to be a Vietnamese military force which should therefore fall under South Vietnamese command. The breakdown of the original CIDG effectiveness predicated on the Buôn Enao philosophy was not unknown among leading US military and political persons, but according to Thomas Ahern it did not receive much attention:

When interpreting the relative and temporary success of the CIDG, it is important to bear in mind the context of its time. In the early 1960s the NLF had just been formed, the insurgency had just started, and the flow of fighters and materiel down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail was still only a trickle.Footnote ²⁸ The NLF was at the time largely dependent on its hold over local populations – by persuasion, force, or a combination of the two. And although the US military, political, and intelligence forces were deeply implicated in combating the emergent insurgency, it was not until March 1965 that US ground troops were deployed in Vietnam. The war changed from a smaller-scale counterinsurgency to more conventional warfare, as the DRVN poured more troops and heavier weapons down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail. The Tết Mậu Thân Offensive in 1968 exposed much of the Southern infrastructure and wiped out a major part of the local guerrillas of the NLF, which therefore became even more reliant than before on Northern conventional forces. In conditions of large-scale conventional warfare the effectiveness of both guerrilla and counterinsurgency tactics – as embodied by the CIDG – was questionable, but in the early 1960s such tactics could still make a major difference, as events on the ground had shown.Footnote ²⁹ But in what follows I will not engage in counterfactual analysis about the outcome of the war if other tactics had been employed; instead I will focus on the important consequences of the demise of the CIDG for the Vietnam War; for the Highlanders themselves, in particular for their eventual aspirations for autonomy; and – indeed – for the postwar situation. In the violent and insecure environment of the early 1960s, the CIDG camps – now military camps commanded by Vietnamese LLDB and advised by US Special Forces – became like pressure cookers, waiting to explode.

The Rise and Demise of FULRO, 1963–1965

In 1962 some of the Bajaraka leaders who had been in jail since 1958 were released by President Diệm as an act of goodwill, but Y Bham Enuol remained incarcerated. This created completely new situations for the various leaders of Bajaraka, and they responded differently.

In 1962–3 Colonel Layton of the CIA’s Combined Studies Division used Christian and Missionary Alliance contacts among the Rhadé to negotiate with NLF vice president Y Bih Aleo over his defection to the RVN, among other things in exchange for the release of Y Bham Enuol. Although the negotiations – code-named Operation Linus – were given the green light by US ambassador Frederick Nolting and General Paul Harkins, US military commander in Vietnam, as well as by President Diệm and his brother Nhu, the intended meeting was sabotaged by the Darlac province chief Lê Quảng Trọng, who had the meeting place bombed by the RVN air force.Footnote ³⁰ But this event was dwarfed by the so-called Buddhist Crisis in 1963, which pitted the Buddhist majority against the regime of the Catholic Ngô family in the RVN. The crisis came to a head in June 1963 with the self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức in protest against the regime, and the raids on Xá Lợi and other Buddhist pagodas in the RVN in August.Footnote ³¹ The social unrest triggered a military coup against the Ngô brothers on November 2, 1963, setting in motion a whole string of military coups and countercoups, and triggering an initial relaxation of policies against Diệm’s adversaries, including in the Central Highlands. Thus, in February 1964 Bajaraka’s charismatic leader Y Bham Enuol was released by the prime minister, General Nguyễn Khánh, and subsequently appointed province vice chief for Montagnard affairs of Darlac province.

Meanwhile, in 1963 some of the more “radical” Bajaraka leaders, including Y Dhon Adrong, had crossed the border to Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s Cambodia to seek refuge and support, and were put in contact with Cham and Khmer Krom irredentist movements. Within Vietnam, both the Cham and Khmer ethnic groups had experienced the loss of territory and resources during Vietnam’s historical expansion from the Red River Delta in what has been called the “southward march” (nam tiến) from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.Footnote ³² The “postcolonial” situation, in which the Việt were demographically, politically, and culturally dominant in the new state, inspired some Cham intellectuals to seek the renaissance of the erstwhile Cham “kingdom,” and some Khmer groups in the Mekong Delta to seek reintegration with the Khmer homeland, Cambodia. Eventually a coalition was formed between two irredentist groups, one Khmer and one Cham – the Front de Libération du Kampuchea Krom and the Front de Libération de Champa – and the Highlander autonomy movement, which went by a series of different names over time.Footnote ³³ Eventually this coalition movement adopted the name Front Unifié de Libération des Races Opprimées – better known as FULRO – that exploded onto the scene in 1964 with simultaneous revolts in five Special Forces camps.Footnote ³⁴

In the Special Forces camps, ethnic tensions ran high because of the enhanced command roles assumed by Vietnamese Special Forces, and of their attempts to disarm Highlander militia in camps that were deemed “secure.” The FULRO shadow command structure came under the influence of radical Highlanders in Cambodia, led by Les Kosem, who was in the Buôn Sarpa camp at the time. This strongman behind the movement was a well-connected ethnic Cham major in the Cambodian army, who received tacit support from Prince Sihanouk and General Lon Nol for the promotion of the idea that the Central Highlands constituted haut Champa, that is the highland region located between the erstwhile Cham kingdom on the coast of central Vietnam and the Cham populations on the Mekong River in Cambodia.Footnote ³⁵ In a surprise move, on September 20, 1964, Highlander militia revolted in five camps, killing a number of Vietnamese commanders and taking many American and Vietnamese Special Forces hostage. The rebels demanded the reconstitution of the “special status” that the Central Highlands had enjoyed under Emperor Bảo Đại, as well as their own armed forces and flag. A move to take Ban Mê Thuột city was thwarted, however, and in four camps US mediators were able to secure the release of the Vietnamese Special Forces in exchange for a nonviolent response on the part of the South Vietnamese army.Footnote ³⁶ Radicalized by Les Kosem, the Buôn Sarpa CIDG defected to Cambodia, where they would constitute a small military presence in Mondulkiri province, adjacent to Darlac. A group of these Highlander militia fetched Bajaraka leader Y Bham Enuol from his residence in Ban Mê Thuột and took him to Cambodia, where he was followed by hundreds of Highlander militia. Y Bham was to stay most of the time in Cambodia – in the latter years in detention in Phnom Penh – until he died there at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in April 1975.Footnote ³⁷

After the FULRO rebellion in September 1964 a series of confused negotiations took place between the various military government parties of the RVN and Highlanders associated with FULRO’s loose organization, interspersed with various real or attempted FULRO uprisings in CIDG/Special Forces camps. In Cambodia FULRO presented itself as an alliance of irredentist movements claiming parts of Vietnam, namely the Front de la Libération des Khmer Krom, Front de Libération des Hauts-Plateaux du Champa, the Front de Libération du Kambuja Nord, and the Front de Libération du Pays Montagnard du Sud-Indochinois. In reality this coalition was a front for Cambodia’s head of state Prince Sihanouk, who harbored territorial claims to parts of Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam.Footnote ³⁸ This became clear at the Conference of Indochinese Peoples (Conférence des Peuples Indochinois), which he organized in Phnom Penh on February 25, 1965. This conference was intended to be the diplomatic launching pad for FULRO, with the distribution of a history of FULRO as well as one of the Front de Libération des Hauts Plateaux du Champa, authored by Les Kosem under the alias Po Nagar, and Extraits de l’Histoire des Hauts-Plateaux du Centre-Vietnam (Pays Montagnard du Sud Indochinois), authored by Y Bham. Although FULRO was supposed to be the umbrella organization of three different irredentist movements of Highlanders, Cham, and Khmer Krom, a reading of all three Historiques makes clear that both the organizational and personnel structure and the territorial and representative claims overlapped, with Vietnam’s Central Highlands claimed by Central Highlanders as the Hauts Plateaux du Sud-Indochinois – the French colonial designation – and by Cham as the Hauts Plateaux du Champa.

During the conference a new theory was proposed that sought to create a “racial” basis for the coalition of Highlanders, Cham, and Khmer Krom as belonging to the same race, indicated with the neologism of “Austriens” (not to be confused in English with Austrians, which in French is rendered as Autrichiens). It postulated a racial bond between Khmer, Cham, and Highlanders, which was contrasted with the Việt – referred to with the derogative label of “Yuon” or “Yuan” by their neighbors – and which facilitated Cambodian territorial claims to parts of South Vietnam. The idea of a race austrienne was concocted by Charles Meyer, French advisor to Sihanouk, on the basis of the linguistic categories of Austronesian and Austroasiatic, designations of the language families that included Cham, Rhadé, Jarai, Raglai, and Churu (Austronesian or Malayo-Polynesian) and Khmer and all other Central Highland vernaculars (Austroasiatic or Mon-Khmer). In the Historique of the Hauts Plateaux du Champa Khmer, Cham, and Highlanders were also considered to belong to one race, namely the Kham – conveniently sharing an etymological root with Cambodia.Footnote ³⁹ It is clear from these convoluted ethnic and racial fabrications that they were intended to justify alliances against one common enemy, namely the Việt – whether incorporated in the RVN, NLF, or DRVN.

