Rare Footage Of America’s “Hearts And Minds” Strategy In Vietnam

On the night of 14th September 1966, in a fortified villa on the edge of a hamlet in Kangai province, six United States Marines and 12 Vietnamese militia men were holding a position that had no strategic value whatsoever. The building had belonged to a landowner who fled in 1950 when the Vietmen first came into the district.

 The Marines had filled its windows with sandbags, strung wire, and given it a name. They called it Fort Page after Private First Class Larry Page, the youngest man in the squad, killed in an ambush on a night patrol 2 and a half months earlier. The senior man present was Sergeant Joseph Sullivan. Most of his squad was outside in the dark on patrol, which was the entire point of the place.

 There had been no significant contact for over two weeks. By marine reckoning, the village of Bengia had gone from contested to roughly 75% pacified, a figure that meant less to the men in the compound than the simple fact that they could now walk the trails at night. A cold drizzle had begun to fall.

 Sullivan had asked the local militia commander to post seven men in the hamlet behind the fort to cover his rear. That detachment walked through the hamlet, found nothing unusual, and went home to sleep out of the rain. Across the Trong River, roughly 60 North Vietnamese regulars from the 409th Battalion joined about 80 local Vietkong.

 They crossed the water, moved through the sleeping hamlet without being seen, and attacked the fort from two directions. Within minutes, five Americans were dead, including Sullivan and the Navy Corman. The sixth Marine in the compound was wounded. So were five of the 12 militia men. The remaining seven held. The next morning, a Marine colonel walked into the smoking compound and offered the survivors a way out.

 Nobody in the American chain of command believed a rifle squad in a village was worth this. The survivors declined. To understand why they refused and why a war involving more than half a million Americans came to hinge in the minds of a few senior officers on what happened in places like Bin Gia.

 You have to go back 18 months to a beach outside Daang and to a mission that was supposed to be almost entirely defensive. On 8th March 1965, the first American ground combat units of the Vietnam War came ashore at Daang. Their orders were narrow to the point of being restrictive. The Joint Chief’s landing directive stated that the Marine Force will not, repeat, will not engage in day-to-day actions against the VC.

Their job was to protect an airfield. The countryside around it was the responsibility of the South Vietnamese. By April, the Marines had established a second enclave at Fubai, south of Hi, and by early May, a third at Chulai. Their area of operations was I core, the five northernmost provinces of South Vietnam, a long coastal shelf of riceand backing into foothills and then into the jungle spine of the anomite range.

 The geography contained the problem in miniature. Between 80 and 90% of the population lived in that coastal strip in small rice farming hamlets grouped into administrative villages. One Marine general put the tactical consequence in a single sentence. There were roughly 100,000 Vietnamese living within 81 mm mortar range of the Daang airfield.

 That number is the beginning of the story. It meant that airfield security was not a perimeter problem. It was a population problem. The Marines understood this and asked for room to patrol. The South Vietnamese command was reluctant and for reasons that were not merely bureaucratic. The communists had been telling the villagers for months that the Americans were coming to take over the country.

 Moving American infantry into the hamlets too quickly would confirm the propaganda. General Nuin Chanti, commanding first Corps, added a blunter concern. He doubted the Americans could handle the population side of the work and feared incidents. The argument was settled by the enemy. On a night in July 1965, a force of about 85 Vietkong reinforced by a 13-man North Vietnamese sapper unit attacked the Daang air base from the south.

 They carried a 57 mm recoilless rifle, four 82mm mortars, grenades, and demolition charges. They penetrated the perimeter at a quarter 1 in the morning, destroyed three aircraft, damaged three more, and withdrew the way they had come. No enemy bodies were found. In the morning, the Marines found blood trails leading south. That raid ended the debate.

Within days, the marine tactical area of responsibility was extended south across the Kao River into some of the most densely populated ground in Southeast Asia, over a thousand people per square mile. The Marines now had the room they had asked for. What they did not yet have was a method.

 If you’re enjoying this story so far, consider subscribing. We’ve got plenty more forgotten war stories like this one coming. and let me know in the comments where are you watching from. I’d love to see how far this story has traveled. On 12th July, Marines operating near a cluster of six hamlets called Cam Ni took fire from one of them.

