A thought to start this week’s note, from conversations with several of you.

We saw examples in Vietnam, as we saw in Iraq, that we see in Afghanistan, and that we will see in other poor, weakened, troubled and vulnerable states, of the success of village-based collaborations between the population and military/security forces/peacekeepers to create sustainable peace and security that enables the locale to turn its attention to providing itself the basic human needs and build on that with governance, clean water and power, schools, commerce, etc.  

 

The circumstances that permit and enable this bit of bottom-up progress are hard to scale, I believe, to generate consistent and repeatable successes across a conflict, in part because the combination of phenomenon is so different from valley to valley, and the experience and ability to apply thoughtfulness in the military is so inconsistent from unit to unit.  For every COL Chris Kolenda’ success, there are an equal number of examples where the combination of circumstances and approach may not have been sufficient to enable success.

How do you incorporate effective observation and situational awareness, relationship-building, empathy and consideration, thoughtfulness, and the like into the young military men commanding squads, platoons and companies?  This is the critical factor, I believe, that determines our success or failure with the population in each of these small areas that are the basic and critical building blocks of enabling peacefulness and enough stability.

 

I’ll be very interested in your views and comments. 

 

One of you sent me the following article:

“Reflections on the Vietnam War”, a 2006 speech by Dr. Lewis Sorley, who graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1956. His Army service included leadership of tank and armored cavalry units in Germany, Vietnam, and the U.S. In Vietnam, he was the Executive Officer, 1st Battalion, 69th Armor, 25th Infantry Division. He retired from the Army a lieutenant colonel, and received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Sorley is the author of several books, including Arms Transfers Under Nixon, Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and the Army of his Times, and the acclaimed, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam—a work which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. One of the most esteemed historians of the Vietnam War, Dr. Sorley addressed the Ninth Annual Conference on November 10, 2006. The following is a transcript of that presentation.

“I am very pleased to be here and to, in a very short time, say a few words about the war in Vietnam. The Vietnam War was one of the longest and most complex wars our country has ever taken part in, so you will understand that what I am going to say is highly selective, but I hope will open up some aspects of the war that you may want to talk about. I would like to say something about the nature of the war, about the conduct of the war, about the outcome of the war, and about the people who fought the war.

First of all, one of the controversies you have heard over the years has to do with the nature of the war, with some commentators arguing that it was essentially a guerrilla war, and others disagreeing, saying that it was a conventional war. I think that, in many ways, this is a false dilemma. Because the fact is that, in some times and in some places, it was one, and in other places and other times, it was the other. Sometimes, in the same place, and in the same time, it was both. You talk to people who served in Vietnam, you get a wide range of views as to the nature of the fighting they were engaged in, and the enemy they were engaged in fighting, and that will be because some were engaged in fighting in one province, some up in the north near the demilitarized zone, where the nature of the war was, let us say, more conventional, and others who might have found themselves in the Mekong Delta, where for most of the time the war was more of a guerrilla-type war. Then, some who served in the early period will have one experience, while some who came later will have had a different experience—maybe in the very same province or provinces. And so, what you have really is a patchwork of experiences, all of which are a part of the whole. But if you try to reason from an individual experience at one time and in one place, you will only get one piece of that whole.

The conduct of the war is probably the most interesting aspect of it. It’s interesting to think of the war in terms of segments. I have used for analytical purposes four segments (involving the U.S. experience in the war) starting with 1960. You can pick different starting points, but for those of us who served in Vietnam, we each received a medal from the government of the Republic of Vietnam—the South Vietnamese—and on the ribbon of that medal, there is a little metal scroll. It has the opening date—1960—then a little dash, and then it is blank after that. I presume the intention was, at some point, to fill in the last date, but unfortunately by the time that date came, there was no longer a South Vietnam, for reasons which you know and on which I will comment in a bit. I took the date 1960, the date that they chose, as a reasonable starting point for the American involvement, even though we had people there in various roles before that. I think it’s useful to look at the period of 1960-1965 as the period of primarily advisory effort of Americans in Vietnam, although we did do other things during that period, to include helping the South Vietnamese improve communications, and with intelligence and logistics. By the way, the advisory effort that we made during that period was a very difficult one for the American armed forces, particularly for the U.S. Army, because the people who were sent there as advisors, primarily senior non-commissioned officers and junior officers, were drawn from the existing units. We had no separate corps to fill that role, so we pulled those people out of their units, which meant that less experienced people had to step in to fill those jobs, and others would fill in behind them. This extended advisory period in Vietnam took something of a toll on our existing units. So let us state that the advisory period went from 1960 to 1965. I pick that date 1965 because at that point President Lyndon Johnson decided to commit ground forces to Vietnam, a major change in the nature of our involvement, and in the nature of the conduct of the war.

