The cemetery lies in the midst of a run-down working class neighborhood in the center of Yangon, Myanmar (formerly Rangoon, Burma).  To its west, gray concrete apartment buildings, their sides streaked black by mold and rot, rise high above the tombs.  Behind masses of electrical wires and hung clothing, the residents are visible slowly shuffling back and forth in dark rooms.  To its south, on a hill overlooking the rows of dead, stands a Buddhist monastery.  As the hot tropical sun sets in a blaze of orange off to the west of the city, the monks leave the shade of their rooms to sit quietly on a long veranda.  They’re waiting for a cool evening breeze.  North of the graveyard is a thatch and wood squatter’s hut.  Barren earth, devoid of any vegetation, surrounds the simple house.  Two rough-looking dogs and a scrappy rooster run across the dirt yard with no apparent direction at all.

On the east side of the cemetery is the shack of the groundskeeper.  He’s a young, dark, handsome man in his twenties, almost certainly of Tamil descent.  He lives with his elderly mother, wife, and young daughter in a ramshackle hut constructed from tin and wood.  He does not speak English and I do not speak his language.  So we stare at each other with expressions of mutual frustration, all too frequently nod and smile at one another, and gesticulate with our arms and hands in odd ways, hoping to communicate meaning.  As a groundskeeper, he has largely succeeded in keeping the tombs from being desecrated by vandals.  Although he has not been able to prevent the Buddhist monks from throwing their discarded rust-colored robes and garbage into a couple of unsightly piles located on the edge of the cemetery.  He’s also failed to keep the weeds down.  Thorn bushes and tall grass grows in the tight gaps between the tombs.  Trees have even taken root atop a few tombs.  The old tombs are showing the effects of weather and time.  Decades of sun, heat, and monsoonal rains have peeled away their coating of paint, exposing the underlying cement, leaving them a dull, moldy gray, like the apartment buildings nearby.

The majority of names inscribed on the tombs are in Aramaic, with some inscribed in both Aramaic and English.  A wide variety of family names are visible on the tombs, including Solomon, Jacobs, Moses, and Emphraim.  They were Sephardic Jews who had come to Burma as merchants and traders in the later half of the nineteenth century or early twentieth century, taking advantage of Great Britain’s market access across Asia. Most traveled south to Rangoon from China or eastward from India.  In Rangoon, they produced ice, sold soda water, and traded spices.  Some made their fortunes in the opium trade.  But life in Burma was anything but easy; often it ended rather unceremoniously in premature death.  Malaria, typhoid, cholera, and strange tropical diseases took a horrendous toll on newcomers.  Many died during the period known as “seasoning,” which occurred in the months and years immediately after arriving in the tropics.  An individual’s body either made the physical adjustment to the new environment, becoming “seasoned,” or it did not.  If it did not, the colonist either departed the tropics for a temperate clime or died.  Untold numbers of colonists did not make it out of the tropics in time to avoid death.

By today’s standards, the Jews of Burma died young.  A significant number buried in the cemetery died in their 30s, 40s, and early 50s.  Only a handful of name plates indicated the deceased had lived into his/her 80s.  Internments in the cemetery appear to have peaked in the 1930s.  After 1937, the number of burials tapered off to nearly zero.  One possible explanation for the drop off in burials after 1937 is the Japanese invasion of China.  Once the Japanese moved into China, they cut off the markets there to the Jewish merchants of British Burma.  The Japanese invasion of mainland China also increased the likelihood of a larger, deadlier war throughout Asia.  Recognizing that a major war loomed in the near future, and no longer able to trade with China, the Jews of Rangoon began to flee to India, a British colony considered more secure from the Japanese.  As the Jews fled Rangoon, they left their dead behind.  During the Japanese occupation of Burma from 1942 to 1945, the Jewish community in the Burmese capital shrank to only a handful of families.  The Japanese made life too difficult for the Jews, who they considered to be pro-British.  In leaving Burma, the Sephardic Jews of Burma took part in yet one more Jewish diaspora.

Today, an estimated 20 Jews still reside in Myanmar.  There is a synagogue in the center of Yangon, but regular services are not held there.  As for the cemetery, the government wants to move the Jewish tombs to another location so the site can be developed for a more profitable purpose.  According to Sammy Samuels, whose father, Moses, cares for the synagogue, the government project is temporarily on hold.  However, the government could still get its way.  If it does, the last Jews of Rangoon, who found a resting place in one corner of Asia, will be forced to partake in another diaspora.

By spring 1965, large swaths of the South Vietnamese countryside had fallen under Vietcong control.  Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, a man who prided himself on his analytical skills, wrote in a memorandum dated March 24, 1965, that “The situation in general is bad and deteriorating.  The VC have the initiative.  Defeatism is gaining among the rural population, somewhat in the cities, and even among the soldiers – especially those with relatives in rural areas.  The Hop Tac [pacification] area around Saigon is making little progress; the Delta stays bad; the country has been severed in the north.  GVN control is shrinking to the enclaves, some burdened with refugees.” [Herring, Pentagon Papers, 116]  McNaughton’s reference to the demoralization of ARVN troops with relatives in rural areas is instructive.  The morale of the ARVN began to plummet because South Vietnamese troops found it increasingly difficult to visit family members in the many hamlets that had recently been lost to the Vietcong.

At the same time that U.S. combat troops were coming ashore in South Vietnam to bolster the position of the GVN and stave off the complete collapse of the ARVN, South Vietnamese President Nguyen Cao Ky estimated that approximately 70% of South Vietnam’s territory belonged to the Vietcong.  The GVN still held the majority of district and provincial capitals, the larger cities situated on the central coast, such as Da Nang, Qui Nhon, and Nha Trang, and the capital city of Saigon.

By mid-year, U.S. Secretary of Defense McNamara concluded that circumstances in the South had deteriorated even further since the writing of McNaughton’s assessment back in March.  He wrote the president on July 20, 1965, “The situation in South Vietnam is worse than a year ago (when it was worse than a year before that).  After a few months of stalemate the tempo of the war has quickened.  A hard VC [Vietcong] push is now on to dismember the nation and to maul the army…The central highlands could well be lost to the National Liberation Front during this monsoon season.  Since June 1, the GVN has been forced to abandon six district capitals; only one has been retaken…Cities and towns are being isolated as fewer and fewer roads and railroads are usable and power and communication lines are cut. The economy is deteriorating – the war is disrupting rubber production, rice distribution, Dalat vegetable production, and the coastal fishing industry, causing the loss of jobs and income….” [FRUS, Vietnam, Vol.III, Document 67, "Memorandum From Secretary of Defense McNamara to President Johnson," July 20, 1965]  McNamara concluded that the GVN and ARVN teetered on the brink of total defeat.

Historian and journalist Bernard Fall believed the tax delinquency rate represented an excellent method for gauging the level of Government influence across South Vietnam.  If the Government could collect taxes from an area, it meant it still had effective control over the population.  In 1964, according to Fall, the tax delinquency rate countrywide stood at 74%.  Fall postulated from that data that the GVN had control over a mere 26% of South Vietnam’s population and most of that population resided in the country’s urban centers.  The tax delinquency rate edged higher in 1965 after the Vietcong scored a succession of military victories against the ARVN.

In summer of 1965, the Communists tightened their noose around the South Vietnamese capital.  Americans risked death or kidnapping at the hands of the Vietcong if they ventured outside of Saigon.  Daniel Ellsberg recalled the surprise of U.S. officials at Ham Tan (northeast of Saigon) when he informed them that he and John Paul Vann had traveled by vehicle on Route 1 from Saigon through Bien Hoa and Xuan Loc and then along a provincial road to Han Tan. [Ellsberg, Secrets, 122] Other highways near the capital had also been cut by the Vietcong.  Most notably, segments of the well-traveled road between Saigon and the resort city of Vung Tau (formerly Cape St. Jacque) had fallen to the Vietcong.  The guerrillas maintained such a strong military position along the road that they charged a toll to the Saigonese headed to the beaches of Vung Tau. Traffic on Route 4, known as the “rice road” because it carried the delta’s rice harvest to Saigon, faced daily Vietcong interdiction. [Ellsberg, Secrets, 123]  That the ARVN could not keep open three major highways, all on the outskirts of the national capital, indicated the weakness of the Government position in the countryside.

The Vietcong cut provincial roads and national highways all across South Vietnam in the summer of 1965. MACV Commander General William C. Westmoreland recognized that the closure of roads presented him with a serious tactical problem.  With the Vietcong holding much territory along the nation’s roadways, his supply convoys would be subject to frequent Vietcong ambush.  To limit the possibility of ambush, and keep U.S. casualties down, Westmoreland proposed the construction of dozens of airlfields across South Vietnam.  He wanted the country saturated with airfields.  The airfields would enable U.S. forces to jump over the long stretches of Vietcong territory, rather than try and fight their way through.  Airfields would ensure that the U.S. military continued to have access to the countryside.  Westmoreland would get his wish.  U.S. Army engineers went on a crash construction program in 1965, grading airstrips everywhere within South Vietnam. The proliferation of airfields, and the U.S. heavy reliance on helicopters and cargo planes for resupply and reinforcement, reflected not only the U.S.’s vaunted air mobility, but just how little territory the U.S. and GVN actually controlled in South Vietnam.