 They pulled back and called in air support. Patrolling continued through July. American intelligence classified Cami as a long-standing Vietkong stronghold, fortified and sympathetic to the communists since the French War. On 3 August 1965, Lieutenant Colonel Ver Ludwig commanding first battalion 9th Marines was ordered to search out the Vietkong in Cami and destroy them, their positions and their fortifications.

One company commander told his men to destroy any position, including huts, from which they took fire. By any conventional measure, the operation confirmed the intelligence. Company D went aboard amphibious tractors, three of which bogged down in the mud. The Marines crossed open Patty under small arms fire and found a village that had been prepared like defensive work.

Trench lines, tunnels, spider holes, hedge rows laced with mines and 267 punji stake traps and pits. They used rockets, grenades, and flamethrowers against firing positions and burned structures they could not otherwise clear. 51 huts were demolished along with 38 trenches, tunnels, and prepared positions.

 The Marines lost three killed and 27 wounded. The Vietkong withdrew, carrying their casualties with them. The Marines also killed a 10-year-old boy and wounded four villagers caught between them and the enemy. And there was a CBS news correspondent walking with them. Mley Safer had been in Daang looking for an operation to cover and a lieutenant invited him along.

 On the way in, Safer was told the force intended to level the place. His cameraman, Hathuk Kan, was the only man present who spoke both languages. When Marines prepared to fire a flamethrower into a shelter, K put his camera down, argued with them, and talked roughly a dozen civilians, including a family with a newborn, out of the hole.

 Safer’s report aired on 5 August. It showed an American rifleman setting fire to a thatched roof with a cigarette lighter. His narration reported 150 homes leveled in retaliation for a burst of gunfire and then made the point that mattered. To a Vietnamese peasant whose house represented a lifetime of labor on ancestral land, no presidential promise would establish that the Americans were on his side.

 The Marine Command considered the report incomplete, and with some justice, the fortifications, the fire, the casualties, and the enemy’s presence went largely unmentioned. But the institutional response tells you that the criticism landed. The morning after the broadcast, the president of the United States telephoned the president of CBS to say that his network had the previous evening defecated on the American flag.

Investigations were ordered into the correspondents loyalty and then into the possibility that he had bribed a Marine officer. Neither produced anything. What Cam Ni produced was a doctrine. In September 1965, American headquarters in Saigon issued new guidelines governing operations among civilians. Indiscriminate destruction of populated areas was explicitly prohibited.

 Where possible, units were to warn villagers with loudspeakers and leaflets before ground and air attacks. South Vietnamese troops were to accompany American units, both to search dwellings and to make plain that their own government had authorized the operation. 2 weeks after the broadcast, the Marines went back into Cami in force.

 This time with full advance warning to the villagers. They searched the entire complex, found no Vietkong, took no casualties, and built shelters for the homeless. The tactical lesson was that firepower could clear a hamlet. The strategic lesson was that clearing a hamlet was not the same as holding it, and that the manner of the clearing could cost more than the hamlet was worth.

 As one Vietnamese observer put it afterward, “The 10-year-olds who watched their village burn would be 15 when they picked up rifles for the Vietkong.” Out of that reckoning came one of the more revealing artifacts of the American War, a training and orientation film produced in 1966, made to explain to soldiers what kind of war they had entered.

 Sources identify a 1966 Army film of this type narrated by the actor Glenn Ford, then a commander in the Naval Reserve. The footage is unremarkable and therefore valuable. Patrols moving through Patty, medical teams working under canvas, Marines guarding a rice harvest, engineers pouring a floor for a village school. The narration is what startles.

 It does not describe a war of position at all. It begins by drawing a contrast with Korea. Korea, the film says, had a battle line. When the war went badly, the line pushed in. When it went well, the line moved out. And on the far side of that line lay enemy territory, where the cost of victory fell on towns that had to be accepted as an unavoidable tragedy of war. Vietnam is different.

There is rarely a conventional battle line. The enemy does not depend on holding terrain. He depends on the people. And so in the film’s formulation, whoever has the people wins the war. From that premise, the film draws conclusions that read strangely against the way the war is usually remembered.

