In an insurgency situation, the guerrilla is dependent on a sympathetic population. Counter-guerrilla operations must, therefore, have as one objective winning the population’s cooperation and denying the enemy their sympathy.
An imaginative program of village assistance, properly backed by the military and civil authorities, is one form of psychological operation which will contribute significantly both toward this objective and toward the achieving of U.S. goals in Laos.
You arc not in competition with other U.S. agencies ... you are the spearhead and focal point for the injection of these activities until Laos civil assistance teams are trained and operational.
Upon arrival in the village, pay a courtesy call on the Chao Muong [the district political boss]. Do not talk shop on the first meeting. Just make friends.
Deal directly with the Chao Muong. Do not work through his subordinate. Always work through one man—the chief.
Make a statement on graft. Let the Chao Muong know that under no circumstances will you tolerate graft, and if you detect it, your aid will stop. If corruption starts, the villagers will tell you. You do not need to search for it.
Always make the villagers share the workload. Let them know that all these projects are village projects, not U.S. help for the helpless. Once you do one project all by yourself, the villagers will forever after expect this from your team. Do not give them something for nothing. For example, a good approach could be: “I will try to get a tin roof for your school house if you will build the school and furnish all other materials and labor.
Try to present our ideas to the Chao Muong in such a fashion as to make him think it was his idea in the first place. Let him win full credit for the completion of any project. Do not issue orders to him or demand an instant decision. When you approach him with an idea, let him have a night to think about it. But the next day be sure to gently push him toward a decision.
Initially your weapon is talk. It must be interesting, arousing, intelligent. You are a master salesman for the United States. Some pitfalls for newcomers: drinking too much at social functions (keep your mind clear for business); getting involved with native women (creates jealousy and hate, and makes you a setup for anti-U.S. propaganda); being arrogant, sarcastic, or belittling in your conversation (these people are hypersensitive and proud, and you will come to a dead end if they dislike you). Maintain the proper team attitude of good-natured willingness and endless patience in the face of resentment to change and complete apathy. Be tactful, be tolerant. Show exceptional tolerance to the children and the very old. Be courteous, be relaxed, and do not be in a hurry.
For success in this mission, observe the native customs. For example, when you are visiting a village, inform the villagers that you are coming so that the people can assemble. The Chao Muong always makes a political speech on these occasions. Never force your way into a village where broken branches across the trail indicate a closed celebration. Follow the native custom of removing your footgcar when going into a village house. Learn the customs of your region.
Make sure the United States gets credit for all U.S. items distributed. When the Chao Muong makes a speech to the citizenry about the tools and supplies they are to receive, make sure he tells them that the equipment comes from America.
The sky is the limit in what you can achieve. You cannot make a new Laos in one day, but it only takes one day to start. Now is the time to start beating the enemy at his own game—the winning of men’s minds, emotions, and loyalty to the concepts that motivate us: freedom, justice, individual human rights, equality of opportunity, and a higher living standard.
Lieutenant Colonel Little’s message also discussed practical programs for medical support and sanitation; aid to education, agriculture, and transportation; improvements to marketplaces and children’s playgrounds; and the like. All of these projects were in addition to the primary task of helping to train military forces.
A NOTHER legendary Special Forces officer—arguably the greatest operational Special Forces officer of them all—Lieutenant Colonel Arthur D. “Bull” Simons, also left a strong mark in Laos. Simons was a big, exceedingly unhandsome man, a magnificent leader, and a specialist in bringing the toughest jobs to a successful conclusion.9 Because he was too busy makingthings happen in the field to punch all the tickets needed to advance to general officer’s rank, he retired as a colonel. Recognition did come, however. Simons’s statue was recently dedicated at Fort Bragg. No one deserved it more.10
In late 1961, the Pathet Lao controlled the strategic Bolovens Plateau in southern Laos. The Plateau occupies most of the Laotian panhandle region, with North and South Vietnam on the cast, Cambodia on the south, and Thailand to the west; and it is mostly inhabited by Kha hill tribesmen. The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran between the plateau and the Vietnamese border. The mission of Simons and his Green Beret colleagues was to organize, arm, and train the Kha tribesmen into guerrilla bands, then to drive the Pathet Lao off the plateau, and finally to send the guerrillas into action against the Trail. They succeeded in the first two of those aims, but the attacks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail never materialized. By then the 1962 Geneva Accord had intervened, and the Special Forces had to pull back from Laos.
In 1962, various U.S. governmental agencies proposed three very different paths for achieving an acceptably stable situation in Laos: One, put forward primarily by the Joint Chiefs, argued for a full-scale conventional military intervention—slugging it out with the Pathet Lao on the battlefield—yoked with the bombing of North Vietnam; this was essentially the same plan the JCS tried in Vietnam. A second proposal put forward primarily by the CIA and the Special Forces,11 argued for a counterinsurgency solution, since it seemed to be beginning to work. And last, the diplomatic community argued for a negotiated settlement that would somehow harmonize all the major factions, turn Laos into a safe, “neutral” country, and secure the withdrawal of foreign military support. This last was the solution that was adopted, and it was codified in the Geneva Accords.