The significant number of airfields also supported Westmoreland’s attrition strategy.  Westy did not plan on holding large patches of territory nor did he want to deploy U.S. troops to conduct the slow, difficult task of pacification.  He intended on fighting a highly mobile war in which U.S. forces moved rapidly from one battlefield to another, destroying the enemy’s main-force units and racking up bodies.  He had no intention of keeping his forces in-place. They would be constantly on the go, running down the Vietcong and PAVN.  That the airfields, and the aircraft and troops utilizing the airfields, were physically divorced from Vietnamese rural life did not concern Westmoreland.  He did not want U.S. troops becoming entangled in that rural world anyway.  In a sense, the airfields reflected the disjuncture between the Vietcong experience of rural South Vietnam and the American. The Americans constantly shuffled from place to place, while the local guerrillas, and especially the highly trained Vietcong cadre, remained rooted to locality, where they did the time-consuming work of winning hearts and minds to Communism.

When the Vietcong took control of an area, they made a deliberate effort to sever the geographical links between their own territory and that of the GVN.  They cut trenches across roadways, dropped tall trees across trails, tore up sections of railroad, blocked canals with debris, and mined footpaths and highways.  Neil Sheehan recalled a helicopter ride over the Mekong Delta in the early 1960s with John Paul Vann and General Paul Harkins, (the head of MAAG).  “As they flew across the countryside and passed over a Viet Cong-controlled area, Vann…would call Harkin’s attention to the marks of recognition – the ditched roads, the dirt barriers blocking the canals, the ruins of an outpost.” [Sheehan, Bright Shining Lie, 110]  This decoupling from the GVN’s geographical system not only made it more difficult for Allied units to enter Vietcong territory, it also shrank the GVN’s market access, causing a reduction in government supervised trade and the taxes derived from that trade.  As the GVN’s market area shrank, the GVN treasury acquired fewer piasters to fund government functions.  Destroying infrastructure and cutting off Vietcong areas from the GVN’s geographical system weakened the GVN.  The Vietcong literally cut away a chunk of South Vietnam’s body politic.  If South Vietnam resembled a living organism, the separation of too many areas from GVN control would eventually kill the organism.  South Vietnam could not hope to survive if it lost too many pieces of territory to the Vietcong.

In 1965, when the Vietcong owned 70% or more of South Vietnam, South Vietnam was doomed to die, it could not survive with so little territory and population under its control.  But what kept it alive, even with such a small area under its control, were infusions of aid from the United States.  The sea lanes between ports such as Seattle-Tacoma, and Long Beach, to Saigon, Qui Nhon, and Danang, acted as an intravenous tube, feeding American aid into South Vietnam.  In a sense, the U.S. had South Vietnam on life support, furiously pumping in aid to keep the dying patient alive.

The Vietcong, in areas under their control, did more than just cut trenches across roads or mine roadways.  When the Vietcong took hold of a hamlet, its cadre actively recruited new members, levied taxes on farmers, executed “enemies of the people,” propagandized the populace, and trained local men in the rudiments of guerrilla warfare.  The Vietcong also engaged in a program to fortify the villages and the surrounding countryside – to make the landscape a bastion against U.S and ARVN forces.

The Vietnamese had a long history of using villages as military strongholds.  Centuries earlier, when the Vietnamese expanded southward out of Tonkin, they confronted Cham and Khmer peoples in their path.  The Vietnamese constructed fortified villages along their frontier to protect the Vietnamese inhabitants from attack and to serve as bases from which to launch military forays into Cham or Khmer territory.  According to Jonathan Schell, the village of Ben Suc in Binh Duong Province northwest of Saigon, had been one of those fortified villages.  Ben Suc enabled the Vietnamese to secure the fertile Saigon River Valley.  Schell, who would witness the destruction of Ben Suc during Operation Cedar Falls in January 1967, wrote, “…[Ben Suc] had a recorded history going back to the late eighteenth century, when the Nguyen Dynasty, which ruled the southern part of Vietnam fortified it and used it as a base in its campaign to subjugate the natives of the middle region of the country.”[Schell, Ben Suc, 3].

Before the start of the First Indochina War, Ho Chi Minh hinted that he planned on utilizing the Vietnamese rural landscape as a weapon against the technologically-superior French forces.  According to Ho’s biographer William Duiker, “…[Ho] insisted the heroism of the Yugoslav partisans against Nazi Germany showed that the spirit of man was more powerful than machines, which could not operate effectively in swamps and thick jungles.  There were millions of straw huts that could serve as “Trojan horses,” in the rear of an invading army. “ [Duiker, Ho, 379]  Ho also revealed how the Viet Minh would operate against the French.  “It will be a war between an elephant and a tiger…If the tiger ever stands still the elephant will crush him with his mighty tusks.  But the tiger does not stand still.  He lurks in the jungle by day and emerges by night.  He will leap upon the back of the elephant, tearing his chunks from his hide, and then he will leap back into the dark jungle.  And slowly the elephant will bleed to death.  That will be the war of Indochina.” [Duiker, Ho, 379]

In December, 1946, war erupted between Ho’s Viet Minh and the French.  Fighting first began in Haiphong and then spread to Hanoi.  In the capital city, the Viet Minh transformed residential neighborhoods into defensive works.  Houses became mini-fortresses.  The Viet Minh connected one house to another by knocking down adjoining walls or by digging trenches and tunnels from building to building.  In this way, the Communists could resupply and reinforce each building, while making it possible for the troops to slowly retreat if the need arose.  The intricate system of Viet Minh defensive works took a terrible toll on French troops.  French infantry found it difficult to root out the dug-in Viet Minh.  But after two months of vicious house-to-house fighting, the French finally cleared the Viet Minh from Hanoi.  In the end, a sizable Communist force escaped the city by fleeing through tunnels. [Spector, Advice and Support, 83]  Slowing down French forces, and using buildings, tunnels, and trenches, to inflict high casualties on the enemy, would be a trademark of Viet Minh tactics throughout the First Indochina War.

As the war against the French intensified in the late 1940s, Ho, and his military commander Nguyen Giap, ordered that rural villages under Viet Minh control be fortified.  By war’s end, villages all across the country had been made to serve as Viet Minh bastions.  Bernard Fall accompanied a French military operation in Quang Tri Province in the summer of 1953.  Operation Camargue sought to clear the Viet Minh from the coastal villages in the vicinity of Route 1, an area known to the French as the “Street Without Joy.”  Operation Camargue represented the largest single French operation of the First Indochina War, but it failed in its objective – to find, fix, and destroy the sizable guerrilla units adjacent to the strategically-important Route 1.  Fall wrote about the Viet Minh fortified countryside near Route 1.  He stated, “Each village forms a veritable little labyrinth that measures barely more than 200 by 300 feet and is surrounded by bushes, hedges, or bamboo trees, and small fences which made ground as well as aerial surveillance almost impossible.  Regiment 95 [of the Viet Minh] had spent more than two years fortifying the villages with an interlocking system of trenches and tunnels, underground arms depots, and first-aid stations which no single brutal thrust by large mobile forces could uncover or destroy.” [Fall, Street Without Joy, 147]  Unable to find the Viet Minh because of the superb concealment of tunnel entryways, and because the local population refused to reveal the hidden locations of the Viet Minh troops, the French departed the region.  The Viet Minh then emerged from their subterranean hiding places and reasserted control over the “Street Without Joy.”

French military operations acted like a wave that briefly washed over the land and then receded.  The Viet Minh resembled the rock and sand under the wave.  The Viet Minh might move with the wave, but once the water retreated back from whence it came, the Communist troops resurfaced to again take control.  Fortified villages, with their tunnel networks, made the permanent French occupation of the countryside a nearly impossible task.

Once the Viet Minh took over a region’s hamlets, the French found it hard to dislodge them with any military means short of the complete destruction of the village and the forced removal of the inhabitants.  Because fortified villages proved their tactical worth during the First Indochina War, Ho and Giap planned on fortifying Communist villages in South Vietnam if the U.S. became directly involved in the war there.  Both Communist leaders believed the political and environmental conditions in South Vietnam mimicked those present in Tonkin and Annam during the First Indochina War.  Thus, the Americans, lacking popular support, would be forced to rely upon mobility and firepower to fight the Communists.  A fortified countryside would slow the movement of U.S. forces, negate U.S. advantages in firepower, and ultimately defeat the American army, just as it had defeated the French.

In 1965, there existed some areas in South Vietnam that had been under Communist control since the August Revolution of 1945, including hundreds of hamlets in the provinces of Quang Tri, Thua Thien, Quang Tin, Quang Nam, Quang Ngai, and Binh Dinh.  In long-held Vietcong hamlets, the people had decades to construct and perfect complex tunnel systems, bunkers, and trench networks.  In areas that had more recently been occupied by the Vietcong, such as in the hamlets next to the large American airbase at Danang, the Vietcong worked rapidly in 1965 to transform the villages and land into a series of overlapping fortifications.  All of this was done while the unsuspecting GIs came ashore only a few miles away.

Soon after taking a village, the Vietcong organized the villagers into labor gangs.  How much of this labor was volunteer and how much was coerced is impossible to gauge.  If the labor was in fact volunteered freely, it gave the villagers a stake in the Revolution.  It empowered the people, making them feel part of a bigger movement.  It also strengthened the ties between the military arm of the Vietcong and the peasantry.  If the inhabitants were coerced into building the fortifications, the works themselves would make it difficult for the villagers to either remain neutral in the struggle or to go over to the other side.  The Americans and ARVN would consider the fortified village and its inhabitants to be VC and keep the populace under suspicion.  Thus, fortifications committed the villagers to the Vietcong, whether they wanted to be or not.

