Jungle of Snakes (24 page)
Authors: James R. Arnold
In the Phu Bai area, as elsewhere, each village consisted of multiple smaller hamlets. At first the marines visited the hamlets
only during the day and while accompanied by the militia. They avoided direct contact with the inhabitants. Instead, each
marine kept a notebook to record his observations about the people’s daily habits. By learning what was routine, the marines
learned what was extraordinary. They acquired a special sense, “an attitude you feel,” that indicated the extent of Viet Cong
control.
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Then, having grown confident in their new environment, the marines and Popular Forces saturated the area with nocturnal patrols
and ambushes.
Contact with armed enemy was infrequent. Alarmed by the unexpected marine tactics, the Viet Cong avoided the four CAP villages.
However, it became apparent that the Communists and the villagers had arrived at a tacit agreement whereby the Viet Cong would
leave them alone as long as the villagers contributed money and rice to the NLF. But the rice harvest of 1965 was poor and
the Communists needed food, so they sent women and children to the market to purchase rice. Villagers began tipping off the
militia, thereby allowing CAP patrols to intercept the rice agents. Ek came to learn that the armed enemy “were the easy ones”
to find and eliminate; it was the unarmed rice or tax collector or the woman who showed a torch from her home to betray an
ambush site who were the more difficult foe.”
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Ek and his superiors judged the Phu Bai experiment with Combined Action Platoons a success. With hindsight it can be seen
that several special circumstances contributed to this outcome. The first set of CAP marines were highly motivated, experienced
volunteers who were quick-thinking and socially aware. Two thirds of this first cohort volunteered to extend their tour with
the Combined Action Program rather than depart Vietnam. Backing them were some especially competent Provincial Forces and
an unusually efficient national police unit. The four trial villages lay in open rice paddies with no easy route for Viet
Cong infiltration. Lastly, the Viet Cong responded to the marine presence with a wait-and-see attitude. Later CAPs would have
none of these advantages.
Life in the Village
THE SUCCESS AT PHU BAI PERSUADED the marine leadership to expand the Combined Action Program. Officially, the program emphasized
destroying the insurgent infrastructure embedded within each village while protecting the people and government officials
from insurgent reprisal. As it formally evolved, a fourteen-man marine rifle squad plus a navy corpsman operated with a 38-man
local militia, or popular Forces (PF) platoon. Because the marine rifle squads were dispersed around different CAP villages,
young marine sergeants or corporals held in dependent command positions. Their counterparts back in Central America during
the Banana Wars, as well as British noncommissioned officers (NCOs) in Malaya, had served in the same way. While not unprecedented,
it was still a heavy responsibility. The NCOs and their men received a short primer on Vietnamese language (although the language
barrier remained the cause of frequent and sometimes fatal misunderstandings), culture, and history before being permanently
assigned to a hamlet or village where they lived twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
For the villagers, the most popular American was the navy corpsman. Hundreds attended his sick call. As one marine rifleman
recalled, “You won’t find too many Marines that’ll dispute the fact that Doc won more hearts and minds than all of us combined.”
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Far more difficult was the challenge of forging an effective command relationship between the marine NCO and the Vietnamese
platoon leader. It was one thing to establish the principle that they shared responsibility for the well-being of their troops
and operated on the basis of mutually agreed courses of action. It was something else to adhere to this principle.
If the men meshed, it proved a good blend, with the marines instructing the PFs in basic small-unit tactics and discipline
while the Viet namese taught the marines the terrain and informed them about the local population. In the absence of harmony,
a PF platoon commander exercised his power by refusing to cooperate. Many of the problems with the militia stemmed from sources
beyond the control of the marines. The popular Forces troops sat on the bottom of the pecking order in the allied order of
battle. They were nominally volunteers recruited within their native villages to protect their own families. In reality they
served at the discretion of the Viet namese district chiefs. Sometimes they remained in their home villages but too often
they were sent elsewhere for ancillary duties such as guarding fixed installations or acting as bodyguards for well-connected
politicians. Even worse, the PFs often received assignments outside their home villages, where the inhabitants viewed them
with the deep suspicion directed at all outsiders and foreigners. At all events, until much later in the war, the PFs received
last call on weapons and equipment. The Viet Cong outgunned them and they keenly felt their inferiority. Lastly, service in
the Popular Forces did not provide draft exemption. Consequently, most able-bodied men were in the regular forces, leaving
the ranks of the militia filled with the very young, the too old, or the physically or mentally infirm. Out of such unpromising
material, marine NCOs set to work to forge motivated anti-Communist fighters.