Highlanders and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975

On a nationwide scale the unraveling of the security situation in the Central Highlands after Operation Switchback was compounded by the political instability of the RVN after the Buddhist crisis and the killing of the Ngô brothers, leading to more brazen attacks on RVN and US positions by the NLF and its DRVN allies. A fierce attack on February 7, 1965, by the PLAF on the American helicopter base Camp Holloway near Pleiku in the Central Highlands provoked a massive military response, with a heavy bombing campaign against the North (Operation Rolling Thunder) and the landing of US marines near Đà Nẵng in March 1965, initiating a military buildup that would reach more than 500,000 at its height in 1968. In other words, while there had been US Special Forces in Vietnam who operated in an advisory capacity only, there was now a direct and growing combat presence of the US military in Vietnam, not unlike the direct French presence in the Highlands during the French Indochina War. The enhanced US presence seduced Highlanders to see a wide assortment of American agents – Special Forces officers, missionaries of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, CIA, US Agency for International Development, and International Volunteer Service officers, and even anthropologists – as trusted or at least potential protectors or go-betweens in their deliberations with the RVN government and army. This bond – real or assumed – between some Highlanders and some Americans raised suspicions among many Việt officials, who tended to see Highlanders as primitive, naive, and gullible, and as disloyal and potential traitors.Footnote ⁴⁰

The expanding presence of the US military after 1965 was matched by the increasing role of the Northern People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) in the war, giving it a more conventional flavor, with emphasis on use of heavy firepower and the air force instead of the guerrilla and counterinsurgency tactics that had characterized the NLF and CIDG approaches in 1962. Relying on their superiority in terms of technology and firepower, the US Army preferred pitched battles on empty terrain, unencumbered by the presence of local populations, and this preference applied even more to the air force, which sought to create “free fire zones,” where the population had been removed and it had license to “kill everything that moves.” In order to create such a battlefield, local populations were forced into refugee camps, and those resisting or avoiding resettlement would be labeled “VC” (Viet Cong), meaning followers of the NLF, who could then be legitimately killed. According to Gerald Hickey, two-thirds to four-fifths of the Highlander population had been moved or resettled at least once during the war, and the use of force and violence was often excessive, sometimes leading to atrocities. Needless to say, these policies and military tactics were highly unpopular among Highlanders and those Americans who opted to work with them, such as missionaries, aid workers, intelligence personnel, and Special Forces. As an embedded anthropologist, Hickey saw it as his duty to warn against such policy programs and military tactics, but to little avail.Footnote ⁴¹

In this confused and depressing situation, FULRO fragmented and reconfigured in alliance with a variety of different interest groups in the RVN, the United States, and Cambodia. Depending on the vantage point, FULRO has been interpreted in very different ways, if only because it was hardly a unified organization. Some Highlander leaders pursued a military career in the ARVN or working directly with the US Special Forces; many young Highlanders were eager to pursue military careers – both with the CIDG and beyond. Some civil leaders of Bajaraka and FULRO oscillated between oppositional and governmental positions, with the Catholic Bahnar leader Paul Nur and the Jarai leader Nay Luett eventually taking up ministerial positions in the RVN. Some Highlander leaders continued to follow the NLF. Some leaders pursued the FULRO dream in Cambodia, in conjunction with Prince Sihanouk and from 1970 the Lon Nol regime. This FULRO branch was dominated by the Cham colonel Les Kosem, who used it as a vehicle for furthering Cham claims in both Vietnam and Cambodia and for his personal ambitions within the Cambodian political landscape.

It would require too much space to discuss in detail the series of events from 1965 onward, as the history of the Central Highlands, the Highlanders, and FULRO is complex. In his Free in the Forest, Hickey describes in great detail the many armed groups of Highlanders that emerged and vanished, moving in and out of the South Vietnamese armed forces, but invariably legitimizing their authority with reference to FULRO and its Rhadé leader Y Bham Enuol.Footnote ⁴² Until 1968 Y Bham resided at his FULRO headquarters at Camp le Rolland in Mondulkiri province in Cambodia across the border from Darlac, where he became more and more alienated from the various armed FULRO factions of Highlanders within the RVN. After the coup against Sihanouk in 1970, Les Kosem, who was close to the new president Lon Nol and his brother Lon Non, became the champion of the “Khmers Muslims” – ethnic Cham – while simultaneously commanding a fierce battalion against the emerging Khmer Rouge, and eventually leaving Cambodia before it was completely taken over by the latter.Footnote ⁴³

With their charismatic leader Y Bham Enuol across the border in Cambodia under the control of Les Kosem, and with Sihanouk, Lon Nol, the CIA, the NLF, the DRVN, and the French and Chinese secret services operating at greater distance, between 1965 and 1975 FULRO became a pawn in the various power games on the fringes of the Vietnam War. At the same time, the fragmented FULRO movement was unsuccessful in keeping the war away from the Highlands or in securing Highlander autonomy. On the contrary: Operation Switchback effectively created fragmented groups of professional Highlander troops and various armed Highlander groups that continued to operate in the Central Highlands with some connection to FULRO until 1975. The CIDG and related programs (such as the Mobile Strike Force, Mountain Scouts, Trương Sơn Force, and the Regional Forces and Popular Forces – these last were nicknamed “ruffpuff” by American soldiers) trained and armed Highlanders mostly at the initiative of non-Việt foreigners, cutting these fighters loose from their village environments and ritualized agricultural lifestyles, and simultaneously making them partially dependent on outsider support rather than securing autonomy. However, after Operation Switchback these Highlander fighters were detached from their foreign mentors by officially turning them over to a Vietnamese command structure, thereby alienating the Highlander militia and inadvertently turning them into the armed wing of the Highlander autonomy movement – or, to put it better, of the various factions using the name of FULRO. When in late 1968 Y Bham Enuol, still the titular head of FULRO, was placed under house arrest in Phnom Penh, the FULRO military headquarters in Mondulkiri province disintegrated, and the remainder of FULRO in Vietnam fragmented or rallied to the Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu government in 1969.Footnote ⁴⁴

But fueled by growing discontent among young Rhadé and Jarai about the uncompromising attitude, the corruption, and the continued land grabs of the Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu regime, in 1973 a number of FULRO units reconstituted themselves around Ban Mê Thuột under the leadership of the Jarai FULRO leader Kpӑ Koi. Kpӑ Koi was supported by a number of senior Highlanders with (previous) ties to FULRO, who took a dim view of the US capability to protect the Highlanders after the Paris Peace Accords of January 27, 1973, against the backdrop of the gradual implosion of the Lon Nol regime and the resultant presence of Khmer Rouge across the border in Cambodia. Claiming to act on behalf of Y Bham, Kpӑ Koi entered into negotiations with the PLAF, whose regiments in that region consisted partly of Highlanders, represented by their Rhadé vice president Y Bih Aleo.Footnote ⁴⁵ Throughout 1974, this revived FULRO movement appealed to former FULRO fighters who had rallied to the RVN in 1969 and expanded its control in the villages around Ban Mê Thuột.

In March 1975, it was the silent complicity of these FULRO units, and the Rhadé villages around Ban Mê Thuột under their influence, that ensured the surprise element in the attack by regular North Vietnamese cavalry. Their tanks were reportedly painted with “Highlander Autonomy Movement of the NLF” on the sides, and Hickey reports that some FULRO units even participated in the surprise attack on Ban Mê Thuột. The subsequent history is well known. The rapid takeover of Ban Mê Thuột prompted Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu to withdraw his armed forces from the largest part of the Central Highlands – most notably Kontum, Pleiku, and Cheo Reo (now Ayun Pa) – along the only road that was not blocked, Route 7B, a barely passable forest track. In the words of Hickey, the rout of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians along this road “may have been the worst bloodbath of the Vietnam War.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The rout effectively cut the Northern cities of Huế and Đà Nẵng off from the South and eventually forced President Thiệu to evacuate the coastal parts of central Vietnam, triggering the collapse of the RVN as a separate state.Footnote ⁴⁷ In other words, the ethnic unraveling of the RVN as brought out in the fragmented and partially reconstituted Highlander autonomy movement FULRO was instrumental in bringing about the surprise collapse of the RVN in spring 1975.

Epilogue

The Central Highlands and its indigenous populations played a pivotal role during the Vietnam War. The communist insurgency in the RVN started with the Trà Bồng uprising and other revolts in the Highlands in 1959 and 1960; the direct intervention of the US Army in 1965 followed a PLAF attack on a US Army camp near Pleiku; and the collapse of the RVN started with the communist surprise conquest of Ban Mê Thuột. In all these pivotal events, Highlanders played an important role. An early American success story of mobilizing Highlanders for the Village Defense Program was undermined in 1963 as Highlander troops were separated from their home villages under the umbrella of Operation Switchback, while simultaneously militarizing Highlander youth. Eventually, this resulted in a situation where such Highlander units, without clear leadership and in a situation of violence and deprivation, acted as loose cannons, allying themselves with any outside force that seemed to offer the best terms in the short run. The alliance of the Kpӑ Koi faction of FULRO with the NLF in 1974–5, running up to the conquest of Ban Mê Thuột and the consequent collapse of the RVN, shows the importance of such local deals not perhaps for the longer-term outcome of the war, but certainly for the speed of events.