One of the first tasks involved digging tunnels from the village to a nearby stand of trees or to the bank of a river, to anyplace that would ensure the Vietcong fighters a safe, unobserved entry to the village and a secure escape in during an Allied assault.  A resident of rural South Vietnam in the 1960s, and later author of “When Heaven and Earth Changed Places,” Le Ly Hayslip recalled, “The able-bodied men who were excused from duty with the guerrilla militia were organized into labor squads to dig tunnels that would allow the Viet Cong to pass into and out of the village without being seen.” [Hayslip, Heaven and Earth, 39]  Hayslip remembered how the Vietcong concealed the entryways to their tunnels and bunkers to avoid Allied detection.  “…the Viet Cong could not be found, they spent most of their time, after all, hiding in caverns underground with entrances hidden by cookstoves, bushes, false floors, or even underwater by flowing rivers….” [Hayslip, Heaven Earth, 41]

Labor gangs also excavated trenches and fighting holes around the perimeter of Vietcong villages.  These trenches ran along the edges of hedgerows or beneath rows of fruit trees, making the defensive works all but invisible to approaching Allied troops.  The noted war correspondent and historian, S.L.A. Marshall, known as “Slam” to his friends, accompanied soldiers of the First Cavalry Division on a foot patrol in Binh Dinh Province in mid-1966.  The First Cavalry soldiers, known throughout the U.S. Army as “Sky Troopers,” came upon a hamlet designated as Phu Huu 2.  Marshall described the trench system in the hamlet.  “S. Sgt. Willie P. Haskett led his small group forward, along the left side of the village, not knowing all the while that he was moving parallel to a perfectly camouflaged, well-bunkered and manned trench, not 10 meters away, that ran the length of the settlement.  He learned it when fire first came against him from out [of] the trench.  The overgrowth was so thick that he still could not see the fortification.” [Marshall, Bird, 139]

In the villages themselves, the Vietcong built underground bunkers or trenches inside the thatch huts of the residents.  The trenches and bunkers protected the villagers from aerial bombs and artillery fragments.  Additionally, if Allied forces entered the hamlet, the trenches could be utilized by guerrillas as fighting positions, turning each hut in the village into one of Ho’s “Trojan Horses.”  Villagers piled the excavated dirt from the interior trench or bunker into mounds along the outside walls of the hut.  Usually, villagers piled the earth on the side of the hut facing the outer perimeter of the village.  These mounds of earth not only provided the hut’s inhabitants with a further measure of protection from exploding bomb and shells, the mounds gave the guerrillas cover from incoming small arms fire.  When U.S. troops entered the fortified VC village of Ben Suc in January 1967 as part of Operation Cedar Falls, they discovered bunkers inside the thatch huts, and hillocks of compacted earth outside of the huts [see above photograph of a hut at Ben Suc with defensive works].

Villagers became quite ingenious in finding hiding places for Vietcong weapons and ammunition.  They hid rifles and handguns under the thatch of their roofs, buried hand-grenades in bins of rice, and placed belts of machine-gun ammunition in the walls of their huts.  Weapons and ammunition could be hidden almost anywhere – as long as the materials had been sealed in waterproof containers.  Occasionally, Vietcong fighters wrapped belts of machine gun ammunition in waterproof plastic before lowering the ammo to the bottom of the village water well.  At the bottom of the well, beneath several feet of water, the ammunition remained out of sight until the time came to pull it up.  War materials could also be buried in a rice paddy, hidden under the mud and grime of a pig pen, dropped into an irrigation ditch, placed in the sandy riverbed of a local stream, or simply stashed in one of the many tunnels burrowed under the village.  It was rare for the ARVN and Americans to find VC arms caches.  The varied environment of South Vietnam presented too many hiding places.  When they did uncover a cache, Allied forces often only found it contained a few items.  The Vietcong did not create large caches with loads of weapons and ammunition.  Instead, they dispersed their caches across the landscape in small batches to prevent the loss of too many materials at once, and to make discovery more difficult.  Had the Vietcong had less popular support, the guerrillas would not have been able to create such dispersed armed caches.

It did not take much to alert villagers to the approach of Allied forces.  The rice paddies extending outward in all directions in the delta and the coastal plain gave village defenders a clear line of sight across the land.  Additionally, the Allies, with their loud, tracked vehicles, or louder helicopters, could be heard coming from a great distance.  Allied APCs usually clung to the established roadways, rather than risk becoming stuck in the mud of the paddies.  Thus, the Vietcong had no trouble in monitoring the few passable avenues of approach into a village.  Every village also had it full complement of mangy, malnourished, and neglected dogs.  The dogs were as anti-American as their owners.  A U.S. or ARVN military patrol nearing a rural hamlet was guaranteed to receive a welcome filled with the howls, barks, and yelps of the village dogs.  Rickety gates, the clank of metal on metal, and the swoosh sound of clothing brushing against a hedgerow gave notice of the movement of Allied troops.  Villagers were also known to bang on gongs or hollowed out artillery shells or bombs to warn one another, or the residents of a neighboring hamlet, of the arrival of the Americans or ARVN in the area.  The Allies rarely surprised villagers with their arrival.  They were usually discovered long before they entered a village.  Regular U.S. Army units, especially in the early years of the war, were notorious for their lack of noise discipline.

Striking a Vietcong village was the tactical equivalent of storming a Japanese-held island in the Pacific during World War II.  Granted, the Vietcong lacked the firepower of the Japanese Imperial Army, but in both instances, the enemy had clear warning of an impending attack.  The Vietcong, like the Japanese, were well dug-in, concealed by camouflage, and fanatical soldiers, willing to die for the cause, rather than surrender.  In both cases, the attacking force had to cross open country to close with and destroy the enemy.  The Marines in World War II had to traverse open water and a sandy beach to close with the Japanese, while in Vietnam, U.S. Army troops and Marines had to slog through the rice paddies to reach Vietcong villages.  Those rice paddies subjected the Americans to Vietcong small-arms fire and mortars.

Beyond the village, the Vietcong reshaped the landscape to suit their military goals. Throughout rural areas, the guerrillas built defensive works in concentric rings, forming a defense in-depth that slowed approaching Allied forces and gave the occupants of Vietcong logistics depots, hospitals, and troop bases time to either retreat or to prepare for the arrival of Allied troops.

A primary goal of the defense in-depth involved slowing down Allied forces.  The Communists recognized that the militarized countryside would wear down Allied troops, reduce their combat effectiveness, attrite their numbers, and create an actual physical quagmire that would bog down Allied units, keeping them physically outside of Vietcong areas.  With Allied forces slowed, or bogged down, it would be easier for the guerrillas to maintain their presence and hold on the countryside.

The Vietcong dug punji pits along the foot trails leading to and from the hamlets and base areas.  The pits consisted of a hole approximately six feet deep by four feet long.  The pit needed to be deep enough so that the force of the falling GI/ARVN soldier was great enough to impale the trooper’s feet and possibly hands on the sharpened stakes poking out of the earth at the bottom of the pit.  Punji pits were not necessarily designed to kill, although they did on occasion.  Rather in using the punji pit, the Vietcong sought to wound a GI or ARVN trooper, to take an Allied soldier out of action.  In the wounding, the pits forced patrols to stop, care for the wounded, call in a medevac, and set up a defensive perimeter to protect the incoming helicopter – all of which consumed time and energy, making it harder for the GIs to find, fix, and kill the Vietcong.  In a small way, punji pits lengthened the war and hindered the U.S. war effort.  The Vietcong understood, as did the Politburo in Hanoi, that the longer the war went on, the greater the chances that the U.S. public would tire of the struggle and push for the withdrawal of U.S. forces.  So in a small way, but magnified by many thousands, the punji pits served the Vietcong military and political objectives.  Philip Caputo, who wrote the critically acclaimed book, “A Rumor of War,” described the use of punji stakes by the Vietcong.  “The village was a long one sprawling beside the riverbank for a quarter of a mile.  There seemed to be a hedgerow every ten yards, or a pangee [punji] trap or ditch with crisscrossed bamboo stakes in it.” [Caputo, Rumor of War, 302]

Trees found a use too.  Vietcong snipers climbed tall trees, tied themselves with rope to a large branch, and waited for the arrival of Allied troops.  High up in the trees, the Vietcong had excellent fields of fire, while branches and leaves concealed their positions.  GIs expressed utter surprise that the Vietcong would use trees as firing positions.  U.S. troopers first faced tree-hugging Vietcong snipers in large numbers at the Battle of the Ia Drang in November, 1965.  Vietcong sharpshooters still used trees to good effect in October, 1967, when Vietcong tree snipers of the Vietcong 9th Division delivered deadly fire down upon the soldiers of Lt. Col. Terry Allen’s battalion at the Battle of Ong Thanh.

The Vietcong dug truly impressive tunnel complexes under villages, between villages, and beneath base areas.  Some tunnel systems, such as the famous Cu Chi tunnels northwest of Saigon, had been in existence since the years of the First Indochina War.  Larger tunnel complexes, like the one below the timbered Iron Triangle, became something akin to a massive underground base camp with storage areas, ammunition dumps, hospitals, and sleeping quarters.  An unnamed Vietcong commander thought that the Vietnamese use of tunnels symbolized in a very direct manner the connection between the Vietnamese and the land.  The Vietcong literally went into the land to seek its protection.  This Vietcong leader said, “They [the tunnels] are something very Vietnamese and one must understand what the relationship is between the Vietnamese peasant and the earth, his earth.” [Gibson, Perfect War, 123]

The Vietcong constructed the tunnels to not only hide from the ARVN and Americans, but also to withstand U.S. firepower.  The earth served as a buffer between the Vietcong soldiers and the American bombs, rockets, and gunfire.  The ground was a barrier, blunting the effects of America’s awesome arsenal.  The Vietcong went deep into the earth, 20, 30, 40 feet down to make them impervious to all but the largest U.S. aerial bombs.  Communist engineers excavated rooms with “A” frame roofs, which strengthened the caverns against the concussive force of repeated explosions.  Tunnels contained separate levels that could be entered through trap doors.  This design limited the spread of tear gas, which the Americans pumped into tunnels.  The trap doors also blocked suffocating smoke that might enter through the system because of fire or explosions.  False tunnels with dead ends and false entryways led American tunnel rats – the name given to GIs who had the nerve-wracking job of exploring the tunnels – to dead ends or booby-trapped rooms and booby-trapped trap doors.  The Vietcong did not dig straight tunnels.  Each subterranean pathway bore through the earth in an arch.  This design feature diminished the killing range of explosives and gunfire.  Thus, a tunnel rat could not just shoot straight down a tunnel and hope to kill the enemy.  Instead, his bullet would eventually smack up against the curving wall of the tunnel, as would fragments from an exploding grenade.  Whenever possible, the tunnels passed through non-porous clay – which not only absorbed the shock waves from exploding bombs and shells, but also kept monsoonal rains from collapsing the tunnels and underground rooms.  Tunnel systems had multiple entry and exit points to ensure that the occupants could escape or not be sealed into an unwanted tomb if the Americans discovered and closed one entryway.  Multiple air shafts extended from the earth’s surface to the dark, dank rooms and tunnel passageways below.  Again, redundancy offered safety against suffocation if the Americans closed one shaft.