In the spring of 1965, some Marine units went in and, in July of ’65, major American ground forces were sent in to Vietnam. The next period could be called the “buildup of the American involvement in Vietnam.” This is combat involvement on the ground, side by side with the South Vietnamese and, as time went on, with certain forces from other nations as well, primarily those from the Republic of Korea. This buildup continued from the summer of ’65 through when it was capped early in 1969. It eventually resulted in our fielding 543,400 Americans on the ground in Vietnam at the peak—over one-half million people on the ground helping to fight the war. That was the period of the buildup. I end that period at Tet of 1968, because that event was a watershed in many ways, including a change in command on the part of American forces there from General Westmoreland, who had commanded from June of 1964 until June of 1968, to General Creighton Abrams, who commanded from 1968 until 1972. So from ’68 through ’73, that is the period of American withdrawal, and handing over more and more responsibility for the conduct of the war to the South Vietnamese themselves, who of course had the sole responsibility before we had become involved, so it was a change back to the earlier situation, except by that time they had a lot more combat wherewithal, and in some cases a lot more combat experience. We are out of there at the end of March 1973, pursuant to the Paris Accords, as they were called, which were a so-called peace agreement, theoretically ending the war. Of course no such thing happened, because the North Vietnamese violated the accords from the very first day, and meanwhile we withdrew as we had said we would.

So then you have the final period, from 1973 through ’75, when on the 30th of April of that year Saigon fell, which was the end of the war for the South Vietnamese, and North Vietnam, as they had always sought to do, had unified the country by force under their communist domination.

Let me go back and say a little bit about how those various periods were conducted, as they were quite different. In the earlier period, when General Westmoreland took command and we began to deploy the large numbers of forces which I described, his approach to the war was to conduct what he called a “war of attrition,” and to conduct operations in pursuit of that strategy that were characterized primarily as search and destroy operations. What this meant was the measure of merit in this period of the war was body count, as the objective of a war of attrition was to kill as many of the enemy as possible. The theory was that if you killed enough of the enemy they would lose heart, cease their aggression against South Vietnam, and therefore our objectives would be accomplished, and our objective from the beginning to the end was to allow South Vietnam to be able to sustain and maintain itself as an independent non-communist government, free of domination from the north. During this period of the war of attrition, as I mentioned, the buildup continued, and the use of these forces, larger and larger American forces, was primarily to conduct large-scale multi-battalion and sometimes multi-division operations primarily in the heavily jungled areas adjacent to South Vietnam’s extended western border with Laos and Cambodia. And one of the major problems of this period was finding an elusive enemy, because we had said that, politically, we had put the constraint on ourselves that we would not cross those western borders. So if the enemy decided or desired to disengage, they had a relatively simple mechanism for doing that, which was simply to move to the west across the borders, where they were off-limits and out of reach of our forces and those of the South Vietnamese.

During this same period, the South Vietnamese forces were relegated to somewhat of a secondary mission in support of what was called pacification, and I am sorry to say given what were rather inferior weapons, largely castoff World War II American weapons. Those were great weapons in World War II, but they were not the best weapons in the world by the time we are talking about now. Furthermore, if any of you ever lugged a BAR, and you looked at the average Vietnamese person of rather slight stature, and think of them trying to lug a BAR through the jungle, that’s not the easiest task in the world. Meanwhile American forces were getting the best first-line weaponry (which included the M-16 rifle) and by the way, so were the enemy forces, which in 1965 began to be armed with the best of current ChiCom and Soviet-bloc weaponry, such as the famous AK-47. Unfortunately it was not until about three years later that the South Vietnamese began to get comparable weaponry. So if you hear people criticize the South Vietnamese forces during these early years, I think it is only fair to bear in mind that they had inferior weaponry, not only to what the American forces had, but inferior to what the enemy forces had. And by the way, Americans were also hogging most of what we might call combat wherewithal, I am talking about close air support, B-52 bomber raids, intra-theater troop lift, helicopter gunship support, all things which are combat multipliers, and which American forces had in abundance, but the South Vietnamese very little.