But the reconciliation between Kpӑ Koi’s FULRO faction with the new regime was short-lived. Already in the summer of 1975 the communist NLF leader Y Bih Aleo had become disenchanted when he realized that the autonomy promised by the northern regime would not materialize, and in 1977 his Highlands Autonomy Movement was disbanded along with the NLF. In 1976 Kpӑ Koi and other FULRO leaders went underground when they learned about the New Economic Zones program that would relocate many Kinh lowlanders into the Highlands.Footnote ⁴⁸ Considering FULRO members CIA tools, the new communist regime cracked down on them; they responded by reviving their guerrilla war against the communists, which was doomed to failure.

From the late 1970s the Central Highlands were incrementally settled by millions of mostly Việt colonists who grew coffee and other cash crops, displacing Highlanders from their lands. The Central Highlands became one of the world’s major coffee, tea, rubber, pepper, cashew, and cassava-growing and -exporting regions, massively transforming its landscape and ethnoscape,Footnote ⁴⁹ as the Central Highlands’ ethnodemography changed rapidly. Any protest against dispossession or any manifestation of cultural autonomy – for example, in the guise of a massive Highlander conversion to evangelical Christianity – is interpreted by the current Vietnamese regime in terms of a history of contested sovereignty as embodied by FULRO, and hence severely repressed.Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus, the story after 1975 is equally as tragic for the Central Highlanders as the one before 1975, as the ethnic unraveling happening in the RVN has not healed with the reunification of the two Vietnams. The course of history gives Central Highlanders reason to feel betrayed by all sides (the French, the Americans, the Cambodians, the various Vietnamese parties) while at the same time harboring a profound sense of nostalgia for a (colonial) past imagined as free from outside interference.

Progress toward victory in a guerrilla war could not often be measured by things like the conquest of crucial cities, so it was perhaps inevitable that the United States would rely to a large extent on statistical measures. The influence of Robert McNamara, US secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968, may have pushed this further than it otherwise would have gone. The first important step in his career had been his work using statistical analysis in the management of US Army Air Forces operations during World War II. When he began dealing with Vietnam in the early 1960s, he was eager to get briefings loaded with statistics, and he had a startling ability to remember them. Still, it is not clear that, without McNamara’s influence, the US military would have been a lot less focused on statistics as measures of progress. The military was happy to comply with his wish for copious statistics, and military briefings remained heavily statistical long after McNamara was gone.

The statistics on the war that are available today come almost entirely from the United States government. The Republic of Vietnam (RVN) published few statistics during the war in places where they can now be found, and could not publish any after the war because it no longer existed. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN), the National Liberation Front (NLF), and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam published few detailed statistics either during or after the war.

The things the Americans could most easily measure – on which they could most easily get reasonably accurate statistics – were not always good indicators of actual progress. They measured efforts by the United States and the Republic of Vietnam – numbers of strategic hamlets built, quantities of commodities provided, and so forth – rather than the results of those efforts, changes in the relative strength of the government and the insurgency. Sometimes the statistical measures impeded effective conduct of the war. A Vietnamese navy officer who commanded RVN coastal patrol forces commented that, in 1964, the American advisors to the Vietnamese navy began using the number of fishing boats searched each month for weapons or other contraband as a measure of the performance of the coastal patrol forces. Their pressure to increase the number of searches pushed patrol vessels to focus their patrols on areas with dense concentrations of fishing boats, where many could be searched in a short time, rather than on areas where there was a higher probability of spotting some NLF activity.Footnote ¹

In the early 1960s the measures that were considered most important were the ratio between RVN and NLF personnel losses (by death or capture) and the ratio between numbers of weapons captured by the two sides. The latter ratio could be measured more accurately. Figures on the number of RVN weapons captured by the NLF, and NLF weapons captured by the RVN, were much more reliable than figures on NLF personnel losses.

The extent of pressure to ensure that the statistics indeed showed progress, showed that the war was being won, fluctuated over the course of the war. In the early 1960s the two officials most conspicuously exerting such pressure were Secretary of Defense McNamara and the first commander of Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), General Paul Harkins. In October 1963, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research issued a memorandum, “Statistics on the War Effort in South Vietnam Show Unfavorable Trends,” using just the sort of statistics that McNamara treated as authoritative, to demonstrate that the war was not going well.Footnote ² McNamara was furious; he asked Secretary of State Dean Rusk to ensure that no such thing be permitted to happen again. But McNamara was almost at the end of his ability to persuade himself that the war was going well. By December he was admitting that it was going badly, so he stopped pressing those reporting statistics to make the statistics show progress. General Harkins, however, continued to apply such pressure until his departure in June 1964.

During the years of rapid escalation that followed, the main statistical measurements used were the figures for the current strength and the losses of US, RVN, and communist forces. The US government’s figures for most of these were in some way problematic.

Figure 12.1 US secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara points to a map of Vietnam during a press conference (April 26, 1965).

Source: PhotoQuest / Contributor / Archive Photos / Getty Images.

US and RVN Strength and Losses

The United States regularly released figures on the number of US military personnel in Vietnam, and on casualties by week. The figures on personnel strength in Vietnam seem to have been accurate, though they were in a sense incomplete, since many of the US personnel involved in the war were on ships off the coast, or at military bases in Thailand, Okinawa, and Guam that handled much of the US bombing in Indochina.

The figures on the numbers of Americans killed in combat per week, per month, and per year were quite accurate (see further discussion below). There were figures on losses per day that were seriously inaccurate. There was an office at MACV that reported each day the number of Americans known to have been killed on the previous day, but this figure represented only those for whom a death report had moved fast enough through the system to have reached that office by the time it compiled the report. These seriously incomplete figures were not released to the press or the public, but they circulated to some extent at the upper levels of the government. President Lyndon Johnson probably did not understand that, when he was given a figure for the previous day’s American dead, the number often was well below the actual death toll.

The US government’s figures for RVN strength (Table 12.1) were the RVN’s official figures, and they exaggerated personnel strength by a margin that cannot be determined. One of the common forms of corruption in the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF) was to list more men on the roster for a unit than were actually serving in the unit. The commander could pocket part or all of the pay of the “ghost” and “ornamental” soldiers. General William Westmoreland estimated that they might make up 10 percent of the nominal strength of the RVN forces; John Paul Vann estimated 20 percent.Footnote ³ But no one could really know, and the extent of the problem surely varied from one section of the RVNAF, and one year, to another.

MACV discovered toward the end of 1967 that at least since the beginning of 1966 it had been seriously understating combat deaths in the RVNAF. MACV had been getting its data from RVNAF reports that counted only the men who had died promptly after being hit by enemy fire. Including the ones who had lived long enough to reach medical care, but then died of their wounds, raised the number of RVNAF combat deaths for 1966 from 9,469 to 11,953, and for the first eleven months of 1967 from 9,641 to 11,513.Footnote ⁴ The low figures had political significance, since they encouraged American complaints that the RVNAF was not doing its fair share of the fighting. The figures in Table 12.2, compiled after this error had been corrected, are reasonably accurate so far as is known.

In the last years of the war, after US forces had withdrawn and MACV had been replaced by the much smaller Defense Attaché’s Office, that organization underestimated RVNAF combat deaths by a wider margin – something like a factor of two.Footnote ⁵

Communist Losses

The infamous “body count” was among the most important of the Americans’ statistical indicators. The American military, never permitted to launch large-scale ground invasions of Laos or North Vietnam, pinned much of its hope for victory on attrition of the communist forces in South Vietnam. If the communists’ losses exceeded their ability to add new personnel, their strength would shrink and, if it shrank enough to make it obvious they had no chance of victory, they might abandon the struggle.

MACV was determined to present figures for enemy personnel losses, and to claim that those figures were based on actual data. By far its most important source of actual data was the counting of enemy bodies on the battlefield. MACV claimed that its figures for overall enemy personnel losses were based primarily on the body count, though there was one significant adjustment: MACV assumed that for every one hundred known enemy dead, an additional twenty-eight (by 1967 this had become an additional thirty-five) would be so seriously wounded that they would die of their wounds after being evacuated from the battlefield, or would be permanently disabled.

MACV put heavy pressure on unit commanders to report high body counts. Not to do so compromised an officer’s chances of promotion. Exaggeration of the body count, by officers who counted civilians who had been caught in the crossfire as enemy troops or simply invented figures, was common. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, after becoming famous as the commander of US forces in the 1991 war against Iraq, looked back with dismay at his days commanding a battalion in Vietnam. He said he and other officers “all knew that we had lied about body count”:Footnote ⁶

Officers who had served as generals in Vietnam have made comments such as: “The immensity of the false reporting is a blot on the honor of the Army.” “A fake – totally worthless.” “Often blatant lies.”Footnote ⁸

Wild exaggeration of the body counts did not imply serious exaggeration of overall communist personnel losses. It should have been obvious to anyone familiar with the nature of the war that not even half the communist military personnel who died would do so under circumstances that gave US and RVN forces an opportunity to see and count their bodies. The Americans used artillery and air bombardment on a huge scale; it was seldom practical to inspect the target areas afterward and count bodies. The death rate from disease must have been substantial. Even when infantry fought infantry, communist forces might carry off their dead, or the circumstances might not permit US, RVN, and allied troops to spread across the battlefield counting bodies.

