What Viet Cong POWs Said About Fighting American Soldiers

Between 1964 and 1968, American interrogators sat down with over 2,400  Viet Cong prisoners and defectors in dimly lit interrogation rooms across South Vietnam. They asked them everything. What scared them? What tactics worked? How did they think the war would end? The answers filled 62,000 pages of testimony.

 The US military had the intelligence goldmine they’d been searching for. But here’s what nobody expected. From main force regulars  to village guerrillas, from captured PAVN soldiers to Chieu Hoi defectors who’d switched sides, they all said variations  of the same thing.

 And what they revealed would prove the US command was fighting the wrong war entirely. The story starts in a French colonial villa at 176 Rue Pasteur in Saigon with a simple  question from Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. What makes the Viet Cong tick? He turned to the RAND Corporation, the think tank that had helped win the Cold  War, and commissioned what would become the largest intelligence gathering operation of the Vietnam War.

The Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project, roughly 40 Vietnamese interviewers, mostly University of Saigon faculty, conducted one-on-one sessions in private  rooms. They offered cigarettes and coffee. The interviews were informal, conducted entirely in Vietnamese. The process was painstaking.

 Answers were transcribed in Vietnamese, written up in French by translators  working through the night, then translated into English for shipment to RAND headquarters  in Santa Monica, California. But that was just one stream of intelligence. MACV’s Combined Document Exploitation Center in a converted  warehouse in downtown Saigon was processing millions of pages of captured documents and conducting over 20,000 prisoner interrogations.

By 1968, American intelligence had access to more enemy testimony than any army had ever gathered in modern warfare. Stacks of interview transcripts lined the walls of secure facilities from Saigon to the Pentagon. And across all those thousands of interviews, from the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta to the mountain jungles of the Central Highlands, patterns started to emerge.

The first pattern was impossible to miss. One word appeared in interview after interview after interview. Aircraft. A main force platoon leader, a party member, told his RAND interviewer  something that would be echoed hundreds of times in the months that followed. “I would say that the GVN is winning, and the factor  that contributed to this victory is the presence of airplanes in the south.

 Nothing is more effective in destroying the morale of the men than bombs.” The quote appeared in a February 1966 RAND report  titled Some Findings of the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study. But it wasn’t just any  aircraft. It was the B-52 Stratofortress. Arc Light strikes arrived without warning from 30,000 ft, beyond the range of human hearing. No engine noise.

 No incoming  whistle. Bunker complexes built 3 to 6 m underground simply  evaporated in massive explosions that shook the earth for miles. A VC liaison agent  from War Zone D described it in his interrogation. The B-52s  were the most dangerous of weapons and their destructive power was frightening.

More devastating than any other weapons used so far. Some refugees in villages near strike zones thought they’d been hit by missiles. They had no idea what had happened until the ground erupted beneath them in walls of fire and debris. A captured military region seven annual report taken during Operation Silver City 2 in March 1966 by the 173rd Airborne Brigade used the enemy’s own words.

 It noted, “Some evidence of reluctance  of performing missions for fear of B-52 aircraft.” But the most vivid account came from inside the leadership itself. Truong Nhu Tang was the National Liberation Front’s  Minister of Justice. He survived multiple Arc Light strikes in the Cambodian sanctuaries  where the communist leadership hid.

In his memoir published in 1985, years after the war ended, he described  what it felt like. “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. The terror was complete. One lost control of bodily functions as the mind screamed incomprehensible orders to get out.

” He recalled a visiting Soviet delegation at COSVN headquarters whose members emerged from a strike with uncontrollable trembling and wet pants. Even hardened communist officials  from Moscow had never experienced anything like American strategic bombing. The Americans had a terror weapon and it worked.

 But when the testimony turned to American infantry soldiers on the ground, something unexpected emerged. VC cadres told their soldiers before battle that Americans were soft mercenaries who would panic and retreat under fire. They were told the enemy had no stomach for real combat. Combat changed those views completely. The RAND report  from February 1966 summarized what prisoners who’d actually engaged US troops in firefights said.

The researchers noted a clear pattern. VC soldiers who had been in contact with US troops noted that contrary to what they had been told, the US soldiers were more aggressive than ARVN, less likely to pull out when caught in a tight place, and in possession of great firepower. Unlike ARVN, US patrols  did not repeatedly follow the same routes, and were therefore more difficult to ambush.

The Ia Drang Valley  in November 1965 became the testing ground for a new tactical  doctrine. Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Hu Anh commanded the PAVN  33rd Regiment that clashed with the US 1st Cavalry Division in the first major battle between American and North Vietnamese forces. After taking heavy casualties from American artillery  and air strikes, he gave his soldiers new instructions.

“Move inside the column, grab them by the belt, and thus avoid casualties from the artillery and air. Hug the Americans so close  they can’t call in their massive firepower without killing their own men, close to within 50 m.” This became known as the belt buckle tactic. Prisoners taken at Landing Zone Albany on November 17th confirmed this was now official doctrine across PAVN units throughout the  Central Highlands.

But in their interrogations, they identified other American weaknesses, too. American units announced their movements with loud helicopters  and heavy equipment. Their patrols, while less predictable than ARVN, still followed detectable patterns. Their reliance  on technology made them easier to track.

And the one-year rotation policy meant US  units were perpetually filled with inexperienced soldiers who didn’t know the terrain or the enemy’s methods. The Viet Cong took careful notes, and they  adapted their tactics accordingly. Duong Van Mai was the daughter of an official in the South  Vietnamese government.