It’s no surprise that the United States complied with the Accord’s terms and withdrew its military forces, nor is it a surprise that North Vietnam (though a signatory) paid no attention to them. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was already far too vital to the success of its campaign against the South.
This situation continued for the remaining years of conflict in Southeast Asia. Though the United States “cheated” a little, and now and again “attacked” into the North Vietnamese border sanctuaries in Laos (and Cambodia), political and diplomatic constraints blocked the major military operations that might have ended the Trail’s usefulness to the North Vietnamese. Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese never stopped expanding the Trail and making it more secure.
VIETNAM
Before turning to the role U.S. Special Forces played in Vietnam, it’s helpful to review the United States’ military involvement there and how the strategy for countering the Communist threat evolved.
United States military involvement in Vietnam actually goes back to 1950, shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War, when the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) was formed. This initiative resulted from a Joint Chiefs of Staff belief that Indochina was the key to holding Southeast Asia against the Communists. In those days, the MAAG’s mission was relatively small—mainly liaison with the French, who were then deeply involved in fighting Ho Chi Minh’s insurgents.
During the years following French withdrawal, however, when the Viet Cong gain in momentum began to place South Vietnam at great risk, the primary responsibility for the security of South Vietnam fell to the United States. No one else was eager to take the lead.
As a first step toward meeting this responsibility, the National Security Council (NSC) directed the JCS to develop a Vietnamese Defense Force capable of providing internal security. The JCS determined that a force of approximately 89,000 would be required; the mission of designing and training this force was passed to the MAAG.
In December 1954, the MAAG
chief, Lieutenant General John W. O’Daniel, and the Vietnamese Minister of Defense agreed to an Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) force structure that called for the creation of three territorial and three field divisions. The territorial divisions consisted of thirteen locally recruited and trained regiments that would assist civil authorities with internal security operations. The field divisions were designed to be more “strategically mobile,” and specifically to provide defense against an invasion from the north until reinforcements from the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) could be rushed to the scene.
Over the next five years, this force structure changed considerably. Under MAAG’s direction, the ARVN evolved to a conventional force that mirrored the structure and methods of operation of the U.S. Army. In 1955, the National Security Council raised ARVN’s manpower allocation to 150,000; MAAG then scrapped the three territorial divisions in favor of six new light infantry divisions, which were similar to American divisions and no longer regionally oriented. Another field division was also added, bringing the total number to ten (six light and four field). By 1959, the light divisions had been further transformed into standard heavier infantry divisions, and the field divisions had become armored cavalry regiments.
Meanwhile, the Viet Cong insurgency in South Vietnam continued to grow. Civil authorities were increasingly overwhelmed, and the ARVN was more and more called upon to assist in counterinsurgency. MAAG’s mission, once simply to design and train the ARVN, now included recommending a strategy for employing those forces against the insurgents.
In 1960, Lieutenant General Lionel C. McGarr assumed command of MAAG. Faced with the formal establishment of the National Liberation Front that year, and the activation of the Peoples’ Liberation Armed Forces, McGarr and MAAG began to develop a counterinsurgency plan for 1961. The plan focused primarily on offensive operations designed to destroy guerrilla forces in the field. The objective was to “find, fix, and destroy the enemy.” This was even before President Kennedy blessed other, more unconventional approaches to counterinsurgency.
In spite of the growing involvement of MAAG and the ARVN in counterinsurgency operations, the guerrillas continued to gain strength, and Viet Cong infrastructures and control increased rapidly, especially in rural areas where the government had little presence or influence.
In response to the worsening situation, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to upgrade MAAG. In November 1961, they proposed the creation of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, and on February 8, 1962, MACV was activated under the command of General Paul Harkins.12 MACV’s mission was the same as its predecessor’s: to “assist the government of South Vietnam in defeating the Communist insurgency”; and it took the same operational approach: to destroy the enemy’s field forces through large-scale operations. MACV doctrine and tactics were also conventional: making extensive use of helicopters and air mobile operations to attempt to surprise and “fix” guerrillas.
The MACV approach was not totally conventional, however. During that time MACV also attempted a pacification program (a kind of heavy-handed civil affairs operation), and in January 1962, the “Strategic Hamlet Program” was initiated. This program grew out of two distinct plans: The first had been proposed by MAAG before the activation of MACV; the other (the one preferred by the regime of South Vietnam’s President Diem) had been proposed by the British Advisory Team, headed by counterinsurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson.
At that time, the insurgency had been building for approximately six years, and the six provinces near Saigon had become Viet Cong strongholds with well-established infrastructures—an obvious threat to the capital. In MAAG’s view, the government had little choice but to start clearing the areas closest to home. Thus, the MAAG plan would begin with the pacification of the six provinces closest to Saigon.