The number of communist personnel who died without the Americans being able to count their bodies at least approximately balanced – perhaps more than balanced – the ones the Americans falsely claimed had been counted.

Communist Strength

The evolution of the American estimates of communist military strength in South Vietnam was a complex story. Soon after MACV was established in 1962, officers there compiled an order of battle (OB) for the NLF – a listing of military units the existence of which was considered confirmed, with the best available information about the strength of each. The total came to about 20,000 NLF troops. The officers at MACV also estimated that there were at least 100,000 irregulars – guerrillas and militia. They considered it obvious that their listing must be incomplete. There was normally a considerable lag between the time a unit was formed and the time US intelligence got reliable information about it. So more units would be added as information about them was discovered. But as long as Harkins remained in command, he and his intelligence chief – determined to present an image of NLF weakness – tried to minimize upward revisions in the figures.

General Westmoreland replaced Harkins in June 1964. A month later, the figures for NLF strength were increased substantially. When the US ambassador passed the new figures to Washington, he said they reflected belated inclusion in the order of battle of units the existence of which had been suspected for years. He gave the impression he was not aware of significant units having been created recently.Footnote ⁹ Since NLF strength had in fact been increasing rapidly during recent months, the new figures must have been serious underestimates on the day they were issued.

During 1965 the number of intelligence analysts at MACV increased dramatically, and an order of battle section was established, assigned to update the OB on a continuing basis. At first the OB section devoted essentially all its attention to the communists’ regular combat units, which it reported had 79,600 regular troops in January 1966. This figure was surely an underestimate, omitting some units recently added to the communist force structure, but it was the closest thing to a reliable figure for communist strength that MACV had ever issued. But the officers involved were also required to give numbers for other categories of communist personnel. The January 1966 report gave figures of 16,911 for support personnel, mostly transport and logistics, but also communications, medical corps, training, and headquarters personnel, without whom the combat units could not have functioned effectively; 103,573 for irregulars (full-time village guerrillas, and the part-time “self-defense” and “secret self-defense” militias); and 39,175 for “political” (often called “infrastructure”), which included the Communist Party, and administrative personnel in areas where the NLF was enough in control to have an administration.Footnote ¹⁰ The figure for “political” remained unchanged to the last digit until October 1967. The figure for irregulars rose to 112,760 in May 1966, and then remained unchanged to the last digit until October 1967. These absurdly precise numbers were based on so little actual study that they did not really deserve even to be called guesses, which meant that the total for all categories did not really deserve even to be called a guess. MACV does not appear to have thought about the political risks that could result from including so unreliable a total figure in press briefings, which it did with increasing frequency in 1967.

By early 1967, MACV intelligence was aware that it was seriously underestimating guerrillas, militia, and infrastructure, and had analysts working to compile more valid estimates for those categories. By May the MACV J-2 (chief of intelligence), Major General Joseph McChristian, was ready to make the new numbers official. They would have increased the figure for “political” by about a factor of two, and the figures for guerrillas and militia by more than 50 percent. General Westmoreland, worried about the reactions of the press, Congress, and the president, blocked the change and ordered that the matter be reconsidered.

The CIA had been aware the MACV figures were unrealistically low, but had been waiting for McChristian to deal with the problem. By June it became apparent that was not going to happen. At a series of conferences in the summer, CIA representatives pushed for higher figures. MACV analysts, under command pressure, presented figures to other agencies that they believed were unrealistically low (one of them later published an account of this titled “Being Ordered to Lie”),Footnote ¹¹ but even the lowest figures for which they could find any argument were leading toward a total for all categories of well over 400,000, at a time when the official OB total, which had been released to the press, was 297,000. Brigadier General Phillip Davidson, who had replaced McChristian as MACV J-2, told his officers, “I am sure that this headquarters will not accept a figure in excess of the current strength figure carried by the press.”Footnote ¹² General Creighton Abrams and General Westmoreland, the two top officers at MACV, said the media would react very badly to an increase in the figure for total enemy strength, and suggested that the NLF militias no longer be included in that figure.Footnote ¹³

The September OB Summary, the last one that used the traditional categories, showed a total of 295,840. In the October OB Summary, the figures for guerrillas and support personnel rose significantly, but the total strength figure no longer included the militias or the “political” category, so it dropped to 235,852.

When Abrams and Westmoreland told intelligence officers that it was important for the figure for total enemy strength to be low, to project an image of success in the war, they suggested dropping categories out of the count. But the command preference for a low total also influenced the estimates for the categories that were not dropped. As early as August 15, Brigadier General Davidson told his officers, “The figure of combat strength and particularly of guerrillas must take a steady and significant downward trend as I am convinced this reflects true enemy status.”Footnote ¹⁴ Within months there was significant downward pressure even on the figures for People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) regular troops. This was happening just as the communists were expanding their forces in preparation for the Tet Offensive of 1968, with a massive surge of PAVN troops coming down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail, and a smaller but significant increase in the strength of NLF units. The OB for January 31, 1968 – just at the point at which the Tet Offensive began – showed 55,744 men in PAVN units in South Vietnam. Within a month the officers responsible for the OB had officially revised that figure up to 77,800, but they did so very quietly (their report does not seem to have been transmitted even to the White House). By July they were admitting that PAVN strength in January had been 93,501.Footnote ¹⁵

If MACV intelligence had acknowledged in January the way communist force strength was expanding, warnings of a communist offensive might have been taken more seriously, and the Tet Offensive might not have achieved the partial surprise that it did. And the fact that communist forces had been far stronger in January than MACV estimates had acknowledged helps to explain the communists’ ability to sustain very heavy combat continuously from late January through late June (see below), despite the very heavy casualties they were suffering.

The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency believed that MACV’s OB was still underestimating communist strength in the second half of 1968 and into 1969, but far less information has been released about this period, so it is difficult to evaluate the validity of these charges. It is clear at least that, if MACV was still underestimating communist strength, it was not doing so by as wide a margin as it had in January 1968.

The Hamlet Evaluation System

During 1967 the United States began working on a very different indicator of success, a measurement of the extent to which the RVN controlled the villages of South Vietnam. The Hamlet Evaluation System (HES) was supposed to collect statistical data to evaluate the status of every hamlet in South Vietnam, considering both security – the extent to which NLF power and influence had been eliminated – and socioeconomic factors. HES sorted the hamlets into six categories. In category A hamlets the government had essentially eliminated the NLF and was functioning well, providing benefits to the people such as health care, education, and economic opportunity. Categories B and C represented reasonably secure government control, but there might be some NLF presence and somewhat less effective government services. In category D hamlets the NLF had a significant political and military presence at night. Category E hamlets were dominated by the NLF at night, and government programs had little effect even in daylight. Category VC hamlets were under unambiguous NLF control.

There were two factors biasing the ratings in an upward direction. By far the most important was that both Vietnamese and American officers whose careers were more likely to prosper if things seemed to be going well in the areas for which they were responsible had the ability to influence the ratings, making the situation look better than it was, and they often did so. The other was that, if a community was under complete NLF control, with no RVN hamlet administration, the RVN might simply not recognize the community as being a hamlet, and it might thus be omitted from the count of VC hamlets. The first HES report, dated March 15, 1967, described the situation as of January 31, and covered 11,830 hamlets. In the months that followed, the Americans identified hundreds of additional hamlets that had not been on the RVN’s lists of hamlets, and added these to the HES system.

Despite these problems, the HES ratings were probably more realistic than either the body count or MACV’s estimates of communist personnel strength in South Vietnam. During 1967, the HES ratings showed a modest rate of improvement on average. The communists’ general offensive expanded the territory under their control significantly in the early months of 1968, but at a cost of very heavy casualties that seriously weakened communist forces. During the second half of the year, pacification more than made up the ground that had been lost in the first half. In 1969 there were further huge gains in government control of the countryside. By the beginning of 1970, four-fifths of the hamlets were in categories A, B, and C, representing a reasonable degree of government control (Table 12.3). Less than 4 percent, however, were in category A. Under a policy called “fast-and-thin” pacification, establishing at least superficial government control in as many hamlets as possible took priority over deepening and strengthening the government’s grip on areas where there was already some government control.

The hamlets under a reasonable degree of government control had larger populations, on average, than those that were heavily contested or under NLF control. There were some areas under NLF control from which almost the whole population had fled, primarily to escape bombing and shelling by US and RVN forces. So the percentage of population in category A, B, and C hamlets was significantly higher than the percentages of hamlets in those categories (Table 12.4).

The pacification of the countryside slowed in 1970 and 1971, and was reversed in 1972, but by that time the war was becoming more conventional in character, and the United States was judging the state of the war more by shifts in battlelines than by statistical indicators.

Retrospective: What the Statistics Show about the War

The statistics can clarify important aspects of the Vietnam War. It was, for the United States, a limited war. Comparing the Vietnam War with other limited wars shows the limits as surprisingly broad. Comparing what the United States did in Vietnam with what the United States (with its very large population and huge resources) would have been capable of doing makes the limits look rather narrow.

The 1968 Tet Offensive proved to be the turning point of the Vietnam War and its effects were far-reaching. Despite the fact that the communists were soundly defeated at the tactical level, the Tet Offensive resulted in a great psychological victory at the strategic level for them that set into motion the events that would lead to the election of Richard Nixon, the long and bloody US withdrawal from Southeast Asia, and ultimately the fall of South Vietnam.