How did this work out during this period? I would have to say that the approach of General Westmoreland was highly successful in its own terms, which means that large casualties were inflicted on the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong—horrifying numbers, really—but the intended and desired and anticipated outcome did not result. They did not give up their aggression against the south, they simply sent more and more forces south, and of course many of them were slaughtered too, but yet more would come to take their place. Meanwhile it’s only fair to say that two more important missions did not get the attention that conduct of the ground war was getting. To wit, the South Vietnamese were not trained, counseled, advised, and improved as they might have been, both because of the secondary mission and because they did not get the first-line weaponry that other forces were getting. And another extremely important mission, which was conduct of the pacification program in the villages and the hamlets of South Vietnam, was neglected. The importance of that was that the communists had in place and had had in place for a long period of time in these villages and hamlets a covert infrastructure that was through terrorism and coercion keeping the South Vietnamese people, the populace in the rural parts of Vietnam under their domination. Until you came in and rooted out this infrastructure and neutralized it, the people could not be free no matter what happened out in the deep jungle.

The Tet Offensive of 1968, which began at the end of January and lasted throughout February was a huge event, a watershed event, I think it is fair to say, in the history of the war. In part because in the months preceding that Lyndon Johnson, General Westmoreland, Secretary Rusk, and others had been saying that the war was proceeding extremely well. And then, people across the country saw on their television screens this offensive in which all of a sudden, in most of the major cities and towns of Vietnam, here came enemy uprisings that were completely unanticipated, at least by the people at home. There was an argument as to whether they were anticipated by the forces in the field. A series of cataclysmic and dramatic events followed from that, including Lyndon Johnson’s announcement that he would not be seeking reelection and his decision to begin a partial bombing halt in North Vietnam.

Soon after that the command changed in Vietnam. General Creighton Abrams replaced William Westmoreland. Interestingly enough they were 1936 classmates at West Point, Westmoreland an artilleryman and Abrams a tanker, and a horse cavalryman before that who had been a great hero in World War II when he commanded a tank battalion that had broken through the German encirclement to relieve the 101st Airborne Division at Bastogne. Abrams had a different view of the nature of the war, and that view led him to prosecute it in a different way. He saw the war as “one war,” as he described it, along with his two excellent colleagues, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and William Colby, who had come out from the Central Intelligence Agency to be in charge of support for the pacification program. They all described it as “one war,” which meant a continuation of the military fighting, as had been the case previously, but much revised. In equal measure with fighting, there was emphasis on pacification and rooting out the infrastructure, which I described, and upgrading the South Vietnamese armed forces so they became more capable of undertaking a major responsibility for defense of their country. These things were enhanced by now finally giving the South Vietnamese first-line equipment, giving them better training, and especially incorporating into the armed forces and giving emphasis to territorial forces. Territorial forces were what were called Regional Forces and Popular Forces, and they remained at the province and district level, which meant that they were basically defending their homeland and families. They were very strongly motivated by that, and as they were given upgraded equipment and training they became a very important part of the South Vietnamese ability to defend themselves.

The changed tactics were also very important and need to be mentioned. General Fred Weyand, who was a very close associate of Abrams, said, “The tactics changed within 15 minutes of Abrams taking command.” The way in which they changed was from emphasis on large operations and in the deep jungle a change to an emphasis on small unit operations, and for those operations to be positioned more in between the enemy and the people, because Abrams recognized that this was a war for the control of people, and if you positioned yourself so that the enemy had to come to and through you to get to the people, first of all, if they came, the problem of finding them, which had plagued us in the earlier years was much less, and secondly, if they engaged you, you had the opportunity to deal with them. If they couldn’t get through, then the people in the village and the hamlet, if you got the infrastructure out, would be increasingly free. That was the nature of the war in that second period. And, by the way, things went extremely well, so much so that I was emboldened in A Better War to say that the war was won. The fighting hadn’t ended, but the war was won and the reason it was won was because the South Vietnamese had achieved the ability to maintain their independence and freedom so long as we kept the commitments that we had made to them.