The Americans expressed a grudging admiration for the Vietcong’s tunneling capabilities.  Gerry Schooler, who served with the 25th Infantry Division at Cu Chi recalled, “The tunnels were interesting.  You could see how much work they put into them.  That’s when I first realized that these people were not lazy, that they were industrious and dedicated…It was obvious they were dedicated and had been there for a lot longer than one or two years: these tunnels were big, complicated, and old.” [Bergerud, Tropic Thunder, 192-193]

Long-held Vietcong areas were honeycombed with tunnels.  When the Americans attempted to clear the Vietcong out of the Iron Triangle in early 1967, the GIs learned the extent of Vietcong tunneling in the area.  Jonathan Schell, who accompanied U.S. forces on the mission to clear out the Triangle wrote, “American intelligence had also received reports of a twelve-mile tunnel running the length of the Triangle from north to south.” [Schell, Ben Suc, 18].  Long tunnel such as the one traversing the Triangle allowed the Vietcong to move undetected from their base areas toward U.S. and ARVN positions.  When the Americans bulldozed the vegetation in the Iron Triangle, to deny the Vietcong cover and concealment, the monstrous Rome Plows, repeatedly crashed down into the earth as the weight of the huge machines collapsed the roofs of tunnels.  The extensive tunnel systems made it impossible for the Americans to clear and hold an area, let alone find and kill the Vietcong.  On countless occasions during the long war, GIs believed they had cleared an area of Vietcong only to learn that the Vietcong returned to the same area within a matter of days after the end of a U.S. operation.  This, of course, was because the Vietcong simply reemerged from their subterranean sanctuaries after the GIs had departed the area.  The web of tunnels in War Zone D and the Iron Triangle made it impossible for the Americans to ever clear and hold those regions.  The Vietcong remained into both of those base areas until the end of the war in 1975, even after the herculean efforts of the Americans to push them out.  Both areas had too many tunnels.  The Americans could not find all of the tunnels, let alone destroy them.  As an Army historian acknowledged in the early 1970s, “One such complex used by the Vietcong in the III Corps Tactical Zone was probably as much as twenty years in the building.  Constructed in impervious layers of hard clay at varying depths, with small, well-camouflaged entrances, these tunnels defied any simple method of destruction.” [Vietnam Studies, Army Engineers, 92].

If the U.S. military could not find and destroy the tunnel systems, how could it have hoped to hold the land above?  S.L.A. Marshall, witnessed firsthand the extensive Vietcong tunneling in a long-held Communist area.  He wrote, “Trung Luong [village] was served by one of the most extensive tunnel system anywhere in the country.  Of this came the enemy mobility that had cost Furgeson so many of his soldiers [54 casualties in two days].  The NVA had been moving through the catacomb to get from one firing point to another.  Without this tunnel system, the air and artillery might have broken the resistance, but the heaviest bomb could not cut through to the tunnels.” [Marshall, Fields of Bamboo, 121].

GIs often admitted that “Victor Charlie” owned the night, while the Americans owned the day.  It was also true that while the Americans owned the surface of the earth (at least where they stood) and the skies above Vietnam, Charlie ruled the subterranean world.  That dark, unseen world of the Vietcong unnerved the majority of GIs.  Few wanted to enter that place to contest the Vietcong’s hold on it.  To GIs, the tunnels were mysterious, full of danger, and clousterphobic.  Big 18-year-old corn-fed Iowa boys could not even fit in the narrow, tight tunnels.  And the tunnels negated what the GIs valued in the war zone – speed, firepower, and good visibility.  Frederick Downs, at Duc Pho in Quang Ngai Province in late 1967, remembered how the tunnels, and the underground realm, were conceded to the Vietcong.  After discovering a vast tunnel network, Downs wrote, “None of us was going to lower himself to the bottom to explore the tunnels, so I called Delta Six to report the find.  We were not too concerned since Vietnam must have had a million miles of tunnels under everything.  I had only been in-country a short time and already tunnels were a feature of the landscape.” [Downs, Killing Zone, 95]  The existence of so many tunnels, and the physical impossibility of find them and destroying them, made U.S. and GVN efforts to clear and hold the countryside extremely difficult and maybe impossible, as it had been for the French.  The presence of the tunnels may have precluded the possibility of the U.S. and GVN ever pushing the Communists entirely out of South Vietnam and of securing South Vietnam’s non-Communist future, or of winning the war.  If the underground realm could not be secured, the Americans had no way of holding the surface of the earth.

Vietcong tunnels extended right up to the perimeter, and sometimes under the perimeter, of U.S. bases.  At the 25th Infantry Division base at Cu Chi, the Vietcong burrowed under the perimeter wire, entered the base from below, and launched attacks on unsuspecting GIs, who had considered themselves safe inside the massive U.S. facility.  At Danang, the Vietcong tunneled into Marble Mountain, a few miles south of the Danang Airbase.  From the heights of the mountain, the Vietcong observed the comings and goings of the Marines on the base and the U.S. aircraft there.  The Americans never knew of the Vietcong hidden deep in the bowels of Marble Mountain.  The revelation that the Vietcong had been inside the mountain during the duration of the war only became public knowledge after the end of the war.  The Vietnamese village of Dong Binh sat next to the gigantic U.S. base at Chu Lai.  The Vietcong infiltrated Dong Binh.  Overtime, the guerrillas developed a tunnel system throughout Dong Binh, which made it possible for them to enter and leave the village unobserved by the Marines on the big base.  More importantly, Dong Binh’s tunnels enabled the Vietcong to observe the Marines on the base.[West, The Village, 301]  Tunnels enabled the Vietcong to get close to U.S. positions and to launch surprise attacks on those positions.  Countless GIs recalled how during a battle, the Vietcong broke off contact and then slipped away, as if disappearing into thin air.  The reason the Vietcong seemed to disappear is that they went underground.

In the Mekong Delta, where the high water table and the alluvium soils precluded the construction of tunnel systems, the Vietcong relied on the land’s surface features to fortify areas under their control.  There was no shortage of potential fortifications.  When the French build roads into the delta in the late 19th century and early 20th century, they raised the road beds above the surrounding marshlands to facilitate the drainage of the road surface and prevent the road’s inundation from the periodic floods of the Mekong River.  The elevated roads provided the Vietcong with excellent cover when ambushing Allied convoys on the roads [Downs, Killing Zone, 45].

French engineers drained the delta’s soggy soils by digging thousands of miles of canals and small drainage ditches across the delta.  The French laid down the spoil from the excavations in elongated piles of earth on either side of each canal and drainage ditch.  Over time, trees and thick undergrowth took root atop the mounds of dredged earth.  The guerrillas dug fighting holes under the trees and in the midst of the understory.  American troops found it nearly impossible to see the Vietcong dug into these positions.  Atop the mounds, or along their edges, the guerrillas possessed good fields of fire over the paddy lands to the front of their position.  General Bruce Palmer wrote of these man-made canal banks and their tactical use.  “Those canals, with their steep banks and heavy fringe of vegetation, are normally the only significant terrain features in an otherwise open and monotonously flat countryside.  The canal lines formed natural defensive positions, affording protection and concealment to the defender while permitting perfect observation and murderous fields of fire out over the shimmering rice paddies.” [Palmer, Summons Trumpet, 33-34]

On top of old slurry piles, the Vietcong could quickly do an about-face to interdict Allied gunboats cruising in the canal.  A common Vietcong tactic involved digging in on the side of a canal where it narrowed or where it made a bend.  Along those reaches, U.S. and RVN gunboats had to slow down.  It was at that moment that the Vietcong sprung their ambushes.  Once the firing began, the Americans and South Vietnamese could not quickly turn their boats around in the narrow channel to escape the deadly Vietcong fire.  It was also a practice to spring ambushes at low tide, when the waterways became more constricted and U.S. and South Vietnamese vessels had greater difficulty maneuvering in the tight channels. [Cutler, Brown Water, 170]

Rice cultivation required the construction of paddy dikes to regulate the water level within the rice paddy.  In some areas, these dikes dated back centuries, to the period of initial Vietnamese settlement.  Farmers walked back and forth atop the dikes to get to their fields.  After decades of incessant foot traffic, the earth in the dikes had become compacted and hard.  During the dry season, when farmers drained the paddies and harvested the rice, the paddy dikes dried out under the hot sun, becoming as hard as concrete. Paddy dikes served as ready made breastworks.  The Vietcong merely had to lay behind the paddy dikes to gain protection from American or ARVN small arms fire.  David Hackworth, who served as a battalion commander with the 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta in 1969 commented on the dikes and their use by the Vietcong.  “…rice paddies themselves offered little concealment.  But the paddy walls provided the VC good cover from direct fire weapons.  The only way for a GI to get a clear shot at Charley was to scale the dike and hope he wouldn’t get blown away….” [Hackworth, Steel Soldiers, 16]