The United States first committed ground combat troops in Vietnam in March 1965, when the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade came ashore on Red Beach near Đà Nẵng. A month later, President Lyndon Johnson authorized the use of US troops in offensive combat operations in Vietnam. This marked a major change in US involvement in the ongoing war between the South Vietnamese government in Saigon and the National Liberation Front (NLF). The American goal in Southeast Asia was to ensure a free, independent, noncommunist South Vietnam that would serve as a bulwark against the spread of communist influence and control in the Vietnamese countryside. However, the Saigon government and its armed forces were losing the battle against the NLF and things only worsened when Hanoi began to send North Vietnamese regulars down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail to join the fight in South Vietnam. Heretofore, US forces had been supporting the Saigon government with advisors and air support, but that approach proved inadequate. With the arrival of the marines, a massive US buildup ensued that resulted in more than 184,000 American troops in Vietnam by the end of 1965.

With the arrival of large numbers of American combat troops in South Vietnam, the US effort shifted to the conduct of military operations to destroy the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF, called the Viet Cong, or VC, by the allies) and their North Vietnamese counterparts, the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN). One of the first major battles between US forces and North Vietnamese troops occurred in November 1965 in the Ia Đrӑng Valley in the Central Highlands. Over the next two years, US forces under General William C. Westmoreland, commander of US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), conducted many large-scale operations to find and destroy PLAF and PAVN forces in a war of attrition meant to wear down the enemy by killing or disabling so many of its soldiers that Hanoi’s will to prosecute the war would be broken.

As Westmoreland pursued his war of attrition, Hanoi ordered more PAVN troops down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail to join forces with the PLAF in their fight against the South Vietnamese troops and their American allies. By the middle of 1967, the war in Vietnam had degenerated into a bloody stalemate. US and South Vietnamese operations had inflicted heavy casualties on the PLAF and PAVN, but Hanoi continued to infiltrate troops into South Vietnam, and the NLF and PLAF still controlled the countryside in many areas in the south. Both the United States and North Vietnam had greatly increased their commitments to the battlefield, but neither side was able to defeat the other.

Antiwar Sentiment in the United States

In the United States, the lack of any meaningful progress on the battlefield began to erode public support for the Johnson administration’s handling of the war. As newspapers, magazines, and the nightly television news brought the war home to the United States, the antiwar movement grew. The toll of the fighting was mounting rapidly; the total number of US troops killed in action had grown from more than 2,300 in 1965 to more than 17,000 by the end of 1967. Scenes of the bloodshed and devastation resulting from the bitter fighting across South Vietnam led many Americans to the conclusion that the price of US involvement in the war was too high. The war was also aggravating social discontent on the homefront. Polls that initially reflected support for the president and his handling of the war began to turn against him. By June 1967, fully two-thirds of Americans polled said they had lost faith in Johnson’s ability to lead the country. A public opinion poll in September 1967 showed that for the first time more Americans opposed the war than supported it.Footnote ¹ By this point, Johnson’s popularity had dropped to below 40 percent, a new low since he had first entered office. Meanwhile, antiwar protests continued to grow in size, and it was clear that the American public was becoming increasingly polarized over the war. Even many of those who supported the war effort were dissatisfied with Johnson’s inability to craft a winning strategy in Southeast Asia.

While many Americans believed that the war had degenerated into a bloody stalemate, General Westmoreland did not see it that way, and by his primary metric – the body count – the US and allied forces were making significant headway against the enemy on the battlefield. His headquarters continued to send reports to Washington touting the progress being made against the enemy, citing ever increasing enemy body counts.

Based on Westmoreland’s optimistic assessments and concerned about the downward trend in public opinion, President Johnson ordered a media blitz to convince the American people that the war was being won and that administration policies were succeeding. In what became known as the “Success Campaign,” administration officials took every opportunity to counter the perception that there was a stalemate on the battlefield in Vietnam and repeatedly stressed that progress was being made against the enemy.

As part of this effort, Johnson brought Westmoreland home in mid-November 1967 to make the administration’s case to the American public. In a number of venues, the general did just that. Upon his arrival at Andrews Air Force Base, Westmoreland told waiting reporters: “I have never been more encouraged in the four years that I have been in Vietnam. We are making real progress.”Footnote ² The next day, at a press conference, he told reporters that the South Vietnamese army would be able to assume increasing responsibility for the fighting, permitting a “phase-out” of US troops “within two years or less.”Footnote ³ On November 21, in an address at the National Press Club, Westmoreland proclaimed, “We have reached an important point where the end becomes to come into view. I am absolutely certain that, whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing. The enemy’s hopes are bankrupt.” He assured the assembled reporters and the American people that victory “lies within our grasp.”Footnote ⁴ Westmoreland later said that he was concerned at the time about fulfilling the public relations task, but he nevertheless gave a positive, upbeat account of how things were going in the war, clearly believing that a corner had been turned. For the time being, Westmoreland’s pronouncements helped calm a restive American public. However, his optimistic, upbeat reports would come back to haunt him very soon.

Planning for the New Offensive

Meanwhile, in Vietnam, even as Westmoreland spoke, the communists were finalizing preparations for a countrywide offensive designed to break the stalemate and “liberate” South Vietnam. According to William J. Duiker, the communists had earlier decided on a “decisive victory in a relatively short period of time,” which was confirmed by the 13th Plenum in late 1966.Footnote ⁵ This led to an aggressive battlefield strategy that achieved only limited results. By mid-1967, the party leaders in Hanoi decided that something had to be done to break the stalemate in the South. However, there followed a contentious debate in the Politburo about how best to do this. By this time, Lê Duẩn, a one-time organizer of the resistance in the south and by 1967 general secretary of the Lao Động Party (Vietnam Workers’ Party), had become critical of the protracted war strategy. The war was not going as well as the communists had hoped, chiefly because the commitment of American troops had blunted PAVN infiltration and imposed heavy casualties. To Lê Duẩn, the aggressive American tactics during the early part of 1967 did not bode well for the successful continuation of a protracted approach to prosecuting the war. However, two areas of potential allied weakness had emerged. The ARVN still had significant problems and it was clear that US public opinion had begun to waver in its support of the American war effort. For these reasons, Lê Duẩn advocated a more aggressive strategy to bring the war to an earlier conclusion by destroying US confidence and spreading communist control and influence in the countryside.

Lê Duẩn was not alone. Chief among those who agreed with him was General Nguyễn Chí Thanh, head of the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), which was initially established in 1951 as the communist military headquarters in South Vietnam. Thanh also wanted to pursue a more aggressive strategy. He called for a massive attack against the cities of South Vietnam using local guerrillas, main-force PLAF, and PAVN regulars. This would mark the advent of the third, and final, stage of the revolutionary struggle – the general offensive, general uprising (Tổng công kích – Tổng khởi nghĩa or TCK–TKN).

Lê Duẩn and Thanh found other supporters in the Politburo, who were also unhappy with the stalemate in the South. One communist general later described the situation, saying, “In the spring of 1967 Westmoreland began his second campaign. It was very fierce. Certain of our people were very discouraged. There was much discussion of the war – should we continue main-force efforts, or should we pull back into a more local strategy. But by the middle of 1967 we concluded that you had not reversed the balance of forces on the battlefield. So we decided to carry out one decisive battle to force LBJ to de-escalate the war.”Footnote ⁶

Not everyone in the Politburo in Hanoi agreed with Lê Duẩn and Nguyễn Chí Thanh. Some historians, one of whom described the Tet Offensive as “Giáp’s Dream,” ascribe the genesis of the plan to Hanoi’s defense minister, Võ Nguyên Giáp.Footnote ⁷ However, Giáp actually opposed the proposed escalation because he thought that a major offensive in 1968 would be premature and was likely to fail against an enemy with vastly superior mobility and firepower.Footnote ⁸ Long the chief proponent of protracted guerrilla operations against allied communication and supply lines in the south, Giáp was afraid that, if the offensive failed, the revolution would be set back years. Giáp and Thanh had been long-time rivals for control of the communists’ military strategy in the South. Thanh charged Giáp with being “old fashioned.” He criticized Giáp for his “method of viewing things that is detached from reality,” insisting that Giáp and his followers looked for answers “in books, and [by] mechanically copying one’s past experiences or the experiences of foreign countries … in accordance with a dogmatic tendency.”Footnote ⁹

In the end, Lê Duẩn and Nguyễn Chí Thanh won the argument. After lengthy deliberation, the 13th Plenum in April 1967 passed Resolution 13 which called for a “spontaneous uprising in order to win a decisive victory in the shortest possible time.”Footnote ¹⁰ This was a blow for Giáp and his theory of protracted war. However, on July 6, 1967, Thanh suddenly died after suffering an apparent heart attack.Footnote ¹¹ Despite Thanh’s death, Lê Duẩn directed that planning for the general offensive continue, and the responsibility for crafting the campaign fell to Giáp’s deputy, General Vӑn Tiến Dũng.Footnote ¹²

It was decided that the offensive would be launched in early 1968 during Vietnam’s Tết holiday, which traditionally marks the start of the lunar New Year. It is not only a time of revelry celebrated with feasts and fireworks, but also one of worship at the family altar for revered ancestors. For several days the entire countryside was on the move as people returned to their ancestral homes, and all business, even the business of war, came to a halt. Prior to 1968, both sides in the war had observed Tết ceasefires during the annual holiday. Therefore, the North Vietnamese reasoned that a large part of both the South Vietnamese army and the National Police would be on leave when Tết began, and that Saigon would be unprepared for a countrywide attack.