MAAG’s target date for the pacification of these provinces, as well as Kontum Province (approximately twenty miles to the north), was the end of 1961. Once that was accomplished, the priority would shift to the Mekong Delta and the Central Highlands; the rest of the country would follow. The target date for the pacification of the entire country was the end of 1964.
The plan proposed by Thompson and the British was based on the successful British counterinsurgency in Malaya and was focused on the implementation of strict security measures by the civil guard and the self-defense corps. They proposed to launch it initially in an area of weak VC activity, not the insurgent strongholds in the provinces surrounding Saigon, and with the ARVN playing a supporting rather than a leading role.
The final result, the Strategic Hamlet Program, was a compromise between the two plans. It consisted of three phases:
In the first phase, intelligence would be gathered concerning the area targeted for pacification, and the political cadre expected to administer the area would be trained. The second phase called for large-scale ARVN sweep operations in the target areas, aimed at driving out Viet Cong guerrillas. In phase three, the ARVN would hand over control of the areas to the civil guard and the self-defense corps, who would establish permanent security. At the same time, much of the local population would be forcibly resettled in fortified villages, where they could be presumed to be safe from attack.
MACV hoped that all this would somehow win over the hearts and minds of large numbers of rural Vietnamese.
On March 19, 1962, the Strategic Hamlet Program began with an ARVN sweep, code-named “Sunrise,” through Binh Doung province north of Saigon. The operation was not a rousing success. The area of the sweep was close to Viet Cong support bases and heavily infested with VC. That wasn’t a problem for the ARVN troops, but it turned out to be very difficult for the civil forces whose mission was to follow up and root out the VC infrastructure. After the ARVN forces conducted the sweep, the troops left, but the sweep operation had neither destroyed nor neutralized the existing VC infrastructure. This job was left to the civil forces, who simply could not do it.
Meanwhile, the local peasants were taken from their homes and the land they farmed for a living and forced into tin huts in euphemistically named “strategic hamlets,” that were in reality refugee camps. The population resettlement left these people feeling more alienated from the regime, rather than less.
Despite complaints from U.S. advisers, not only were these failures repeated as the program grew, but no serious attempts were made to fix them. MACV’s focus was on military operations to destroy the guerrilla forces, not on long-term pacification, the program’s supposed purpose. Thus the Strategic Hamlet Program never had a unified command structure; and MACV, always primarily interested in the military sweep operations, continued to provide little support to the civil guard or the self-defense forces, whose mission was long-term security.
The South Vietnamese government, meanwhile, blatantly falsified reports: Less than a month into the program, for example, the government claimed more than 1,300 operational fortified hamlets; six months later, the number was 2,500; and when Diem was assassinated in November 1963, less than two years into the program, the total number of hamlets reported was more than 8,000. Most of these were fortified on paper only.
MACV made no serious attempt either to challenge the Vietnamese assertions or to correct the situation on the ground.
THE CIA AND ARMY SPECIAL FORCES
The Strategic Hamlet Program was not the only attempt at pacification. In late 1961, Army Special Forces began to implement the CIA-conceived Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) Program, whose goal was to deny the VC access to food, supplies, recruits, and intelligence in the Central Highlands of Vietnam—and, it was hoped, to block or at least severely hinder NVA access into Vietnam from the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The Highlands were inhabited primarily by an assortment of minority groups and primitive tribes going under the collective name of Montagnards—Mountain People (the name was supplied by the French)—though other minority groups and tribes lived in other out-of-the-way parts of the country, having long ago been d
riven out of the more fertile lowland plains by the Vietnamese (many of these other groups also participated in the CIDG). As in Laos with the Meo and the Kha, the Montagnards and other such groups were held in contempt by the Vietnamese, who thought of them as savages. The Vietnamese government was never enthusiastic about turning Montagnards into a counterinsurgency force, since such a force might casily turn against any Vietnamese.
Because of these tensions, the CIDG program was at first run solely by Americans—specifically the CIA and Special Forces—and was only loosely connected to the Strategic Hamlet Program. Although the program was conceived and funded by the CIA, the task of designing a specific strategy and implementing it fell to Special Forces. In November 1961, two Special Forces A-Detachments were deployed from the 1st Special Forces Group in Okinawa to begin the program.
The strategy developed by the SF, called the Village Defense Program, was simple and defensive in nature:
The A-Detachments would locate themselves in an area, win the trust of the people and local villages, and begin to prepare simple defenses. They would meanwhile recruit and train men from local villages with the aim of forming a small paramilitary “strike force” designed and trained to provide the villages with a full-time security force. They would provide reinforcements to villages under attack, patrol between villages, and set ambushes for the VC.
Once the SF had established an effective strike force, they would begin to organize and train “village defenses.” These groups received basic training in weapons handling, were taught to defend and fortify their own villages, and fought only when their own village was under direct attack. Each village was provided with a radio, which allowed them to contact the SF teams and the strike force for reinforcement in the event of trouble.