We come up to January of 1973, the Paris Accords the supposed peace treaty that had been agreed to in Paris, then pursuant to that agreement, we began to withdraw our forces. They were all out by the end of March of 1973. Before that, in the spring of 1972, the enemy had mounted a major conventional invasion of the south, across the so-called demilitarized zone in the north, and through two places in the western borders I had mentioned before, and a very fierce battle had ensued that lasted several months, but the South Vietnamese prevailed. Our ground forces were mostly gone by that time and did not play any part in the battle, although our air and naval forces did. With support from them, the South Vietnamese were able to prevail and throw back that invasion of a force totaling the equivalent of about 20 divisions. It was a very serious battle.

Some people criticized the South Vietnamese, saying they could not have prevailed except for American air support. That is a rather strange criticism, because we had at that time hundreds of thousands of troops in Europe to help the European allies in the very same manner, should they need it, and we had about 50,000 troops in Korea to help the South Koreans in the very same manner, should they need it, and nobody was criticizing them for not being able to defend themselves without American help. But in Vietnam, I think that criticism was unfairly leveled. By the way, General Abrams rose to the occasion, saying, “I doubt that the fabric of this thing could have been held together without American air power, but, if the South Vietnamese had not stood and fought as they did, ten times the air power would not have allowed us to prevail.”

In January, 1972, rather late in our involvement, just before the Easter Offensive, one of the famous people of the war was a man named John Paul Vann, who was an Army officer early in the war, and went back and rose to a very senior position in the pacification program and was very highly regarded, especially by Gen. Abrams. Vann said in January of ‘72, “We are now at the lowest level of fighting the war has ever seen. Today there is an air of prosperity throughout the rural areas of Vietnam, and it cannot be denied. Today the roads are open and the bridges are up, and you run much greater risk traveling any road in Vietnam today from the scurrying, bustling, hustling Hondas and Lambrettas than you do from the VC.”

The end of the war in Vietnam is a very sad case, and it is in part because—and there is no other way to describe it—we wound up abandoning the South Vietnamese. I told you about the crucial conditionals. We had promised the South Vietnamese that if there was renewed fighting, if the North Vietnamese violated the Paris Accords, we would reintroduce combat forces to punish those violations—air and sea power. Secondly, if there were renewed fighting, we would replace—as the Paris Accords permitted—we would replace major combat system losses on a one for one basis; that means artillery pieces, tanks, and aircraft. And we said we would maintain robust material support for the South Vietnamese for the indefinite future. In a meeting at the Western White House, President Thieu of South Vietnam and President Nixon had mentioned the figure of about $1 billion. When it came to crunch time, I am sorry to say, we defaulted on all three commitments. Meanwhile the North Vietnamese are getting much increased support from their patrons, the Soviet Union and China. As Tom Polgar, the last CIA station chief, said in his last brief message, “Ultimate outcome hardly in doubt, because South Vietnam cannot survive without U.S. military aid as long as North Vietnam’s war-making capacity is unimpaired and supported by Soviet Union and China.” So that is basically the end of that story.

I have only a little time left, but I want to say a little something about two groups of people who fought in the war. First, I want to talk about the American veterans of the war in Vietnam. We have been hearing for a number of years now about the Greatest Generation as christened by Tom Brokaw, those who fought in World War II. That was a wonderful generation, and I am extremely proud of them, and what I have to say in no way denigrates that generation. My father was a part of that generation. My uncle was a part of that generation. But if I last long enough, I am going to try to write another book, the title of which might be Also Great, and the subtitle would read The Generation That Fought the Vietnam War, because I think they are a marvelous generation which has not gotten the credit they deserve. For example, very few people know, as B.G. Burkett points out in his wonderful book, Stolen Valor, two-thirds of Vietnam veterans volunteered for their service. He said, compare that to the 33% of World War II veterans; in other words, the percentages are just the opposite. I doubt that many people know that.