The plan for Tết Mậu Thân 1968 (Tet Spring Offensive of 1968) was finalized in late summer of 1967. North Vietnamese diplomats from around the world were called to Hanoi for consultation in July to discuss the upcoming offensive. This gathering should have been the first indication to allied intelligence that something significant was in the offing, but most allied analysts believed the meeting’s purpose was to consider a peace bid.

According to General Trần Vӑn Trà, commander of communist forces in the South from 1963 to 1975, the objectives of Tết Mậu Thân were “to break down and destroy the bulk of the puppet [South Vietnamese] troops, topple the puppet administration at all levels, and take power into the hands of the people; to destroy the major part of the US forces and their war materiel, and render them unable to fulfill their political and military duties in Vietnam; and to break the US will of aggression, force it to accept defeat in the South and put an end to all acts of war against the North.”Footnote ¹³ As part of the desire to break the American will, the communists hoped to convince the United States to end the bombing of the North and begin negotiations.Footnote ¹⁴ According to William J. Duiker, “Hanoi was counting on the combined offensive and uprising to weaken the political and military foundations of the Saigon regime and to trigger a shift in policy in the United States.”Footnote ¹⁵ To accomplish this, the offensive would target South Vietnamese urban centers.

The plan for the offensive called for a series of simultaneous surprise attacks against American bases and South Vietnamese cities.Footnote ¹⁶ Dũng specifically targeted previously untouched urban centers such as Saigon in the south, Nha Trang and Quy Nhơn in central South Vietnam, and Quảng Ngãi and Huế in the northern part of the country.

Ultimately, Dũng’s plan was predicated on three assumptions. First, he assumed that the ARVN would not fight when struck a hard blow. Second, he believed that the Saigon government had no support among the South Vietnamese people, who would rise up against President Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu if given the opportunity. Third, he assumed that both the people and the armed forces of South Vietnam despised the Americans and would turn on them if given the chance.

Preparations for the Offensive

Dũng’s plan called for a preparatory phase that would be conducted from September to December 1967. During this period, PAVN forces would launch attacks in the remote outlying regions along South Vietnam’s borders with Cambodia and Laos. The purpose of these operations, which were essentially a grand feint, would be to draw US forces away from the populated areas.Footnote ¹⁷ This would leave the cities and towns uncovered. This phase would have two other objectives. The first was to provide opportunities for Dũng’s troops to hone their fighting skills, and the other was to increase American casualties. As part of this preparatory phase, main-force divisions would begin to move into position around Khe Sanh, an outpost along the Laotian border manned by only a single US marine regiment. Additionally, the battles along South Vietnam’s borders served to screen the infiltration of troops and equipment into South Vietnam from Laos and Cambodia prior to Tết.

General Trần Vӑn Trà asserted some years after the war that the plan for the offensive called for three distinct phases.Footnote ¹⁸ Phase I, which was scheduled to begin on January 31, 1968, was a countrywide assault on South Vietnamese cities, ARVN units, American headquarters, communication centers, and air bases to be carried out primarily by Viet Cong main-force units. It was hoped that the Southern insurgents would be able to infiltrate their forces into the attack positions and target areas before the offensive started.

Concurrent with this phase would be a massive propaganda campaign aimed at coaxing the Southern troops to rally to the communist side. The objective of this campaign was to achieve wholesale defections from ARVN ranks. At the same time, the North Vietnamese would launch their political offensive aimed at causing the South Vietnamese people to revolt against the Saigon government. Successful accomplishment of this objective would leave “the American forces and bases isolated islands in a sea of hostile South Vietnamese people.”Footnote ¹⁹

If the general uprising did not occur or failed to achieve the overthrow of the Saigon government, follow-on operations would be launched in succeeding months to wear down the enemy and lead either to victory or to a negotiated settlement.Footnote ²⁰ According to Trà, Phase II of the offensive began on May 5, and Phase III began on August 17 and ended on September 23, 1968.Footnote ²¹ It is clear that, to Hanoi and the NLF, the Tet Offensive, which is usually seen by many American historians to cover a much shorter time period, was a more prolonged offensive that lasted beyond the action immediately following the Tết holiday.

Interpreting the enemy’s moves in the latter months of 1967 as an effort to gain control of the northern provinces, General Westmoreland retaliated with massive bombing raids targeted against suspected PAVN troop concentrations. He also sent reinforcements to the northern and border areas to help drive back PAVN attacks in the region. The attack on Dak To in II Corps in November 1967 was the last of a series of “border battles” that began two months earlier with the siege of Cồn Thiện in I Corps and continued in October with attacks on Sông Bé and Lộc Ninh in III Corps.Footnote ²²

In purely tactical terms, these operations were costly failures and, although exact numbers are not known, the communists no doubt lost some of their best troops. Not only did the allied forces exact a high toll in enemy casualties, the attacks failed to cause a permanent relocation of allied forces to the border areas. The strategic mobility of the American forces permitted them to move to the borders, turn back the communist attacks, and redeploy back to the interior in a mobile reserve posture. North Vietnamese colonel Tran Van Doc later described these border battles as “useless and bloody.”Footnote ²³ Nevertheless, at the operational level, the attacks achieved the intent of Hanoi’s plan by diverting Westmoreland’s attention to the outlying areas away from the buildup around the urban areas that would be targeted in the coming offensive. Additionally, they gave the North Vietnamese an opportunity to perfect the tactics that they would use in the Tết attacks.Footnote ²⁴

While these battles raged, General Dũng masterfully directed an intensive logistical effort focused on a massive buildup of troops and equipment in the South. Men and arms began pouring into South Vietnam from staging areas in Laos and Cambodia. New Russian-made AK-47 assault rifles, B-40 and 122mm rockets, and large amounts of other war materiel were moved south along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail by bicycle, ox cart, and trucks.

As the PAVN troops infiltrated into the South, PLAF units began making preparations for the coming offensive. Guerrilla forces were reorganized into the configuration that would later be employed in attacking the cities and towns. Replacements arrived to round out understrength units. The new weapons and equipment that had just arrived were issued to the troops. Food, medicine, ammunition, and other critical supplies were stockpiled. In areas close enough to the cities to permit rapid deployment but far enough away to preclude detection, PLAF units conducted intense training for the upcoming combat operations. Some training in street fighting was conducted for special sapper units, but this was limited in order to maintain secrecy. Reconnaissance was conducted of routes to objective areas and targets. Meanwhile, political officers conducted sessions in which they indoctrinated the troops by proclaiming that the final goal was within their grasp and exhorting them to prepare themselves for the decisive battle to achieve total victory against Saigon and its American allies.

To achieve tactical surprise, the North Vietnamese relied on secrecy to conceal preparations for the offensive. Specific operational plans for the offensive were kept strictly confidential and disseminated to each subordinate level only as requirements dictated. Although the executive members of COSVN knew of the plan sometime in mid-1967, it was not until the fall that the complete plan was disseminated to high-ranking enemy officials of the Saigon–Chợ Lớn–Gia Định Special Zone.Footnote ²⁵ Although this secrecy was necessary for operational security, it would add to the customary fog and friction of war once the offensive was launched and have a significant impact on the outcome of the fighting at the tactical level.

Figure 13.1 Walt Whitman Rostow (right) shows White House press secretary George Christian (left), President Lyndon B. Johnson (second left), and General Robert Ginsburgh (second right) a model of the Khe Sanh area (February 1968).

Source: Pictures from History / Contributor / Universal Images Group / Getty Images.

US Intelligence and the Fight for Khe Sanh

US military intelligence analysts knew that the communists were planning some kind of large-scale attack, but did not believe it would come during Tết or that it would be nationwide. Still, there were many indicators that the enemy was planning to make a major shift in its strategy to win the war. In late November, the CIA station in Saigon compiled all the various intelligence indicators and published a report called “The Big Gamble.”Footnote ²⁶ This was not really a formal intelligence estimate or even a prediction, but rather “a collection of scraps” that concluded that the communists were preparing to escalate the fighting.Footnote ²⁷ This report also put enemy strength at a much higher level than previously supposed. Military intelligence analysts at MACV strongly disagreed with the CIA’s estimate, because at the time the command was changing the way it was accounting for the enemy and was reducing its estimate of enemy capabilities. Nevertheless, as more intelligence poured in, Westmoreland and his staff came to the conclusion that a major enemy effort was probable. All the signs pointed to a new offensive. Still, most of the increased enemy activity had been along the DMZ and in the remote border areas. In late December 1967, additional signals intelligence revealed that there was a significant enemy buildup around Khe Sanh.