Special Men in a Strange Place
Like the original volunteers who served with Lieutenant Ek around Phu Bai, the nineteen-and twenty-year-old marines who volunteered
for service in the initial CAP cohort were special. They had at least four months’ combat experience and personal records
free of disciplinary blemishes. They had to receive favorable endorsements from their commanding officers and had to be without
discernible racial prejudice against the Vietnamese. This last qualification eliminated many candidates, since more than half
of all marines candidly acknowledged that they did not like any Vietnamese.
For those who made the grade, CAP duty proved lonely and dangerous. The marines involved in the Combined Action Program confronted
myriad difficulties, many of them unperceived by generals and civilian theorists. The program’s success depended on establishing
cooperation and trust with the militia and the villagers. The inability to speak the language and the difficulty of understanding
an alien culture made these goals almost unattainable. Even had the CAP marines spoken Viet namese, it would have been hard
for them to penetrate the complexities of village life with their bewildering (at least to an outsider) network of inter-and
intrafamilial relationships.
Among many cultural differences leading to tension was the attitude toward personal property. Whereas the marines believed
in the sanctity of such property, the Vietnamese did not consider “borrowing” an unused object wrong, and in the marine view
they had a very elastic notion of what constituted “unused.” If a marine came in from patrol in a rainstorm and hung up his
poncho to dry, a militiaman would borrow it to begin his patrol and perhaps return it three months later when the rainy season
had ended. Nothing provoked the marines more than the frequent thefts by the militiamen, with cameras, watches, and other
personal possessions disappearing with alarming regularity. Even items vital to security disappeared: “Every morning we would
awake to find that a few more barbed wire stakes or another roll of barbed wire had walked out of the compound overnight.”
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The marines conceived that they and the militia were “in it”—patrolling, guarding, repairing, and the welcome respite of actually
fighting—fifty-fifty. But they saw the militia as not carrying their weight. Whereas the marines were on duty round the clock,
the “lazy” militia routinely took breaks, including three-hour siestas at noontime. Worse, too often the PFs seemed unwilling
to fight. The marines sarcastically labeled their behavior “search and avoid.” They would accidentally-on-purpose cough loudly
or discharge a weapon at a purported foe, thereby compromising a carefully set ambush. The marines knew that the village’s
sons and daughters served in the Communist ranks. They understood that a militiaman might be reluctant to fire at a potential
relative. But given that they were putting their own lives on the line, the CAP marines still found it hard to tolerate such
conduct.
In the absence of cooperative militia and living amidst an indifferent civilian population, the CAP marines could accomplish
little more than any other American soldiers. One patrol leader recalled conducting more than sixty night ambush patrols and
at least as many daytime patrols and never encountering the enemy. This led to the inevitable suspicion that the militia were
in cahoots with the Viet Cong. (The marines also suspected that an unknown number of the militia were in fact either Viet
Cong agents themselves or at least had made discreet accommodations with the enemy. So when a PF guide refused to advance
any farther along a jungle trail, a marine had to consider: was it because the dangers were really too great or because the
PFs had reached an accommodation that divided territory into “ours” and “yours”? Such suspicions led to enormous frustration,
stress, and often alienation: many marines developed an attitude that while the militia would steal anything not nailed down
and do what ever necessary to avoid danger, it didn’t matter, because the marine would be leaving pretty soon. Marines with
this attitude would not give their wholehearted effort to make the CAP program work.
WHEN THE CAP marines first moved through a typical hamlet the villagers avoided contact with them. They ducked quickly into
their homes and quieted children who called out. They exuded a palpable atmosphere of fear, avoidance, and apathy. To the
villagers, the marines were just another group of armed strangers come to plague them in a conflict without end. Indeed, throughout
the war rural people seldom shared information with outsiders, whether Americans or South Viet namese. But once the CAPs proved
that they were present for the long haul, villagers overcame their fears and began using the militia or children to relay
intelligence to the marines. Some of it was not useful, along the lines of “The VC will come here sometime next month.” But
some was: “A tax collector comes to Minh’s house to night at eleven.” If the marines and the militia successfully acted on
these tips by killing or capturing a Viet Cong tax collector or recruiting agent, by ambushing a Viet Cong propaganda team,
or by repulsing a sapper attack, the flow of actionable intelligence increased.