 Commanders, it says, are obliged to consider the psychological as well as the military objective of every operation and to strike a balance between the force required to accomplish the mission and the necessity of inflicting as few civilian casualties as possible. It insists in the same breath that no man should hesitate to defend himself.

 And then it states the harder proposition plainly that death or injury to helpless civilians even when it is unavoidable works against us. Not immoral, not regretful, counterproductive. It describes the intangible weapons, compassion, goodwill, and notes without embarrassment that in the early phase of the war, the Vietkong had used them more skillfully than anyone else.

 It observes that as the American buildup loosened the Vietkong hold on the countryside, the enemy had turned increasingly to terror and murder to keep it. And it calls that the enemy’s greatest mistake. Then it turns the point around. To a villager, there might be little difference between calculated communist cruelty and fire that arrives from an American rifle or an American aircraft.

This was doctrine written down, distributed, and put on film. And this is the central mystery of the American war in the villages. The understanding was not missing. It was official. The question is what happened when men had to act on it. The answer began at Fubai in an argument about two square miles. The Marine Battalion holding the Fubai enclave was third battalion, fourth Marines under Lieutenant Colonel William W. Taylor.

 Its mission was to defend an airfield and more importantly the Army’s eighth radio research unit, a signals intercept facility that General West Morland wanted protected because it was one of the better means available for locating enemy units. South of the highway lay empty ridges rising toward the mountains and Laos, and the battalion pald aggressively into it.

North and east lay something harder. A semicircle of three villages, densely vegetated, holding about 10,000 people, mostly subsistence rice farmers with no electricity and no running water. The open ground between the airfield and those hamlets was a kilometer wide in places, and from the perimeter it was impossible to see into them.

 A mortar team could set up inside that vegetation and be within easy range of the aircraft. Each of those villages had a popular force platoon, 30 to 40 men, theoretically responsible for its defense. The popular forces were the bottom rung of the South Vietnamese military structure, paid half what a regular soldier received, given no benefits, drawn from men either under 20 or over 30.

 In assessing them in October 1965, Marine headquarters found their reliability questionable. In the Fubai villages, the reality was simpler. They rarely patrolled. Village officials hid at night. The Vietkong came in to collect taxes and distribute propaganda. The Marines area of responsibility was formally extended to include those villages on 21 June 1965 along with operational control of their militia platoon.

 The battalion’s agitant and civil affairs officer, First Lieutenant John J. Mullen had spent the preceding weeks preparing the ground exactly as the manuals recommended. Medical teams went into all three villages regularly, drawing more than 100 patients each time. There were surveys, meetings with village and hamlet chiefs, discussions of engineering projects, a visit to the American consulate in Hugh, and to a Buddhist hospital and orphanage.

 Mullen was deliberately looking for projects that would benefit Catholics and Buddhists alike. By mid July, Mullen concluded that the program was going nowhere. His patrols met no resistance. The militia still would not patrol. Officials still hid at night. The Vietkong were still taxing the villagers and the Marines were getting no intelligence at all.

 That last fact was the one that mattered because intelligence is the product a civil affairs program is supposed to generate. So Mullen called the village chiefs together and asked them why. Their answer, as he recorded it, was that they were grateful, that their villages were better off than they had ever been, and that none of their people could give information without fear of reprisal.

The militia was no match for the Vietkong and behaved accordingly. Mullen’s conclusion has the quality of something obvious only after somebody says it. The Marines had run their civic action program by the book and had neglected the one variable everything else depended on. Nobody would take a risk for a government that could not protect them at 3:00 in the morning.

 The village chiefs owned the daylight. The Vietkong owned the dark. Therefore, Marines had to be in the villages permanently. Mullen took it to the battalion executive officer, Major Cullen C. Zimmerman, who convened a meeting. The operations officer objected on grounds that were entirely reasonable.

 It would fragment the battalion strength and it would get men killed in isolated positions. Three options were discussed. Assign a rifle company to one village, rejected because it would gut the companies. Assign a company to all the villages, rejected because it would cost the battalion an entire maneuver element. or put something much smaller into each village and build it around the militia that was already there.

 Zimmerman’s model for the third option was not the Marine Corps’s own history in the Caribbean. It was the 19th century British Indian Army practice of brigading British units with native units, a method that increased the size of the force for a small investment of British troops and simultaneously raised the quality of the local ones.