Surrounded by a series of mist-enshrouded, jungle-covered hills, Khe Sanh Combat Base (KSCB) was one of a series of outposts established near the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating North and South Vietnam. Located just north of Khe Sanh village some 7 miles (11 km) from the border with Laos and about 14 miles (22.5 km) south of the DMZ, the marine base was a key element in the defense of I Corps in South Vietnam. It effectively controlled a valley which was the crossroads of enemy infiltration routes from North Vietnam and lower Laos that provided natural invasion avenues of approach into South Vietnam’s two northernmost provinces. To Westmoreland, Khe Sanh was the natural blocking position to impede enemy infiltration into South Vietnam in order to protect Quảng Trị and Thừa Thiên provinces.

The marines at Khe Sanh had been involved in a protracted struggle with North Vietnamese forces since mid-1967 for control of the high ground that surrounded the base. In late November of that year, US intelligence began to receive reports that several PAVN divisions in North Vietnam were beginning to move south. By late December it was apparent to US intelligence agencies that two of these divisions were headed for the Khe Sanh area.

Concerned with a new round of intelligence indicators and the situation developing at Khe Sanh, Westmoreland requested that the South Vietnamese cancel the coming countrywide Tết ceasefire. On January 8, 1968, the chief of the South Vietnamese Joint General Staff (JGS), General Cao Vӑn Viên, told Westmoreland that he would try to limit the truce to twenty-four hours. However, South Vietnamese president Thiệu argued that to cancel the 48-hour truce would adversely affect the morale of his troops and the South Vietnamese people. Nevertheless, he agreed to limit the ceasefire to thirty-six hours, beginning on the evening of January 29. Traditionally, as previously stated, South Vietnamese soldiers returned to their homes for the Tết holiday, and this fact would play a major role in the desperate fighting to come.

On January 21, the North Vietnamese began the first large-scale shelling of the marines at Khe Sanh, which was followed by renewed sharp fights between the enemy troops and the marines in the hills surrounding the base. Westmoreland was sure that this was the opening of the long-anticipated enemy general offensive. The fact that the Khe Sanh situation looked similar to that which the French had faced when they were decisively defeated at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954 only added urgency to the unfolding events there. With the increase in enemy activity around Khe Sanh, Westmoreland ordered the commencement of Operation Niagara II, a massive bombing campaign focused on suspected enemy positions around the marine base. He also ordered the 1st Cavalry Division from the Central Highlands to Phú Bài, just south of Huế. Additionally, he sent one brigade of the 101st Airborne Division to I Corps to strengthen the defenses of the two northernmost provinces. By the end of January, more than half of all US combat maneuver battalions were located in the I Corps area, ready to meet any new threat.

Essentially, US and ARVN forces were preparing for the wrong battle. The Tet Offensive represented, in the words of National Security Council staff member William Jorden, writing in a February 1968 cable to presidential advisor Walt Rostow, “the worst intelligence failure of the war.”Footnote ²⁸ Many historians and other observers have endeavored to understand how the communists were able to achieve such a stunning level of surprise. There are a number of possible explanations. First, allied estimates of enemy strengths and intentions were flawed. Part of the problem was that MACV had changed the way that it computed enemy order of battle and had downgraded the intelligence estimates about total PLAF and PAVN strength, no longer counting the National Liberation Front local militias in the enemy order of battle. CIA analyst Sam Adams later charged that MACV actually falsified intelligence reports to show progress in the war.Footnote ²⁹ Whether this accusation was true is subject to debate, but it is a fact that MACV revised enemy strength downward from almost 300,000 to 235,000 in December 1967. US military intelligence analysts apparently believed their own revised estimates and largely disregarded the mounting evidence that the communists not only retained a significant combat capability, but also planned to use that capability in a dramatic fashion.

Given these grossly flawed intelligence estimates, senior allied military leaders and most of their intelligence analysts greatly underestimated the capabilities of the enemy and dismissed new intelligence indicators because they too greatly contradicted prevailing assumptions about the enemy’s strength and capabilities. It was thought that enemy capabilities were insufficient to support a nationwide campaign. One analyst later admitted that he and his colleagues had become “mesmerized by statistics of known doubtful validity … choosing to place our faith in the ones that showed progress.”Footnote ³⁰ These entrenched beliefs about the enemy served as blinders to the facts, coloring the perceptions of senior allied commanders and intelligence officers when they were presented with intelligence that differed so drastically from their preconceived notions.

Another problem that had an impact on the intelligence failures in the Tet Offensive deals with what is known today as “fusion.” Given the large number of indicators drawn from a number of sources operating around South Vietnam, the data collected was difficult to assemble into a complete and cohesive picture of what the communists were doing. The analysts often failed to integrate cumulative information, even though they were charged with the production of estimates that should have facilitated the combination of different indicators into an overall analysis. Part of this problem can be traced to the lack of coordination between allied intelligence agencies. Most of these organizations operated independently and rarely shared their information with each other. This lack of coordination and failure to share information impeded the synthesis of all the intelligence that was available and precluded the fusion necessary to predict enemy intentions and prevent the surprise of the enemy offensive when it came.

Even if the allied intelligence apparatus had been better at fusion, it would still have had to deal with widely conflicting reports that further clouded the issue. While the aforementioned intelligence indicated that a general offensive was in the offing, there were a number of other intelligence reports indicating that the enemy was facing extreme hardships in the field and that his morale had declined markedly. It was difficult to determine which reports to believe. Additionally, some indicators that should have caused alarm among intelligence analysts got lost in the noise of developments related to more obvious and more widely expected adversary threats. Faced with evidence of increasing enemy activity near urban areas and along the borders of the country, the allies were forced to decide where, when, and how the main blow would fall. They failed in this effort, choosing to focus on the increasing intensity of activity and engagements at Khe Sanh and in the other remote areas.

Westmoreland and his analysts failed to foresee a countrywide offensive, thinking that there would be perhaps a “show of force,” but otherwise the enemy’s main effort would be directed at the northern provinces. When indications that North Vietnamese army units were massing near Khe Sanh were confirmed by the attack on the marine base on January 21, this fit well with what Westmoreland and his analysts already expected. Thus, they evaluated the intelligence in light of what they already believed, focusing on Khe Sanh and discounting most of the rest of the indicators that did not fit with their preconceived notions about enemy capabilities and intentions.

Surprise Attack

For these reasons, the Tet Offensive achieved almost total surprise. This is true even though a number of attacks were launched prematurely against five provincial capitals in II Corps Tactical Zone and Đà Nẵng in I Corps Tactical Zone in the early morning hours of January 30.Footnote ³¹ These early attacks, now credited to enemy coordination problems, provided at least some warning, but many in Saigon continued to believe that these attacks were only meant to divert attention away from Khe Sanh, and no one anticipated the magnitude of the attacks to come.

The Tet Offensive began in full force shortly before 3 a.m. on January 31. A force of more than 84,000 communist troops – a mixture of PAVN regulars and PLAF main-force guerrillas – began a coordinated attack throughout South Vietnam.Footnote ³² The PAVN and PLAF targeted more than three-quarters of the provincial capitals and most of the major cities. In the north, communist forces struck Quảng Trị, Tam Kỳ, and Huế, as well as the US military bases at Phú Bài and Chu Lai. In the center of the country, they followed up the previous evening’s attacks and launched new ones at Tuy Hòa, Phan Thiết, and the American installations at Bong Song and An Khê. In III Corps Tactical Zone, the primary communist thrust was at Saigon itself, but there were other attacks against the ARVN corps headquarters at Biên Hòa and the US II Field Force headquarters at Long Bình. In the Mekong Delta, the VC struck Vĩnh Long, Mỹ Tho, Cần Thơ, Định Tường, Kiến Tường, Gò Công, and Bến Tre, as well as virtually every other provincial capital in the region. The communist forces mortared or rocketed every major allied airfield and attacked sixty-four district capitals and scores of lesser towns, villages, and hamlets.

Although the attacks varied in size and scope, they generally followed the same pattern. They began with a barrage of mortar and rocket fire, followed closely thereafter by a ground assault spearheaded by sappers, who penetrated the defensive perimeter. Once inside the cities, the commandos linked up with troops that had previously infiltrated and with local sympathizers, who often acted as guides. The commandos were followed by main-force units, who quickly seized predetermined targets. They were usually accompanied by propaganda teams who tried to convince the local populace to rise up against the Saigon government. The attackers were both skillful and determined and had rehearsed their attacks beforehand.

The surprise and scope of the Tet Offensive were stunning; everywhere there was confusion, shock, dismay, and disbelief on the part of the allies. The carefully coordinated attacks, as journalist Stanley Karnow writes, “exploded around the country like a string of firecrackers.”Footnote ³³ As previously stated, US intelligence had gathered some information of infiltration into Southern population centers and captured documents that outlined the general plan. However, Westmoreland and his intelligence staff were so convinced that Khe Sanh was the real target and that the enemy was incapable of conducting an offensive on such a massive scale that they viewed the captured documents as a diversionary tactic. “Even had I known exactly what was to take place,” Westmoreland’s intelligence officer later conceded, “it was so preposterous that I probably would have been unable to sell it to anybody.”Footnote ³⁴ Westmoreland himself later admitted that he had not anticipated the “true nature or the scope” of the attacks.Footnote ³⁵ Consequently, the US high command had seriously underestimated the enemy’s potential for a major, nationwide offensive, and the allies were almost overwhelmed initially by the audacity, scale, and intensity of the attacks.