Hedgerows, like paddy dikes, divided and subdivided the landscape.  Vietnamese farmers grew hedgerows in order to keep stock animals away from their crops.  Frederick Downs described the hedgerows of Quang Ngai Province.  “Those damn bushes grew everywhere and anywhere.  The dinks used them as fences.  They were thick and bushy with a little red flower growing from every major leaf, it seemed like.  The only way through one of these bushes was where the farmers had made a path over many years.” [Downs, Killing Zone, 93]  But the hedgerows became more than a mere nuisance, the living fences presented the Vietcong with yet one more place to hide or carry out an ambush against Allied troops. [Downs, Killing Zone, 57]  Downs recounted a nerve-wracking experience while in the rice paddy country of the coastal plain.  His unit had been ordered to protect two APCs bogged down in the mud of a rice paddy.  He wrote, “Being stuck out in the middle of that rice paddy with the hedgerows all around us would be a sure ticket to a killing.  The dinks could slip up to within thirty or forty meters to fire an RPG right into one or both of the tracks.” [Downs, Killing Zone, 62]

Vietcong fighters even hid under haystacks, waiting there until the Americans came into rifle range.  S.L.A. Marshall wrote of an incident in Binh Dinh Province, “The killing fire that downed Second Platoon had come from under the haystacks.  They were mere camouflage, topping off three concrete bunkers, fixed with fire slots…Not one thing in the field had indicated the existence of a military position anywhere nearby…The appearance of innocence had deceived the platoon completely.” [Marshall, Fields of Bamboo, 80] What is apparent from the accounts of Downs and Marshall is that nearly every feature of the South Vietnamese landscape could be put to some military purpose.  David Halberstam, although writing of the Mekong Delta, could have been discussing all of South Vietnam when he penned the following lines, “The whole countryside is a natural hiding place….” [Halberstam, Quagmire, 57-59].  There was more feature of that countryside that made it particularly deadly for American troops – booby traps.

Up to the 1880s, the Indians of the northern plains utilized bullboats to traverse the region’s rivers and streams. Tribes, such as the Omaha, Ponca, Teton Lakota, and Arikara, built bullboats by first cutting down the thin willow saplings that grew in abundance along the banks of the Missouri and its tributaries.  Employing axes and stout knives, craftsmen cut away all the branches and leaves from the trunk of each sapling.  They then weaved the long, pliable willow poles together to form a bowl-shaped frame.  Bison sinew, tied between the saplings, reinforced the crude frame.  The top, open end of the boat, was then laid face down on the ground, with the curving bottom of the frame facing up.  Wet bison robes, shorn of all hair, were placed over the bottom and sides of the frame and fastened to the saplings.  The bullboat was then allowed to dry in the sun.  In a day or two, the robes shrank and hardened around the frame of willows.  In the final stage of construction, the Indians oiled the bison robes, making the small vessel waterproof.

Bullboats found widespread use on the Missouri main stem.  The small, lightweight vessels could be quickly built with a minimum of materials.  Native Americans did not travel long distances in the tiny watercraft.  More often than not, the tribes merely used the boats to cross from one side of the Missouri to the other.  Overturned bullboats lined both banks of the Missouri at popular crossing points, ready for the use of travelers.

Native navigators propelled the bullboat forward by kneeling in the hull of the vessel, leaning forward over the boat’s edge, and paddling with an oar stroke that extended straight out from the body, down into the water, and straight back toward the oarsman/woman.  A side paddle stroke, which moves in the water from the front to the rear on either side of the oarsman/woman, would have spun the circular bullboat in place, instead of pushing it forward.  Bullboats disappeared from the rivers and streams of the Upper Missouri country because of the destruction of the plains bison herds in the 1870s and 1880s and the confinement of the tribes to reservations – which severely restricted Indian mobility.  Although bullboats have not navigated the Missouri River and its tributaries in over 125 years, a watercraft, similar to the bullboat, is still in use over 8,000 miles away, in a vastly different environmental setting.

Phan Thiet is a city located on the south-central coast of Vietnam.  It lies five hours by bus from Ho Chi Minh City (known as Saigon prior to 1976).  Phan Thiet is famous for its seafood and its nuac mam (fish sauce).  Nuoc mam, which comes in an wide variety of colors, flavors, and consistencies, is made from fermented fish.  It smells awful, but tastes good.  The Vietnamese drizzle nuoc mam on everything from pork chops to white rice.  They also dip spring rolls or little morsels of meat into it.  Because the residents of Phan Thiet, and the surrounding ocean-side villages, are so dependent on the sea for their diet, large fishing fleets are anchored in the region’s small harbors, estuaries, and river mouths.  At Phan Thiet itself, hundreds of dark blue fishing boats, with sharp, high bows, can been seen in the harbor.  Dozens of smaller, round boats lie on the beaches that extend for miles northeast of the city.

These round vessels, named “thuyen thung,” resemble the Native American bullboats once prevalent across the Upper Missouri country.  Of course, the thuyen thung is not manufactured from bison robes and willow saplings.  Vietnamese boat builders, (in a manner similar to the Native Americans) utilize the construction materials available within the local environment, especially the palm trees growing on the fringes of the area’s beaches.  Craftsmen weave dried palm leaves, or thatch, to form the hull and sides of the boat.  A completed thuyen thung looks a lot like a big, woven basket.  A thick, brown lacquer is applied to the outside of the boat to waterproof it.  The top, open end of the boat is about four feet in diameter.  One or two people can comfortably occupy the inside of the boat.

The thuyen thung is a working boat.  It’s not used to transport people, nor is it visible on Vietnam’s inland rivers.  It’s a fishing vessel, employed in the shallow waters immediately off the Vietnamese coast or in the numerous estuaries bordering the South China Sea.  The Vietnamese paddle the thuyen thung from the front, like the Indians did the bullboat.  Fishers do not take the boat further than two kilometers from the shoreline, fearing the dangers that lurk in the open ocean, especially large waves.  It’s considered a fine fishing vessel, because it displaces very little water, is virtually unsinkable, rides atop the swells, and allows fishermen to approach schools of fish in silence.

Ten years ago, the thatch and lacquer thuyen thung dominated the seas off Vietnam. Today, a significant number of the boats are made out of fiberglass.  The newer boats are painted a standard, dull, light blue.  The modern, synthetic boats are more durable than the older, woven versions.  But the new boats lack the simple beauty and rustic charm of the traditional watercraft.  Also absent in the fiberglass vessels is the visible evidence of the handicraft required in the boat’s construction.  It’s not known whether the old-style thuyen thung will survive Vietnam’s fervent embrace of capitalism and modernity. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance the traditional boats will meet the same fate as the Native American bullboat.

In South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem’s political base consisted of Catholics, the Catholic Church hierarchy, the military’s officer corps (which was also heavily Catholic), landlords, the country’s business elite, and the urban middle class.  In a sense, the American Catholic Church, as well as the presidential administrations of Eisenhower and Kennedy represented another important segment of Diem’s base.  Without the backing of those groups, he risked losing his hold on power.  Because his political influence did not derive from the peasantry, and never had, Diem, during his nine years as the leader of South Vietnam, largely ignored the interests and aspirations of South Vietnam’s rural population.  He did not believe he needed the rural populace in order to remain in office. Another factor that contributed to his neglect of the peasantry related to the perceived military threat by the Communist North.  Up until at least 1959, neither Diem nor the Americans believed the Communists would conduct a large-scale, rural-based insurgency in the South.  The American Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in Saigon concluded that the northern-based Communists, if they did seek to topple the Saigon regime, would launch a conventional cross-border invasion.  MAAG advised Diem that he should train and equip the ARVN to confront North Vietnamese regulars rather than peasant guerrillas.  If an insurgency should emerge in the South, MAAG believed conventional ARVN forces could handle it.

Because he did not need the peasantry politically and because during the 1950s he did not believe it posed a military threat, Diem did little to redress the social, economic, and political ills that beset the countryside.  He did not implement an effective program of rural land redistribution, nor did he lessen the onerous land rental rates paid by millions of tenant farmers.  He failed to grant greater autonomy to village governments.  As a matter of fact, he did the reverse.  He abolished the traditional system of village administration, with its council of village elders, and replaced it with one more responsive to the Presidential Palace.  Against the wishes of President Kennedy, and the U.S. embassy staff in Saigon, he refused to grant the Buddhists a larger stake in his government and within the military establishment.  Diem did little to introduce democratic and economic reform to rural South Vietnamese society.  Rather, out beyond the cities, he worked to strengthen Vietnam’s old order against the revolutionary elements organizing against it.  In the end, his neglect of South Vietnam’s peasant class would prove to be his undoing.

Diem’s revealed his attitudes towards governance, and the peasantry in particular, in small, but illustrative ways.  When he became head of state in 1955, (he acquired the less influential premiership in 1954), he moved into the residence in Saigon of the former French colonial administrator for Cochinchina.  The governor general’s residence, later renamed the Presidential Palace, had been a symbol of French colonial power as recently as the early 1950s, when France still held sway in Vietnam.  The building had been designed and built to serve as a structural representation of French colonial dominance, architectural sophistication and superior French culture.  The building could not have been further, perceptually and physically, from the dwellings occupied by millions of Vietnamese peasants.  Diem took up residence in the building to send a message to his compatriots that he, a Vietnamese nationalist, had supplanted the French governor general at the top of the established order.  In choosing to live in such a palatial home, Diem indicated that he would maintain the old order, rather than deconstruct it. Vietnamese administrators would replace the French in South Vietnam’s political hierarchy.