 Combined with a popular force platoon, a single marine rifle squad would leave the Vietnamese unit intact and capable of standing on its own when the Americans left. Taylor approved. The plan went up through the regiment to Major General Lewis Walt and Lieutenant General Victor Kru, both of whom had served in the Banana Wars and needed no persuading.

 It moved too fast for a long approval process. On one August 1965, the unit went on the books as the joint action company. Command went to first lieutenant Paul RC, brought in from the third marines. E spoke Vietnamese to near fluency and had already worked counterinsurgency as an adviser with special forces. The Marines under him were handpicked.

 Zimmerman told company commanders to give him full squads of volunteers, but not their best men because he refused to hollow out the rifle companies. He read every service record and rejected some. What he ended up with were experienced sergeants and corporals who had led squads before. E trained them for about a week.

Population control, intelligence collection, the political and military structure of Vietnam, and local rules of behavior. He wanted every man to understand his place in a village before he walked into one. The first patrol went out on 3 August 1965, trucked 10 minutes from the base. By the 6th, squads were operating in all three villages.

 By 22 August, they were running night ambushes and night reconnaissance regularly. By midepptember, they were living in the villages, coming back to base one day a week. They built their own barracks out of bamboo, tin, and thatch alongside the militia men. X’s first significant decision was to take something away. Earlier Marines passing through had handed out candy to children and cigarettes to adults and paid inflated prices for food. E banned all of it.

 He wanted the Marines and the villagers on an equal footing, and he told his men to sit and talk with people instead by sign language if necessary. The reason was not sentimental. On one night patrol, a boy called out of the darkness asking for a cigarette. When none came, he informed the Marines that they were number 10, the worst.

 A child’s disappointment had just announced the position of a patrol to anyone listening. Within weeks, E reported, his men were no longer pestered and were being sold goods at Vietnamese prices. The second decision was population control. Without warning, at first light, Marines and militia would cordon a square kilometer of a hamlet and check the identity cards of every adult male, verifying that each man was registered with the district and known to the village chief.

 X-Men apologized for the inconvenience. The process took 2 to 3 hours. They also checked the markets. There was a legal limit of 12 lbs of rice per person per day. On one occasion, five women were caught buying £80. Investigation showed it was destined for an enemy unit in a neighboring district. The result arrived within a month.

 The Vietkong stopped coming into the villages to collect taxes, distribute propaganda, or recruit. They stopped because the knights were no longer theirs. By the end of the year, the concept had a permanent name. Joint was wrong. In American usage, it means multiple services, not multiple nations. So, the units became combined action companies.

Then that name had to go too because in Vietnamese, the initials formed an obscenity. One made funnier by the unit motto. So, they became combined action platoon. caps 14 Marines, a Navy corman and a popular force platoon of around 34 men with the Marine sergeant as platoon commander and the Vietnamese commander as his deputy. Five platoon at Fubai.

 By the end of 1965 in January 1966, General Walt authorized expansion to Daang. By July, there were 38. By the end of the year, 57. The combined platoon were only one part of what the Marines were attempting and it is worth understanding the other parts because they show both the ambition and the ceiling.

 The first was called Golden Fleece and it began with the rice harvest of autumn 1965. The idea was simple. A marine battalion would secure the patties while the farmers cut the crop so the villagers kept the grain and the Vietkong did not get their customary share. Marine staff estimated that in the 1965 season, the program denied the enemy over 500,000 pounds of rice.

 The most productive of these operations came a year later in September 1966 in Moduk district south of Kuangai City. General Huang Schwan Lamb told General Walt that for years the Vietkong had taken close to 90% of the Moduk harvest. Walt suggested that the Marine battalion already in the area, First Battalion, Seventh Marines, under Major Littleton WT Waller 2, simply stayed where it was.

The change of plan was made almost casually on the day an existing operation was due to end, and its very informality may have deceived the enemy. Two Vietkong battalions were in the area. The fighting stayed at the level of platoon and squads. Marine patrols and Vietnamese observation teams pushed further west into the hills than the enemy expected, spotted units moving toward the lowlands, and called artillery, naval gunfire, and air.