In Saigon, in one of the most spectacular attacks of the entire offensive, nineteen Viet Cong sappers conducted a daring raid on the new US Embassy, which had just been opened in September. Elsewhere in the capital city, the communists committed thirty-five battalions, attacking every major installation, including Tân Sơn Nhất Air Base, the presidential palace, and the headquarters of South Vietnam’s general staff. Additionally, they hit nearby installations at Long Bình and Biên Hòa. At his headquarters, the US commander responsible for the defense of the area surrounding Saigon said that the situation map showing the reported attacks reminded him of “a pinball machine, one light after another going on as it was hit.”Footnote ³⁶

Far to the north, 7,500 NLF and North Vietnamese troops overran and occupied Huế, the ancient imperial capital that had been the home of the emperors of the Kingdom of Annam. The battle to recapture the city lasted more than three weeks and resulted in bitter house-to-house fighting that destroyed a large part of the city. The battle had also taken a tremendous toll on the population of Huế. Immediately following the battle and in the months afterward, more than 2,800 bodies of South Vietnamese men, women, and children were found in several mass graves around the city. Reportedly these were part of the group that had been identified as “reactionaries,” who had been rounded up by communist cadres when PAVN and PLAF forces initially took over the city and were executed during the course of the battle.

In addition to the bloody battle for Huế, fighting raged in Quảng Trị, Đà Lạt, Kontum, Pleiku, and Ban Mê Thuột in the Central Highlands, as well as in Cần Thơ, Mỹ Tho, Sóc Trӑng, and Bến Tre in the Mekong Delta, but, ultimately, allied troops, as in Huế eventually, prevailed in all of these battles.

Outcomes

In the United States, news of the widespread attacks and vivid images of the bitter fighting, unprecedented in its magnitude and ferocity, came as a great shock to the American people. The attacks sharply contradicted the optimistic reports that had come out of the Johnson administration in the closing months of 1967. Television news anchor Walter Cronkite perhaps said it best when he asked, no doubt voicing the sentiment of many Americans, “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war.”Footnote ³⁷

In truth, the Tet Offensive and subsequent fighting into the fall of 1968 turned out to be a disaster for the communists, at least at the tactical level. While the North Vietnamese and NLF achieved initial success with their surprise attacks, allied forces rapidly recovered their balance and responded quickly, containing and driving back the attackers in most areas. The stunning attack on the US Embassy was over in a matter of hours, with all the attackers either killed or captured.

The first surge of the offensive was over by the second week of February, and most of the battles were over in a few days, but heavy fighting continued in a number of places around the country. Marines were still under siege at Khe Sanh. Protracted battles also raged for several weeks in several areas of Saigon and in Huế, but in the end allied forces used superior mobility and firepower to rout the communists, who failed to hold any of their military objectives. The communists expected the South Vietnamese forces to collapse, but, for the most part, they acquitted themselves well in the heavy fighting. As for the much-anticipated general uprising of the South Vietnamese people, it never materialized. The communists had launched the offensive, counting on the general uprising to reinforce their attacks; when it did not happen, they lost the initiative and were forced to withdraw or die in the face of the allied response.

That did not mean that the fighting was over. In May, the PAVN and PLAF launched what became known as “mini-Tet,” focused on Saigon and the area just south of the DMZ. In this phase, as in the initial offensive, communist forces sustained a costly defeat. There was a third wave in the early fall, but these attacks were also turned away by the allied defenders.

During the bitter fighting, the communists sustained staggering casualties. Official MACV estimates put communist losses in the first months of 1968 at around 45,000 killed, with an additional 7,000 captured. The total estimate of enemy killed has been disputed, but it is clear that their losses were heavy, and the numbers continued to grow as subsequent fighting extended into the summer and autumn months. By the end of September, when the offensive had largely run its course, the NLF, which bore the brunt of much of the heaviest fighting in the cities, had been dealt a significant blow from which it never completely recovered.

The Tet Offensive resulted in an overwhelming defeat of the communist forces at the tactical level, but the fact that the enemy had pulled off such a widespread offensive and caught the allies by surprise ultimately contributed to victory for the communists at the strategic level. Although the US and allied casualties were lower than those of the enemy, they were still extremely high; US losses through the end of March were more than 3,600 killed in action, while the South Vietnamese during the same time period suffered 7,600 killed and many more wounded.Footnote ³⁸ These casualty figures and those for the subsequent phases combined with the sheer scope and ferocity of the offensive and the vivid images of the savage fighting on the nightly television news stunned the American people, who were astonished that the enemy was capable of such an effort. They were unprepared for the intense and disturbing scenes they saw on television because Westmoreland and the administration had told them that the United States was winning and that the enemy was on its last legs.

Although there was a brief upturn in the support for the administration in the days immediately following the launching of the offensive, it was short-lived, and subsequently the president’s approval rating plummeted.Footnote ³⁹ Having accepted the optimistic reports of military and government officials in late 1967, many Americans now believed that there was no end to the war in sight and, more importantly, many felt that they had been lied to about progress on the battlefield. The Tet Offensive severely strained the administration’s credibility with the American people and increased public discontent with the war.

The Tet Offensive also had a major impact on the White House. It profoundly shook the confidence of the president and his advisors. Despite Westmoreland’s claims that the Tet Offensive had been a great victory for the allied forces, Johnson, like the American people, was stunned by the ability of the communists to launch such widespread attacks. One advisor later commented that an “air of gloom” hung over the White House.Footnote ⁴⁰ When Westmoreland, urged on by General Earle Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, asked for an additional 206,000 troops to “take advantage of the situation,” the president balked and ordered a detailed review of US policy in Vietnam by Clark Clifford, who was to replace Robert McNamara as secretary of defense. According to The Pentagon Papers, “A fork in the road had been reached and the alternatives stood out in stark reality.”Footnote ⁴¹

The Tet Offensive fractured the administration’s already wavering consensus on the conduct of the war, and Clifford’s reassessment permitted the airing of these new alternatives. The civilians in the Pentagon recommended that allied efforts focus on population security and that the South Vietnamese be forced to assume more responsibility for the fighting while the United States pursued a negotiated settlement. The Joint Chiefs naturally took exception to this approach and recommended that Westmoreland be given the troop increase he had requested and be permitted to pursue enemy forces into Laos and Cambodia. Completing his study, Clifford recommended that Johnson reject the military’s request and shift efforts toward deescalation.Footnote ⁴² Although publicly optimistic, Johnson had concluded that the current course in Vietnam was not working. He was further convinced that a change in policy was needed after the “Wise Men,” a group of senior statesmen to whom he had earlier turned for counsel and who had previously been very supportive of the administration’s Vietnam policies, advised that deescalation should begin immediately.

With these debates ongoing in the White House, Congress got into the act on March 11 when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began hearings on the war. The House of Representatives initiated its own review of Vietnam policy the following week. Meanwhile, public opinion polls revealed the continuing downward trend in the president’s approval rating. This situation manifested itself in the Democratic Party presidential primary in New Hampshire, where the president barely defeated challenger Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-Minnesota), a situation which convinced Senator Robert Kennedy (D-New York) to enter the presidential race as an antiwar candidate.

Beset politically by challengers from within his own party and seemingly still in shock from the spectacular Tết attacks, Johnson went on national television on the evening of March 31, 1968, announcing a partial suspension of the bombing campaign against North Vietnam and calling for negotiations. He then stunned the television audience by announcing that he would not run for reelection: the Tet Offensive had claimed its final victim.

In many ways, Johnson was the architect of his own demise. He and Westmoreland built a set of, as it turned out, false expectations about the situation in Vietnam in order to win support for the administration’s handling of the war and dampen the antiwar sentiment. These expectations, based on a severely flawed (or manipulated, if one believes Sam Adams) intelligence picture, played a major role in the stunning impact of the Tet Offensive. The images and news stories of the bitter fighting seemed to put the lie to the administration’s claims of progress in the war and stretched the credibility gap to the breaking point. The tactical victory achieved on the battlefield quickly became a strategic defeat for the United States and led to the virtual abdication of the president.

North Vietnamese general Trần Độ acknowledged that the offensive had failed to achieve its major tactical objectives, but added, “As for making an impact in the United States, it had not been our intention – but it turned out to be a fortunate result.”Footnote ⁴³ That result occurred because Westmoreland and the Johnson administration let political considerations overwhelm an objective appraisal of the military situation. In doing so, they used flawed intelligence to portray an image of decreasing enemy capabilities in order to garner public support. When the fallacy of this approach was revealed by the vivid images of the Tết fighting, the resulting loss of credibility for the president and the military high command in Saigon was devastating to both the Johnson administration and the allied war effort.

The Tet Offensive and its aftermath significantly altered the nature of the war in Vietnam. The resounding tactical victory was seen as a defeat in the United States. It proved to many Americans that the war was unwinnable; ultimately, the Tet Offensive effectively toppled a president, convinced the new president to “Vietnamize” the war, and paved the way for the ultimate triumph of the communist forces in 1975. Perhaps journalist Don Oberdorfer said it best when he wrote, “The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong lost a battle. The United States Government lost something even more important – the confidence of its people at home.”Footnote ⁴⁴