 In 1964, she went to work for the RAND  Corporation in Saigon as an interviewer for the Viet Cong Motivation and  Morale Project. Years later, she recalled her first interview in Ken Burns’ documentary  series The Vietnam War. Many people, including my own, had left family members behind. Um there was a lot of melancholy, rage, anger, bitterness, sadness, the whole gamut of emotions.

 And out of that, people were still trying to rebuild their lives, their shattered lives. Um so I just remember growing up with with an awareness of how much was at stake here, that because we had lost so much and we were trying to rebuild, I was watching my parents work 12 to 14-hour days almost every day of the year and it in their grocery store.

 And that experience was very similar to what everybody else was undergoing at the same time. And we also, for many of us, had to worry about the relatives we had left behind. So, my parents were also sending money back as early as they possibly could. And there was this sense that we were still tied to Vietnam even though we’d been cut off from it as well.

And I mean, what sort of connection, what brought you  together with the members, the relatives that were back in Vietnam? But all of that, the fear of B-52s, the respect for American infantry, the tactical adaptations, none of it was the most important finding buried in those 62,000 pages of testimony.

The first preliminary report published in March 1965 and authored  by researchers John Donnell, Guy Pauker, and Joseph Zasloff was based on just 145 interviews conducted in the final months of 1964. It contained a single sentence that would prove prophetic. Most interviewees believed the war  would last a long time and would end not in a VC victory, but in a gradual exhaustion of the enemy.

A German-Jewish refugee named Konrad Kellen had interviewed Wehrmacht POWs in World War II. In late  1966, RAND brought him in to review the Vietnam data with fresh eyes. He reread  roughly 1,000 interview transcripts over several months. His conclusion, published in reports dated 1969 and 1970, was the opposite of what project  leader Leon Gouré had been telling the Pentagon.

Most VC and NVA soldiers seem to expect an ultimate win, are not discouraged by US weapons  superiority, and appear determined to fight on indefinitely. In short, enemy morale is high, chances of rooting out the insurgency by force look slim, and areas of compromise by negotiation appear narrow. Kellen highlighted one interview that haunted him.

 A captured VC captain was asked if the Viet Cong could win the  war. He said, “No.” Then he was asked if the United States could win. Also, “No.” Kellen wrote in his analysis, he did not think in terms of winning or losing at all. An enemy indifferent to the concept of victory cannot be defeated by attrition. You can’t break the will  of someone who’s defined the conflict in terms of endurance rather than triumph.

But Gouré’s interpretation, which emphasized declining  enemy morale and the effectiveness of American bombing, was what McNamara and President Johnson wanted to hear. It supported the strategy they’d already committed to, and it drove escalation. US troop levels climbed from 184,000 in 1965 to 536,000  by 1968.

Arc Light sorties climbed from 450 a month in 1966 to  1,800 a month during the Tet Offensive in early 1968. Kellen was gradually removed from briefing senior leadership. His reports were classified and filed away in Pentagon archives.  For 3 more years, American strategy was based on reading the same data through Gore’s optimistic  lens, searching for proof that more bombing, more troops, and more attrition would break the enemy.

 The prisoners  had told their captors exactly how the war would end. Their captors chose not to believe them, but some of the testimony did reach field commanders and shaped tactical operations. POW reports of base area locations fed directly into Arc Light targeting. The first tactical B-52  strikes against the Chu Pong Massif on November 16th, 1965 came from prisoner intelligence  gathered at Ia Drang just days before.

The Phoenix Program,  despite its controversial reputation in later years, depended primarily  on prisoner interrogation and Chieu Hoi rallier debriefs to map the Viet Cong infrastructure. It wasn’t primarily an assassination  program as critics claimed. It was an intelligence operation that identified enemy cadres through painstaking interviews with defectors.

 Between 1963 and 1973, the Chieu Hoi program claimed 159,000 defectors who came  over to the South Vietnamese government’s side. Psychological warfare  leaflets dropped by aircraft over enemy controlled areas were drafted around the specific vulnerabilities prisoners  themselves had identified in their interrogations.

Fear of B-52s, malaria and chronic food shortages, North-South  tensions within communist units, the Confucian fear of dying far from home in an unmarked grave. The intelligence worked when it was used tactically. It was the strategic interpretation at the highest levels  that failed. The Viet Cong and Pathet soldiers who sat across  wooden tables from American funded interviewers in prisons and interrogation centers between 1964 and 1969 did not describe a war the United  States was winning.

They described an enemy who feared American firepower viscerally, especially the invisible death that fell from B-52s  at 30,000 ft. They respected American infantry grudgingly, acknowledging that US soldiers were more aggressive and less predictable than ARVN  troops. They identified American tactical predictability clearly, noting the patterns in patrol routes, the noise of helicopters, and the constant turnover of inexperienced troops.

And they expected, with an indifference that RAND analysts called chilling, to simply outlast the Americans, not to defeat them in battle, but to endure until the political cost became unbearable. The most powerful finding in all those interviews wasn’t about military tactics or weapon systems. It was about time and will.

Not in a VC victory, but in a gradual exhaustion of the enemy. That sentence appeared  in the very first RAND report in March 1965. At the exact moment American escalation was beginning and Lyndon Johnson was committing the first combat  troops to South Vietnam, the US command read those 62,000 pages for the next 4 years  as the war expanded across Southeast Asia.

 Pentagon analysts poured over the transcripts. MACV intelligence officers filed  reports based on POW testimony. American leadership chose, until far too late, to read the evidence through the lens they wanted, rather than the lens the enemy was providing. The prisoners had told their captors how the war would end, on April 30th, 1975, exactly one decade after those first interviews.

 North Vietnamese  tanks rolled through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. Their captors did not believe them.