 One patrol reported what it took for 75 friendly troops in a place where no friendly troops should have been, checked by radio, and opened fire. On 21 September, the battalion attacked Van Ha, a hamlet the district chief said no government force had entered in four years. After bombardment, three companies went in against almost no resistance and found a logistics base and a grainery holding over 727 tons of rice.

 Waller told the district chief the Marines would hold the hamlet if the Vietnamese could move the grain. The chief produced more than 8,000 workers. In under 50 hours, they carried out the rice, the household effects of roughly 150 families, and the livestock. Over 700 civilians were resettled at the district town. Many said they had wanted to leave for years and had been prevented.

 Then the district chief asked Waller to destroy the village so it could never serve the enemy again, and the Marines did. 13,500 lb of explosives, 554 bunkers, 123 houses, 50 caves, 125 wells. The operation cost one Marine killed and 19 wounded, and claimed 240 enemy dead. The district chief estimated 7,000 tons of rice kept out of communist hands.

 When the battalion left, several thousand Vietnamese lined the streets of Moduk to see them off. The second program was called County Fair and it was an attempt to do surgery on the Vietkong’s political apparatus rather than its soldiers. Marines cordined a village at dawn. South Vietnamese troops and police searched it and moved the inhabitants to a collection point where officials took a census, issued identity cards, and interrogated the population while the villagers were fed, given medical care, and entertained with films, speeches, folk music, and drama.

The Americans stayed deliberately in the background. The point was to make the South Vietnamese government visible, not the United States Marine Corps. The best of them worked spectacularly. At Tonquit in April 1966, a marine battalion and an Arvin company sealed the hamlet while two Arvin companies swept it.

 The gorillas inside realized they were trapped and fought, 45 were killed, and 17 captured. The Marines in the blocking positions took no casualties at all. Across all of 1966, the Marines and South Vietnamese ran 88 of these operations. They screened more than 46,000 villagers, treated more than 20,000 of them medically, killed 192 enemy, and captured 262.

Do the arithmetic and the average is only about five enemies per operation. But those five were local guerillas and political cadre, the men who actually ran a hamlet at night. remove enough of them and communist authority in a district simply stops functioning. The Marines never got to find out whether that was true at scale.

 Walt wanted 10 county fairs a week. He never came close. By the end of 1966, the rate had fallen to about four a month for two reasons that would recur throughout this story. South Vietnamese officials at district level often failed to participate and marine battalions were being drawn away to a new battlefront in the north.

 While the Marines were learning, so was the enemy and so uncomfortably were the Marines learning about themselves. In the summer of 1966, Generals Krulock and Walt commissioned something no army enjoys commissioning, a survey of what its own men thought of the people they had come to help. The work went to a Navy chaplain, Lieutenant Commander Richard McGonagal, who also held a master’s degree in sociology.

 He sampled roughly 2% of the Marine Force in Vietnam, and a smaller sample of Vietnamese who worked closely with Americans in the first two weeks of September 1966. Only 43% of Marines said they liked the local population. Over 70% of the Vietnamese said they generally liked Americans, but 46% believed the Americans did not like them.

 There was one bright exception, and it was consistent among the Marines in combined action platoon and their popular force partners. The survey found what was described as an overwhelming mutual trust. McGonagal’s own summary of three years of this work was blunt. The name of the game in Vietnam is relationship. When a Marine could see an elderly Vietnamese woman as a full human being, he wrote, “That marine became more careful with firepower, better with refugees, and a better trainer of his counterparts. The stakes of failing that

test were demonstrated in the second half of 1966 by three criminal cases. In August, a Marine on patrol announced he intended to shoot a villager to flush out the Vietkong. Nobody believed him until he shot a farmer who was in the act of showing his identity card. The other men on the patrol reported it, and he was convicted of murder.

 In September, eight Marines raided a hamlet, killed five villagers, and raped a young woman. The same month, three others killed an elderly woman, burned her body, and shot an old man who had witnessed it. General Walt reported all three cases personally to General West Morland on 17 November and then wrote to his own commanders.

 He refused to accept a blanket indictment of leadership, but he identified where the focus had gone wrong, too much attention on operational problems, too little on training the young and inexperienced NCOs the core was relying on. And he set out the arithmetic of the war he believed he was fighting. one man through crime or wanting disregard of human dignity could undo in a few minutes the prolonged efforts of a reinforced battalion.