Not too long after the Vietnam War was over, the Veterans Administration got the Harris polling company to poll those who had served in Vietnam to ask them a number of questions, and the results were very interesting. Ninety-one percent told the pollsters they were glad they had served. Seventy-four percent said they had enjoyed their time in service. And most impressive of all, two out of three said they would serve again, even knowing the outcome of the war. Those are great people and we have every reason to be proud of them and grateful to them. And as I am sure you have heard, the only thing that was missing was when they returned from their service very few people said, “Thank you for your service, and welcome home,” which every veteran, of course, wants to hear.

The last thing I want to say to you is about the Vietnamese who fought that war. They were very heroic people who fought for a long period of time under a number of severe handicaps which I described earlier but, when they got the wherewithal to do the job, did it very well until we essentially pulled the plug on them monetarily and logistically, and they no longer had the wherewithal to go ahead. Many of them – no one knows exactly how many, fled their country to avoid living under communist domination. You have heard them described as the “boat people.” Many of them perished in the South China Sea trying to escape; storms overturned their boats, pirates attacked and robbed them, but many of them made it to the United States to refugee camps and were sponsored by church groups and in some cases by their former advisors who were compassionate toward them. There are now about one million former Vietnamese in this country, spread out over a number of places around the country.

I would like to end with two vignettes. There is a place very near where we are now, in Northern Virginia, that is called the Eden Center. It is about a city block, and hollow in the middle. Around the outside of it, there are all Vietnamese establishments—jewelry stores, a grocery store, restaurants of all kinds, a music store, a bookstore. In the hollow middle, besides parking, there are two tall flagpoles, one of which flies the American flag, and right next to it is the flag of South Vietnam, still flying proudly.

I was there a few years ago on the 30th of April—the date of the fall of Saigon, and a date that is commemorated, but not celebrated, by many Americans and their Vietnamese friends. I met a person there who had been a captain with the Regional Forces at a place called Dak Sut. He was with his wife, who had also been a captain. Their daughter had graduated from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, and she was now an Air Force captain. She was getting her PhD at a college in Tennessee, after which she was going to teach at the Air Force Academy. They were very proud of her, and I was very proud of them.
My closest Vietnamese friend is a man by the name of Ha Mai Viet. Viet and I were captains in the armor officer advance course in 1961-62. He rose to be a colonel, and was the G-3 to General Truong, considered by most Americans, including General Abrams, to be the best fighting general the Vietnamese fielded during the war, and Viet was a wonderfully fine staff officer for him, having commanded himself and being a province chief in Quang Tri, one of the toughest provinces to deal with. I lost track of him when the collapse came, but a few years ago I found him in Houston. He and his wife had found their way to America. He had gotten a menial job, and she got work, too. Eventually he was trained as a draftsman and worked in the oil industry and did very well. Viet and his wife worked at two jobs, and sometimes three jobs—a day, night, and weekend job—to put their five kids through Texas A&M and Sam Houston State college, which is near where they live in Houston. All five kids are now professionals. The mother, a very strong woman, had a conference at one point when all five kids were still at home. She said to them, “Any of you who want to go to college, we’ll find a way to put you through college. Any of you who do not want to go to college, I will give you $1,500 to get yourself started, and you can leave now. Who wants to go to college?” And all five hands went right up. They all did extremely well, though they had a little problem when the youngest daughter, Qui, wanted to get married. She married a Chinese man from Malaysia, and they were worried that if she got married, she wouldn’t finish college—she had a year to go still. So Viet said to her, “If you will let me do this in the ancient way, between me and her father, I will agree to it.” She went along with it, and Viet wrote to the father, who as he knew, was in an internment camp somewhere in Southeast Asia. The letter had to go through a cutout in Paris before going to the internment camp, then through the same route on the way back. That took about six months each way, and by the time the response had come back, Qui had graduated, they got married, and everybody was happy.

I would like to close by saying, I am very proud of our Vietnam veterans. I am very proud of our Vietnamese colleagues, though I wish we had done better by them in the end. And I am grateful for the opportunity to speak with you today.”