The PFs, in turn, gained confidence and agreed to extend the range of their patrols. Meanwhile, a marine civic action noncom
worked to obtain cement to repair hamlet wells. Other marines spent small sums in the hamlets and people began to benefit
economically from their presence. As the months passed additional positive changes in village attitudes occurred and the quality
of the intelligence improved. But progress could be undone so easily. To succeed on CAP duty, individual marines had to exhibit
nearly flawless conduct. Bad behavior by one could and did reverse months of trust building. If a marine greeted a village
girl with inappropriate familiarity or a man who never should have been assigned to CAP duty exploded in a racist rage, patient
progress was lost. External factors over which the marines had no control also impeded progress: an American vehicle accidently
injuring a hamlet child, an errant artillery round destroying a home, a passing convoy of front-line soldiers throwing objects
at the hamlet’s people out of dislike for all things Vietnamese.
Moreover, although the CAP might maintain a presence in a village for three or four years, the particular Americans involved
rotated away to other duties, thereby severing personal relationships between the marines and the villagers. As a 1969 assessment
reported, “Their replacements, fresh from the States, spoke no Vietnamese . . . and, arriving in an area that seemed to hold
no threat from the enemy, they could see little reason behind the requirements for continual military efforts. As a result,
some relaxation of discipline occurred.”
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And this was what the patient Viet Cong agent embedded somewhere in the village waited for, even if that wait went on for
months or years.
The Viet Cong Adapt
Even when the CAP marines managed to cope with all the social problems caused by the inevitable friction between a foreign
army based in the middle of deeply suspicious rural society, the adaptable enemy could nearly always cause a setback. The
village of My Phu Thuong, located only five miles from the first marine CAP village in Phu Bai, demonstrated this adaptability.
When the CAP started to make progress, the NLF leadership summoned the best half of its twenty-man standing village guerrilla
force to a special training program. These chosen ten were to spearhead a counterattack at some future time. Meanwhile, in
their absence, recruiters entered My Phu Thuong to enlist ten replacements, including two women, all of whom belonged to the
American-armed local self-defense force.
Having dealt with its manpower problems, the Communists at My Phu Thuong also adjusted their operational methods. Because
the CAP ambush teams had begun to interdict the local trails, the guerrillas extended their underground tunnel network. Because
some villagers had begun to support CAP activities, the Viet Cong intensified attacks against informers and collaborators.
A key to Communist adaptability was the possession of good intelligence. Guided by people intimately familiar with the local
terrain, a Communist recon team would conduct a careful study. Briefing and rehearsal followed, and then came the assault.
In the seemingly pacified village of Phuy Bong it came at 2:30 a.m. when all the marines and militia were caught in the patrol
base. A North Vietnamese assault force pinned them in the base while enemy soldiers swarmed through the three hamlets that
composed the village. The Communists killed four PFs and then brazenly set up a mortar next to the village market. The mortar
fired against a bridge, undoubtedly with the intent of provoking American return fire that would damage the village. Although
in this case the ploy failed, the attackers succeeded in their goal of reminding villagers that they still were vulnerable
to reprisal. Worse, the next morning the marines discovered why their efforts to defend their base had been so difficult:
wires controlling their Claymore mines—a vital component of their defensive scheme—had been cut, rendering the mines useless.
The obvious answer was “an inside job,” betrayal by one of the militia. During the subsequent investigation matters grew so
heated that a marine apparently beat a PF. And so the precarious bonds of trust dissolved and the insurgents chalked up another
small victory.
All these factors made it hard for even dedicated CAP marines to provide village security. In the absence of security Viet
Cong terrorists struck: kidnapping the sister of a particularly effective militia officer, killing the kindly old couple who
ran a beverage stand frequented by the marines, leaving a note with the message that this was the certain fate for all traitors
pinned to the breast of a mutilated civilian who had provided intelligence to the marines. And always lurking was the fear
that someday the marines would leave and the Viet Cong would resurface.
Problems Emerge
A CAP marine had a 75 percent chance of being wounded once during his tour and a 30 percent chance of being wounded a second
time. Almost 12 percent died. High casualty rates occurred because as the program expanded the enemy recognized the threat
and made CAP villages high-priority targets. They were particularly vulnerable at night, when most of the defenders were out
on patrol and only four marines and six or so popular Forces remained. Thus a typical nocturnal attack by fifty or sixty Viet
Cong enjoyed overwhelming numerical advantage and routinely inflicted serious losses. And, as had been the case with the CIDG
camps established by the Special Forces, reaction forces—this time American, not South Vietnamese—were reluctant to come to
the rescue because they feared night ambush.