 That was the sentence, not a moral appeal, a statement about the exchange rate between a rifle squad’s behavior and a regiment’s work. Which brings us back to Bin Ya. In June 1966, General Walt was doing something he did habitually, asking American district advisers what they thought of Marine battalions in their areas.

 In Binson district in Kangai, the adviser was Major Richard Brawn. His answer was that the Marines would accomplish more working with the Vietnamese than hunting the Vietkong on their own. Walt asked him where he would put a combined platoon. Brun named a village 4 mi south of the Chulai airfield on a river the Vietkong used to move supplies into the mountains.

Government forces had been driven out 2 years earlier. A Vietkong platoon lived there permanently. Companies came in to rest and resupply. The district chief estimated that more than 750 men from that village alone had left to join the enemy. The recommendation had not been bronze idea, and that detail matters.

The district chief had proposed it because his police chief, an unusually capable man whose mother still lived in the village, had asked Americans if he was going to go in there. On 12th June 1966, a squad from Company C, First Battalion, 7th Marines, led by Corporal Robert A. BB, walked into Binga.

 Waiting for them was the police chief, Apt Pan Lamb, with 15 policemen and 18 militia men. Lamb persuaded BB that sleeping in the open hamlets was suicide and that they should fortify the abandoned villa instead. Then Lamb called the villagers together, told them the Americans and his men had come to stay, and asked for help.

 40 civilians turned out to build the fort. BB set the pattern on the first night. After working all day on the fortifications, he personally led a patrol into the dark. Years later, he described those first nights as the most frightened he had ever been in his life, and he was a combat veteran. The response from the other side came immediately, and it was precisely targeted.

 On the morning BB left Vietnam, a Vietkong assassination team entered the house of Chief Lamb’s mother and killed Lamb. At the end of June, Private First Class Larry Page was killed in an ambush on a night patrol. The villa became Fort Paige. BB’s successor, Sergeant Joseph Sullivan, pushed harder. Patrols and ambushes went out nightly, including into the hamlets north of the fort, where no government force had operated in years.

 On one of them, five Marines and three militia men set up on the riverbank. The Vietkong had watched them move in and tried to swing around behind, but the patrol leader had posted a militia man as rear security, and that man saw them crawling along the Patty dikes, and passed the word quietly.

 The patrol turned around and let the enemy close to 50 yards. It lasted 8 minutes, 21 enemy dead, including a company commander and a platoon leader. No friendly casualties. Through July and most of August, the platoon at Fort Paige fought over 70 engagements, an average of nearly 11 contacts a week. And in doing so, it demonstrated the thing that was hardest to demonstrate anywhere else in Vietnam, that at night, at close range, with rifles and grenades, Americans and Vietnamese militia together were better than the gorillas on the gorilla’s own

ground. They were also quietly doing something else. Bin Ya was marked VC on operational maps, but it was also marked out of bounds for harassment and interdiction fire because American troops were patrolling there. No air strike was ever called on Binga during the war. Once when the Marines called artillery on 30 Vietkong, a single round fell 300 yards short, destroyed a house, and killed two civilians.

 It was not the platoon’s error, but these men lived among those families, and it hit them personally. After that, rifles and grenades were what they used. By the end of August, they believed the village was theirs. Then came the night of 14th September, and the drizzle, and the seven militia men who went home to sleep, and the 140 men who crossed the river.

 Five Americans and their corman laid dead in the compound in the morning. Accounts of the Vietnamese losses differ. One authoritative telling puts the militia dead at 6. The offer to withdraw came the next day. Accounts also differ on who made it. Some record the regimental commander, Colonel Lawrence Snotty. Others the commanding general of the first marine division, Lel English, who is said to have observed that the platoon was too light for the job, too exposed, and overmatched from the start.

 Whoever it was, he was giving them a reasonable way out. One of the Marines explained afterward why they would not take it. The general was a good man, he said, and he was trying to give them an out, but they could not leave. What would they have said to the militia men after the way they had pushed them to fight the Vietkong? Not one of them wanted to go.

That afternoon, the villagers of Bingia held a funeral service for the Americans and the Vietnamese who had died together in the fort. And on the night of 16th September, the Vietkong came back, walking down the hamlet’s main street toward the marketplace, upright, apparently convinced there was nothing left to fear.