Diem’s official residence contrasted sharply with that of Ho Chi Minh.  When the Viet Minh marched into Hanoi in the summer of 1954, after spending eight years in the hills of Tonkin, Ho refused to reside in the former governor general’s residence in the northern capital.  Eventually, in 1958, he moved into a traditional Vietnamese stilt house built behind the governor general’s mansion.  In choosing to live in such a simple hut, Ho conveyed to the people of the DRV that he had no intention of upholding the old French order.  Rather, he, and the Communist Party, stood for revolutionary change.  On its surface, the dwelling of a head of state would not appear to have much meaning.  But in Vietnam, in the 1950s, the place of residence of Diem and Ho spoke volumes about each man’s political leanings.

The clothing worn by Diem and Ho also said much about each man.  Throughout Vietnam, peasant farmers wore a basic style of clothing, designed for utility rather than fashion.  In the 1960s, American GIs referred to peasant garb as “pajamas” because of its resemblance to American sleep wear.  Peasants commonly donned collarless, long sleeve, lightweight cotton shirts that they buttoned down the front.  Pants were made with the same lightweight cotton.  Peasants preferred black or blue gray colored pants and shirts. Both the shirt and pants were worn loosely over the body.  Thin loose-fitting cotton cloth kept the body cool in Vietnam’s tropical heat, while the baggy long-sleeve shirts and pants kept the sun off the arms and legs.  The pantaloons did not extend downward to the tops of the shoes in the manner of Western-style pants.  Vietnamese farmers wore their pants high – in a style that Americans called “high waters.”  The reason the peasants wore their pants above their ankles had to do, in fact, with water.  Long pants, worn low to the ground, would have collected mud and grim – which were ubiquitous features of the Vietnamese landscape.  Diem never wore peasant garb.  He did not want to project the image of a commoner.  Rather, he sought to portray himself, through his wardrobe, as both an old-style mandarin, and a modern, westernized Vietnamese.  Occasionally, he donned the hat and long frock of a traditional Vietnamese mandarin.  But more often than not, he dressed in modern attire, which included a white shirt and tie, a double-breasted suit, long pants, and fine leather shoes.  His clothing marked him as educated, urbane and as a member of the upper class – everything the rural peasant was not.  On the off chance that he visited the countryside, he still dressed in formal wear, including the double-breasted suit and leather shoes.  Standing next to impoverished peasants, the visible contrast between Diem and his rural countrymen could not have been greater.  It was obvious he had little in common with the peasantry.  And he made no effort to hide the vast differences between his world and theirs.  In the early 1960s, Roger Hilsman, who worked for the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research remarked on Diem’s lack of connection with the peasant class.  He stated, “Diem has never had widespread popular appeal and support, even during his period of greatest achievement, 1955-58…he has not attempted to identify himself intimately with the peasants.  Relatively few peasants have ever seen Diem or heard him speak, and there are probably many others who are not aware that he is head of the government.” [Pentagon Papers, Volume II, 708]

Ho Chi Minh, on the other hand, dressed in the simple clothing of the peasant.  He often wore rubber sandals on his feet, baggy black “high-waters” pants, and a military-style shirt over his thin frame.  During the chilly winter months, when temperatures in Hanoi could dip down into the 40s Fahrenheit, Ho dressed in an unfashionable quilted cotton coat known as a “Mao” jacket, which Chinese Communist soldiers made famous during the Korean Conflict.  Through his clothing, Ho projected an image of a man of the people, while Diem came across as an effete elitist.

But it was in public policy that Diem’s attitudes toward the rural populace became most apparent.  Specifically, Diem’s advocacy of rural resettlement showed his antipathy toward South Vietnam’s peasant class.  In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Diem saw rural resettlement as the means of not only checking the rising influence of the Vietcong in the countryside, but also as a way of extending the established order’s power outside the urban centers.

Diem and his mercurial brother Nhu viewed the rural hamlet, and its residents, as the primary impediment to the integration and modernization of South Vietnam.  They wanted to break down the physical and political barriers between the hamlet and the central government; doing so, they believed, would eliminate the peasantry’s parochialism, xenophobia, and conservatism – all the factors preventing South Vietnam’s modernization.  The Ngo brothers’ that the peasants, once herded into resettlement camps, would be exposed to modern amenities such as electricity, medical care, and radio.  Rural children would be educated in Government-run schools.  The health, education, and living standards of the peasantry would increase in the camps.  Resettlement camps would be cleaner, the housing better, and life would be founded on scientific principals.  Resettlement, or so the Ngos thought, would rapidly move South Vietnam from feudalism to modernism.  What took Europe 500 years to accomplish, the South Vietnamese would achieve in just a few years.  All of this, it was hoped, would strengthen the South Vietnamese state.

Rural resettlement entailed the movement of the rural populace to areas under GVN control.  Although both American and GVN officials often referred to the various resettlement schemes of the 1950s and 1960s as part of the Government’s pacification program, pacification was in fact something altogether different.  Pacification depended on winning hearts and minds.  It involved convincing the peasantry to throw in its lot with the Government and to become loyal citizens, willing to defend the GVN against the Vietcong.  Pacification experts agreed that winning the loyalty of the peasantry required political, economic, and social reforms, especially land redistribution and a lowering of land rental rates.  It also necessitated an end to the blatant corruption of provincial and district officials.  Because of Diem’s unwillingness to implement the necessary reforms, true pacification of the countryside never took place during his time in office.  In lieu of reform, Diem opted for resettlement as a means of checking Vietcong influence in the countryside.

British counter-insurgency expert Sir Robert G. K. Thompson, whose ideas served as the basis for what would become the Strategic Hamlet Program, argued that the concentration of the rural population in “secure” hamlets would go a long way toward the defeat of the Vietcong.  In Government-controlled hamlets, the Vietcong would lose access to the rural peasantry, which supplied the Vietcong with recruits, porters, rice, taxes, intelligence, and safe haven.  Absent peasant support, the Vietcong insurgency would wither and die.  In the parlance of counter-insurgency, placing the rural population in areas under Government supervision would dry up the sea through which the Communist fish swam.  Rural resettlement would also maintain the established order.  It would not require any reform of the economic or political system, nor would it threaten the standing of the Church, landed elite, or merchant class.  As a matter of fact, resettlement would actually strengthen the established order.  In resettlement camps, the Government would be in a better position to ensure the payment of taxes; landlords would be able to collect rents without fear of retribution from the Vietcong; recalcitrant Buddhists and Vietcong sympathizers would be monitored, harassed, and jailed; and the rural populace would be fed a daily dose of Diemist propaganda.

The American and South Vietnamese proponents of resettlement made a number of assumptions about the peasantry and its likely response to resettlement; all of which later proved to be incorrect.  First, officials believed the GVN and U.S. would do a better job at resettlement than the French, who had tried it and failed at it. [PP, Vol.II, 130]  Second, they thought the South Vietnamese rural population wanted security from the Vietcong above all else and that once provided that security in strategic hamlets, the rural peasantry would become loyal citizens of the Republic of Vietnam, regardless of whether the government provided the promised modern services or not.  Third, they believed that the GVN would actually deliver the governmental services promised to the rural peasantry as part of any resettlement program.  Fourth, they concluded that resettlement would weaken the Vietcong and contribute to the eventual defeat of the insurgency.

One of Kennedy’s most forthright, and perceptive advisors, Michael V. Forrestal, worried about these assumptions.  He admitted to the president in December, 1962, that U.S. officialdom really did not know the thinking of South Vietnam’s peasantry.  Because the Americans and GVN lacked intelligence on peasant beliefs, the outcome of the GVN’s resettlement program remained unknown.  Rural resettlement could go either way – becoming a resounding success or a catastrophic failure.  He wrote to JFK, “…the basic question of the whole war – is again the attitude of the villagers.  It is difficult, if not impossible, to assess how the villagers really feel and the only straws in the wind point in different directions.” [Pentagon Papers, Volume II, 718]

Rural resettlement took many forms in the 1950s and 1960s.  The names of the various programs changed through time, but the goals of each program remained essentially the same – deny the Vietcong access to the peasantry by relocating, or in some cases concentrating, the population in hamlets under Government control.  In the latter years of his administration, Diem initiated three resettlement programs.

The Agroville Program began in 1959.  The Government erected agrovilles along known Vietcong infiltration routes, in long-held Vietcong districts, and adjacent to the highway approaches to Saigon.  U.S. and GVN officials hoped the residents inside the new, fortified agrovilles would disrupt the movement of Vietcong military units, hinder the transfer of Communist supplies, and protect the South Vietnamese capital from Vietcong infiltrators.  [Spector, Advice and Support, 332-333].  But the program, like so many implemented by the Saigon regime, experienced problems from the start.  Construction of the agrovilles was to be accomplished by volunteer labor.  Peasants, convinced of the benefits of the agrovilles, would freely participate in building the camps.  But it did not work out that way.  A significant, but indeterminate, number of peasants did not want to leave their villages and hamlets-of-origin.  As a result, the Government forced thousands of peasants to build the agrovilles, occasionally under armed guard.  Rural resident, Mrs. Nguyen Thi Dinh recalled that in 1959, “As Tet drew near the Americans and Diem intensified their pressure to have the agroville completed.  They even brought in conscripted laborers from all six provinces in central Nam Bo to work on the agroville.  Every day, more than 10,000 people lived at the site in extremely crowded conditions.” [Gettleman, Vietnam and America, 176]

The conscripted labor associated with the agroville program reminded the peasants of the old French corvee system.  The French colonial administration had required Vietnamese peasants to provide the private or public sector a certain number of days each year of unpaid labor.  Corvee laborers worked under horrendous conditions.  Some plantation owners denied their corvee workers adequate food, shelter, and health care, which resulted in the death of a large percentage of workers.  Corvee labor represented one of the worst forms of French colonial exploitation of the Vietnamese peasantry.  Peasants deeply resented it.  Because Diem and the Americans utilized corvee labor to construct agrovilles, untold numbers of peasants linked the Diem regime, and the Americans, to the previous, much-despised French system and to French colonialism.  To make matters worse, Government troops destroyed peasant hamlets to induce the movement of villagers.  Mrs. Thi Dinh stated that at Thanh Thoi village, Mo Cay District, “Every day, they [Government troops] set fire to houses, cut down trees and crushed lush rice fields with tractors.” [Gettleman, Vietnam and America, 174]  Without homes to return to, the peasants had to stay in the agrovilles.