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Article printed from American Veterans Center

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 Here’s one of the very thoughtful comments we’ve gotten over the past week:

“I am certainly no expert in this field but I thought I would add some commentary to the discussion.

 

1.       I find merit and logic in both view points.  However, I believe the discussion is fundamentally flawed because there are underlying core issues not being addressed.  This discussion is based on the counterinsurgency belief of using the combination of military, political and social actions as the counterinsurgency mission plan.  From my perspective, I believe the wrong person is doing the right job and U.S. combatants should only have one (1) mission in the counterinsurgency mission plan  – Military Action.

 

2.       My position is line officers can’t and shouldn’t serve as both a warfighter and a nation builder when deployed on a combat mission.  By ordering a line officer to act as both will undoubtedly conflict against every fiber of a soldier’s training and that of being an elite warfighter. 

 

3.       Furthermore, I believe one could make a case that soldiers acting as both the warfighter and nation builder contradicts the philosophy of 3 Pillars of Counterinsurgency by Dr. David Kilcullen, the Chief Strategist of the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism of the U.S. State Department in 2006.

 

4.       In short – my views are:

·         In counterinsurgency efforts, the warfighter should only participate in military actions. 

·         Soldiers are trained to fight – not to broker peace;

·         Line Officers should not be inserted to build relationships and/or lead humanitarian efforts.  Support –Yes / Lead – No; 

·         Officers are inserted into hostile territory to lead their troops, complete the combat mission assigned, secure the area of operations and get the soldiers home in one piece. 

·         In this discussion, you are asking a soldier to handle more money than he or she will probably see in a lifetime on a monthly basis;

·         These local relationships can be manipulated to the detriment of any military unit (Friendship, sorrow and/or love).  Time and history has proven this over and over again;

·         You are asking a soldier to build relationships with villages and individuals that, at some point, he may have to put a round down range against the very village or persons he has been paying and meeting with for months – if not years. 

·         That soldier has now put a name to a face and memory to that person.  Has anyone ever wondered why PTS has spiked over the last 20 years?;  and

·         Soldiers are trained not to hesitate – if they hesitate – soldiers and civilians die.  If a soldier hesitates because he is conflicted by a face, name and/or memory – they are no longer warfighters;

 

I would also suggest that a component of counterinsurgency is being part psychologist and well trained in body language and movement – it’s more than learning how to sit, drink tea, negotiate and pass out money.  Line officers do not have extensive training in this area – nor should they.  This skill is done and mastered by a certain type of individual which is developed over a long period of time.  Last time I checked this is what the CIA does.  The CIA would not take a new line officer and PCS that individual to Damascus – would they?  Of course not, they would send an experienced officer with years of training and expertise to handle the mission requirements.  For the new CIA line officer, he is moved and promoted to more challenging posts as his experience, confidence and skills evolve.  The U.S. warfighter operates on a different learning curve.  That could be a whole other discussion.

 

If it remains the job of the line officer to participate in socio economic counterinsurgency programs, then embed counterinsurgency specialists into active units and the warfighter can provide security to that mission.  If it is an overall mission requirement of the DOD, then create separate units that specialize in this field to include creating a new MOS and training curriculum.  These units can be deployed and billeted alongside the warfighter and the warfighter can provide escort and security functions to these units.  It is my opinion, the two should never intertwine – warfighters should not be nation builders and nation builders should not be warfighters.  You don’t want the flight surgeon working on the deuce and a half and you don’t want the mechanic operating on the soldier.

 

Last note on the above – In this war, a soldier does not know who the enemy is because the Taliban does not wear uniforms – the lines can become blurred in an instant.  Also, a soldier has no way of telling when or if an individual changes sides due to threats, torture or personal choice until it’s possibly too late.  This war is not about nations fighting nations – soldiers are dealing with the Taliban with the war cry of Jihad.  This preys on the core of a person’s soul – which makes this war an individual’s choice to fight.  As we know, this is a very dangerous thing.  This is too much to ask a line officer to process and not expect he may hesitate in a critical situation or start blurring the lines of his own mission.”

Jeffery Freitas

We look forward to your additions to and thoughts on this topic, via comments on the Roundtable at www.lsi-llc.com, or your e-mails to me at john@lsi-llc.com.

Thanks.

John