 They walked directly into a combined patrol coming the other way, led by Sullivan’s replacement, Sergeant James White. The Marines and militia recovered from the surprise first and opened fire. Within 10 minutes, the rest of the platoon had reinforced them. The enemy broke for the riverbank, leaving a rear guard.

 An old woman came out and pointed out where the rear guard was. The platoon destroyed it and shot up the wicker boats trying to cross. The villagers came down to the riverbanks to watch. One marine said afterward that there was so much light out there, you would have thought it was daytime. 10 known enemy dead, no marine or militia casualties.

 By January 1967, the Marines had numbers to put in front of Washington, and they were extraordinary. A Fleet Marine Force Pacific report found that the 22 villages with an active combined action platoon for 6 months or more averaged 60% on the Marine pacification scale, a rise of nearly 20 points since the Marines arrived in them.

 The report’s second finding was harder to argue with. The popular forces were widely regarded as the worst troops in South Vietnam with a desertion rate roughly four times that of the regular army. Between August and December 1966, over 39,000 of them deserted. About a quarter of the country’s entire popular force strength.

 In the same five months, among popular force soldiers serving in combined action platoon, there were no recorded desertions at all. The kill ratio for combined platoon was 14:1. For ordinary popular force units, 3:1. A Department of Defense assessment 2 years into the program reached a similar conclusion by a different route. Villages protected by a combined platoon scored 2.95 out of 5.

0 O on the Hamlet evaluation system against an average of 1.6 for all of IDcore and they improved roughly twice as fast as villages held by militia alone. The British counterinsurgency specialist Richard Clutterbuck noted something else. Casualties among these Marines were high but only about half those of the ordinary infantry battalions being lifted around the country by helicopter on large-scale operations.

 And there was the claim that Marine officers repeated for the rest of their lives of the villages protected by a combined action platoon. Not one reverted to Vietkong control. It is the single most cited statistic of the program and it deserves both respect and caution. It comes largely from marine sources. The criteria are not always clearly defined, and there is at least one documented instance of a combined platoon at Kesan Village being overrun by North Vietnamese regulars.

 Kruak’s summary was characteristically absolute. This idea, he said, had the greatest leverage of any concept to emerge from the war. Here, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. The Marines learned from the militia, and the militia learned volumes from the Marines. He believed it might be the key to the whole Vietnam War.

 If you are finding this account worth your time, subscribing helps us keep making documentaries. Now to the argument that decided everything. Victor Kruac was not an eccentric. He had been special assistant for counterinsurgency to the joint chiefs of staff before commanding Fleet Marine Force Pacific and his objection to American strategy was not moral but coldly practical.

Attrition, he argued, was Hanoi’s game. The communist aim was to bleed American forces in close quarters, fighting where American supporting arms counted for least, and by accumulating dead and wounded Americans over years, to erode the national will until the United States withdrew its support from Saigon.

A strategy that measured success in enemy bodies was therefore a strategy that accepted the enemy’s terms. In 1966, Kruak went around General West Morland and put his case to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamera. That same year, McNamera wrote a formulation that could have been lifted from Kruak’s own briefing.

 The large unit war, which the United States knew best how to fight, and where it had had its successes, was largely irrelevant to pacification for as long as pacification did not exist. Success in pacification, he wrote, depended on providing physical security, destroying the Vietkong apparatus, motivating the people to cooperate, and establishing responsive local government.

 In the summer of 1966, a meeting was arranged between Kruak and the president. Kruac described his plan for winning the war. Lynden Johnson, by Kruak’s own account, rose to his feet, put an arm around his shoulder, and propelled him firmly toward the door. West Morland’s counterargument was not stupid, and it was not merely bureaucratic.

 Pacification, he believed, was properly a South Vietnamese job, and he did not think he had the men. He could not put an American squad in every village and hamlet, he wrote, without fragmenting his forces and exposing them to defeat in detail. The arithmetic is worth pausing on because it is the crux. South Vietnam contained roughly 11,000 hamlets.