Corrupt Government officials diverted the program’s construction materials for their own personal use or for sale on the black market.  Agrovilles that had been planned as model villages resembled shantytowns.  Peasants erected hastily built huts with the tattered remnants of the destroyed hamlets or with whatever materials they could find in the local area.

The National Liberation Front, the political arm of the Vietcong, advocated an end to the Agroville Program and the return of the people to their original hamlets.  This policy made the Vietcong widely popular in rural South Vietnam.  [Gettleman, Vietnam and America, 189.]  Vietcong opposition also provided the peasantry with the ability to channel their their own opposition to the program.  For instance, few agrovilles contained men of military age.  Able-bodied men left the agrovilles to join the Vietcong. Later, these same men, returned to the camps as armed guerrillas with the hope of liberating their families.

A combination of government corruption, peasant resistance, Vietcong attacks, and the lackadaisical Government defense of completed agrovilles caused the failure of the program in 1961.  A member of the Vietcong at the time recalled, “In 1959 Diem attempted to implement a homegrown version [of resettlement] through an ambitious, countrywide plan to construct self-contained, modern villages called agrovilles.  From the start the peasants reacted angrily….  After a year or so, peasant outrage reached such a pitch that the government was forced to abandon the project.  None of the objectives were achieved, and a great many country people were alienated [from the Saigon regime].  Nevertheless, the idea kept simmering, reappearing in 1962 as the strategic hamlet program.” [Truong, Vietcong Memoir, 47]

The Agroville Program, rather than win the loyalty of the resettled peasantry, destroyed any allegiance, however weak, the affected peasants may have had for the Diem regime.  The program’s only saving grace, for both the peasantry and the political prospects of the Diem regime, was its limited scope.  The majority of agrovilles existed in the vicinity of Saigon.  It is difficult to quantify the effects of the program on the Communist insurgency.  But there is no evidence that it hurt the insurgency.  Rather, it likely strengthened the insurgency in significant ways.  A major rise in Vietcong strength coincided with the years of the Agroville Program.  The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research reported at the end of 1962, “Vietcong capabilities have increased considerably during the past three years.  In 1959 a relatively small but effective military-political apparatus operating largely in the Mekong delta provinces, the Viet Cong has since grown into a formidable force operating throughout the countryside….”  “…Viet Cong hard-core personnel has grown from an estimated 4,000 in April 1960 to about 23,000 in October 1962.” [Pentagon Papers, Volume II, 694]

Despite the failure of the Agroville Program, Diem did not abandon the goal of resettling South Vietnam’s rural population.  In 1961, the regime merely renamed the agrovilles as agro-hamlets and thus was born a new program.  Later in 1961, the GVN began planning for its most ambitious resettlement scheme to date – the Strategic Hamlet Program. [PP, Vol. II, 132-134]  The Strategic Hamlet Program officially began in March 1962 as “Operation Sunrise” in Binh Duong Province north of Saigon.  Binh Duong had a heavy Vietcong presence in 1962.  Only 10 of 46 villages in Binh Duong remained under GVN control at the commencement of the program. [PP, Vol.II, 144]  The GVN started by constructing three strategic hamlets in the province.  Contrary to the recommendation of Robert G. K. Thompson, Diem opted to start the Strategic Hamlet Program in Binh Duong rather than in a province with less of a Vietcong presence.  [PP, Vol.II, 129]  This would prove to be a mistake, one of the many mistakes made during the life of the program.  The next phase of the program entailed the construction of strategic hamlets in the province of Phu Yen in central South Vietnam.  The GVN hoped to build 80 strategic hamlets in Phu Yen by the end of 1962. [Pentagon Papers, Volume II, 674]

The Strategic Hamlet Program had four distinct types of hamlets.  The first type did not require extensive fortification because the GVN dominated the surrounding territory. Local inhabitants quickly constructed lightly-defended hamlets; while the villagers themselves provided for the defense of the hamlet.  In the second type of hamlet, the Vietcong contested the GVN presence in the surrounding territory.  Consequently, the hamlet had stronger defense works.  ARVN and local militia units reinforced the local hamlet defenders.  In the third type of hamlet, the GVN erected large, heavily fortified strategic hamlets in the midst of long-held Vietcong territory.  The ARVN forced the local residents of the area, who were likely Vietcong sympathizers or active members of the Vietcong, to relocate into the strategic hamlet.  Once there, the residents remained under armed guard.  Diem and Nhu planned on establishing a fourth type of strategic hamlet, but the GVN never achieved the area security necessary for its construction.  This strategic hamlet would be built next to Vietcong base areas.  Its residents would consist of patriotic, motivated young people, who would live in a communal setting.  The hamlet would be modeled on the Israeli kibbutz.  [Pentagon Papers, Volume II, 684-685]

To create heavily fortified hamlets, the Government excavated a trench around the huts.  Each trench possessed a standard width of ten feet at its top and a depth of five feet.  Construction workers then placed closely spaced bamboo spikes in the trench, with the sharp ends pointing outward toward the hamlet perimeter.  An earthen rampart (also five feet high by ten feet wide) stood just inside the trench line.  It too had a system of bamboo spikes placed along the entire length of its outside wall.  Along the outermost perimeter, work crews erected a barbed wire fence or in some cases a bamboo or wooden fence.  If the site lacked construction materials for a fence, thorn hedgerows substituted for barbed wire, bamboo, and wood.  A concrete pillbox or watch tower often complemented the defensive works.  In areas with less of a Vietcong presence, a hamlet’s defensive works only consisted of a crude bunker protected by a trench and some barbed wire.  The hamlet itself might not have any fortifications surrounding it. [Rand, Vietnamese Strategic Hamlets, 4-5]

Not all rural residents had to be regrouped into strategic hamlets.  In areas considered safe from the Vietcong, the GVN allowed the residents to remain in their original hamlet.  A few strands of barbed wire strung around the perimeter of the hamlet, along with the construction of a guardhouse, converted the original hamlet into a strategic hamlet.  However, in contested areas, where the Vietcong actively vied with the GVN for the allegiance of the populace, the Government forced villagers into smaller, more defensible hamlets.  These concentrated strategic hamlets required the removal of at least a portion of the population.  The most extensive regrouping occurred in known Vietcong areas. [Rand, Vietnamese Strategic Hamlets, 7]  GVN officials considered the population in these places to be solidly Vietcong.  Peasants in such areas were forcibly removed to entirely new hamlets with the strongest fortifications.

In the most heavily defended strategic hamlets, ARVN soldiers, GVN police, and local militia monitored the movements of the residents.  Villagers could not freely come and go as they pleased, which was what they had been able to do in their old hamlets.  Instead, they needed approval to leave the strategic hamlets to run errands, to travel to another village, or to sale produce at a nearby market.  At night, Government soldiers barred anyone from leaving the compounds, fearing that if they left, they would run off and join the Vietcong.  In strategic hamlets made up of involuntary residents, the people became nothing more than prisoners.

During daylight hours, farmers left the strategic hamlets to work in their rice paddies.  But because the Government built some strategic hamlets at some distance from the original hamlet, farmers had to walk further to reach their fields.  Longer walking distances to and from the rice paddies acted as another sore point for residents of the strategic hamlets.

The Government erected new strategic hamlets along roadways, road junctures, or adjacent to navigable canals.  This was done for very specific reasons. [PP, Volume II, 750]  The Government relied on the roads and canals to move its mechanized troops.  Government officials believed that along the roadways and canals, the ARVN could quickly reach a besieged strategic hamlet via armored personnel carrier or gunboat. Unfortunately for the peasants, new strategic hamlet sites lacked coconut trees, hedgerows, or vegetation of any kind, in contrast to the lush environments of the original villages.  During the daylight hours, the residents, who overwhelmingly consisted of the old, the young, and the infirm, broiled under the searing tropical sun.  Without hedgerows and thickets between the huts, there existed less privacy for each household.  Often, newly constructed strategic hamlets sat on a barren, bulldozed slab of earth.  During the dry season, after months of relentless heat and sun, the ground became a fine powder, which blew away during windstorms.  The shoddy huts, with their odd assortment of construction materials, could not keep the dust at bay.  It filtered into the huts and covered everything inside with a thin layer of dirt.  The quality of life in the strategic hamlets was far less than in the old villages.  Because of the corruption of GVN officials in-charge of the program, residents did not receive the promised amenities.  Rather than a new, modern life in the hamlets, residents found a desolate, dirty, isolated existence under strict government control.  Predictably, the peasants resisted resettlement.