 A 15-man team in each would have required something on the order of 165,000 men, a very large fraction of American strength, but not an impossible one at the peak. What was impossible was not the manpower. It was the reallocation and the years it would have taken to show results. The rest of the army’s senior leadership was less measured.

 West Morland’s operations officer described the Marines as having come in, sat down, and done nothing. Counterinsurgency of the deliberate mild sort. The commander of the first cavalry division said he was absolutely disgusted with them, that he had done everything he could to drag them out and make them fight, and that they would not play.

 In the end, the argument was settled, the way such arguments usually are, by a fourth star and a president’s confidence. The Marines fell in line. The consequences arrived quickly and physically. Intelligence identified a major North Vietnamese buildup along the demilitarized zone, and West Morland determined that this was where the American effort in First Corps belonged.

Marine battalions went north. The county fair program withered for want of troops, and the core that had argued for small units living among the people was directed to build a barrier along the DMZ, clearing a 600 m strip of vegetation with Marines and CBS, taking casualties in the process at a cost of over 750,000 mandays and 114,000 equipment hours before the project was abandoned as too expensive in lives to complete.

 At Binia, the story ended more gently and more instructively. By March 1967, the enemy had stopped seeking contact with the combined platoon. Captured intelligence indicated that at a conference of communist political cadre in January, the Binia unit had been denounced more bitterly than any other American or South Vietnamese program in the district because its patrols had closed the river, blocked a route to Chuli, and made rice collection, taxation, and recruiting nearly impossible.

 In December 1966, the villagers had held a fair and invited the Marines, not as guests, but as participants. By October 1967, district and Marine headquarters agreed the job was finished. The village was pacified, and the Marines were needed elsewhere. American army units and Korean Marines moved into the area. The Marines went north toward the DMZ.

 A captain at district headquarters recorded his opinion that security in the area did not improve because the army was too far up in the hills and the Koreans were behind a defensive barrier. By 1971, the war had left Bin Gia entirely. The Americans were gone, the guerillas were gone and the fort had collapsed back into sand and rain.

 The village was still there. The combined action program kept expanding even as the strategy around it moved elsewhere. By the end of 1968, there were 114 platoon providing security for about 400,000 people, roughly 15% of the population of First Corps. At its peak in January 1970, four combined action groups fielded some 2,000 Marines, two Navy officers, and 126 cormen, working alongside about 3,000 Vietnamese militia men.

 In 1969 alone, the platoon ran 149,000 patrols day and night. Over 5 years, they operated in more than 800 hamlets containing perhaps half a million people. The bill for that was paid in a very specific coin. Over the life of the program, in the neighborhood of 500 to 540 CAP Marines were killed in action. The surviving documentation lists 488 names, and historians believe some were never recorded because their platoon were still administratively carried by infantry battalions.

 Those same platoon accounted for more than 4,900 enemy dead. Almost all of it with rifles and grenades. Almost none of it with the supporting arms that defined the American war everywhere else. The squad at Bengia paid an especially heavy share. The Marine officer who later wrote its history and who served in a combined platoon himself recorded that of the men who fought there over roughly 16 months, about half were killed, and more than 60% of the Marines who served in these platoon extended their tours to stay in them. The program was formally

deactivated as a separate command on 21 September 1970 as the American withdrawal accelerated. Its last form was mobile. By 1970, the platoon no longer lived in fixed village compounds because the fixed compounds had become targets. A change that reduced casualties and cost the program the very thing that had made it work, permanent presence.

 Even West Morland in his memoirs called the combined action program one of the more ingenious innovations developed in South Vietnam. General Walt went further. Of all the innovations of the war, he wrote, none was as successful, as lasting in effect, or as useful for the future. Not every veteran of the program agrees. One former Cap Marine, who later became an officer, wrote that he suspected the truth was harsher, that where combined action seemed to work, it had not really been needed, and where it was needed, it could never have worked. That objection

deserves to stand. The platoon were scattered. They were never numerous enough to change a province, let alone a country. They depended on individual quality. Handpicked sergeants, a police chief willing to die for his village, an adviser honest enough to tell a general that his battalions were being used wrongly.

 Programs built on exceptional people do not scale. And the historians who have studied the evidence most carefully generally conclude that civic action had genuine promise, that a wider adoption would have made the war different, and that whether it would have changed the outcome remains a matter of speculation.