In the spring of 1962, as the Strategic Hamlet Program began to pick-up momentum, U.S. Ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote President Kennedy, warning him of the risks of U.S. support for rural resettlement.  He told the president, “The political effects of some of the measures which pacification requires or is believed to require, including the concentration of the population, relocation of villages, and the burning of old villages, may be damaging to those and especially to Westerners associated with it…We should disassociate ourselves from action, however necessary, which seems to be directed at the villagers, such as the new concentration program.”  Kennedy ignored Galbraith’s advice.  Instead, he fully committed the U.S. to the program.

Initially, Dean Rusk’s State Department, through U.S. AID, had responsibility for providing the money and construction materials for the program.  But late in the summer of 1962, McNamara’s DoD assumed primary responsibility for providing the financing and materials to carry it out. [Pentagon Papers, Volume II, 670-671]

David Halberstam, who wrote for the “New York Times” in 1962, during the heyday of the program’s implementation, recognized the underlying reason for the “new” resettlement program.  He wrote, “It was also clear that Nhu planned to use the strategic hamlet program, which was designed to separate the peasants from the Vietcong, as a means of controlling the population….” [Halberstam, Quagmire, 32]  In the summer of 1962, the State Department’s Roger Hilsman warned Kennedy administration officials that the GVN could not afford to be perceived by the peasantry as attempting to control them.  If this happened, the peasantry would turn against the Government. [Pentagon Papers, Volume II, 680]

American observers learned of problems with the program only weeks after its official beginning.  Rand Corporation employees John C. Donnell and Gerald C. Hickey traveled through several provinces in South Vietnam between January and April 1962, just as the Strategic Hamlet Program began.  The two men noted numerous problems with the program.  In Binh Duong Province, where the GVN constructed the first strategic hamlets as part of Operation Sunrise, they noted that “…the peasants are paying for the project in the form of obligatory communal labor on digging and construction, through the consequently reduced yield of secondary crops, by the contribution of local materials including bamboo, and by payments for purchase of concrete fence posts and barbed wire.  They also have to sacrifice the land put out of cultivation by earthworks.” “…Operation Sunrise…has come closer to arousing peasant dissatisfaction over the program here than elsewhere.  Compulsory regrouping within hamlet perimeters also has caused dissatisfaction.” [Rand, Vietnamese Strategic Hamlets, vii]

Other problems observed by Hickey and Donnel included: farmers being forced to work without pay on strategic hamlets located as far as 100 kilometers from their homes; local Government forces abusing hamlet residents; some farmers being required to work up to 90 days on strategic hamlets without any financial remuneration at all; and the Government, although promising to provide resettled peasants with 1,000 piastres (approximately $14.00 USD) to help offset the costs of moving to the strategic hamlets, not providing farmers with the resettlement payment. [Rand, Vietnamese Strategic Hamlets, 11, 12, 13, 26]  The CIA’s Saigon station chief acknowledged in mid-1962 that, “…peasants reportedly feel some initial resentment at changes enforced in way of life imposed by program, as well as exactions of money and labor.” [Pentagon Papers, Volume II, 687]

These initial misgivings did nothing to lessen the Kennedy administration’s support for the program.  With active U.S. assistance, the Diem regime constructed strategic hamlets at a feverish pace in 1962, relocating a far larger portion of the rural populace in a handful of months than had been done during all the years of the Agroville Program.  The hectic pace of construction was reflected in statistics on the program.  Even though the program had started in March 1962, by June 30, 1962, the GVN claimed to have completed 2,000 strategic hamlets.  [Pentagon Papers, Volume II, 686]  At this time, the CIA station chief in Saigon reported that the Strategic Hamlet Program had become the GVN’s primary weapon against the Vietcong insurgency.  He wrote, “…strategic hamlet program has grown in recent months into government’s major ideological and institutional tool in attempting [to] generate popular consensus in support [of] efforts to defeat enemy.”  The Kennedy administration and the Joint Chiefs of Staff fully supported Diem’s decision to make the program the primary counter-insurgency effort of the GVN. [PP, Vol.II, 148-149, 684]  By the end of the summer of 1962, the GVN claimed that 33% of South Vietnam’s population, or 4,322,034 people lived in strategic hamlets. [PP, Vol.II, 150-151]  By mid-October 1962, the GVN reported that a total of 3,000 strategic hamlets had been completed. [Pentagon Papers, Volume II, 700-701]

Quickly constructing strategic hamlets, and hurriedly pushing the peasantry out of their original homes, was exactly the wrong approach to resettlement.  Halberstam, who supported U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but who opposed some of the methods used to fight the war, observed, “…the success of the [strategic hamlet] program in the Delta rested largely on the strategy of building hamlets slowly, starting with one secure area and then slowly branching out and gathering other villages into a protective umbrella, thus creating a sense of mutual protection through interlocking units.  But this type of construction never took place.  Instead, hamlets went up helter-skelter, lacking any overall, Delta-wide plan of priorities.”  [Halberstam, Quagmire, 105-106].  Michael V. Forrestal agreed with Halberstam’s assessment.  He noted that the Strategic Hamlet Program became quickly overextended.  The GVN built hamlets too far from military support.  He observed, “One result of the lack of an overall plan is the proliferation of strategic hamlets that are inadequately equipped and defended or that are built prematurely in exposed areas.” [Pentagon Papers, Volume II, 720]

The accelerated pace of the program, and its harmful effects on the peasantry, surprised not only Halberstam, but also Stanley Karnow, Neil Sheehan, and Bernard Fall – three keen observers of the Vietnam scene.  Karnow, who served as a reporter for the “New York Times” wrote, “Ancient [settlement] patterns were wantonly disrupted in many areas.  In the Mekong Delta, for instance, where communities were traditionally strung out along canals, sometimes for miles, villagers were concentrated, often under duress, in barbed wire enclosures from which they had to walk long distances to the fields.” [Karnow, Vietnam: A History, 274]  Sheehan seconded Karnow’s observation.  He noted that in order to squeeze a village’s population into a more defensible strategic hamlet, the huts not fitting inside the smaller perimeter were destroyed.  This action not only compressed the size of the strategic hamlet, it established clear fields of fire for the defenders of the new, smaller hamlet. [Sheehan, Bright Shining Lie, 309]  Bernard Fall, recalled a speech by Diem to the national assembly on October 1, 1962, only seven months after the commencement of the strategic hamlet program.  Diem told the legislators, “…at the present time, the population living in safety and revolution inside the strategic hamlets already built (3,074) or about to be completed (2,679), numbers 7,267,517 souls.” [Fall, Two Vietnams, 376]

If Diem’s statistics are to be believed, approximately half of South Vietnam’s population had either been relocated to a strategic hamlet or were about to be relocated to one.  The implications of this program for the rural population cannot be underestimated.  Rural South Vietnam was being turned upside down in just a few months.  Granted, villagers were not moved far from their original hamlets, and some actually stayed in the old hamlet but within a more confined space.  But the results of the relocations were similar to any migration, loss of social cohesion as residents of different villages and hamlets were bunched together in the same strategic hamlet, disruption of economic activity as peasants moved further away from rice plots and markets, disorientation resulting from a strange, unfamiliar place of residence, and the difficulty of adjusting to new work schedules and living arrangements.  A resident of a strategic hamlet stated, “We have no solidarity here, no cooperation.  And so if the Viet Cong come, no matter where we are, they can take advantage of us.” [Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake, 125]  And take advantage they did.  Viet Cong recruitment in the countryside rose noticeably in 1962 and 1963, coinciding with the Strategic Hamlet program’s most intense period of construction. An American remarked, “Nor were the Viet Cong having any trouble finding recruits.  The Strategic Hamlet Program was a bonanza for them.” [Olson, Where the Domino Fell, 97].

In spite of the program’s obvious shortcomings, the Kennedy Administration never wavered in its support of the program.  Throughout 1962 and 1963, the U.S. provided administrative support, advise, money, and construction materials to the program.  Neither Kennedy, the U.S. Mission in Saigon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. AID, nor McNamara’s DoD, made any effort to stop the program or to slow its implementation.  As a matter of fact, Robert McNamara, one of Kennedy’s closest advisors, was regularly kept abreast of developments related to the program.  As a matter of fact, McNamara’s DoD supplied hamlet kits to the Diem government.  The kits consisted of construction materials, such as tin sheeting and barbed wire.  In 1962, the DoD increased the number of kits to the regime so that it could accelerate its construction schedule.  [PP, Vol.II, 152]  With the Americans fully backing him, Diem pursued relocation with a ferver only matched by his religious convictions. [PP, Vol.II, 142-143]

The year 1963 saw the program shift into overdrive.  “On April 11, 1963, almost a year after the program’s official launching, it was reported that 5,917…hamlets had been built, housing 8,150,187 inhabitants out of a total [South Vietnamese] population given as 13,813,066.” [Fall, Two Vietnams, 376].  By the middle of June, 1963, the GVN had a erected…6,800 hamlets – a nearly 900 hamlet increase since April.” [Sheehan, Bright Shining Lie, 338]  In the month of August, 1963, alone, the government claimed to have completed 875 new strategic hamlets. [Palmer, Summons of the Trumpet, 41].  Then, just as the program reached its zenith, Diem’s hold on South Vietnam slipped away.

In August, 1963, Vietcong guerrillas attacked the first, model strategic hamlet at Ben Tuong in Ben Cat District, not far from the Lai Khe rubber plantation in Binh Duong Province. [PP, Vol.II, 149]  Guerrillas urged the residents to return to their old homes, then burned the hamlet to the ground.  The attack on Ben Tuong represented a harbinger of things to come.  It signaled the beginning of the Vietcong’s campaign to destroy the hated strategic hamlets.  Vietcong attacks against the hamlets increased in September and October 1963.

The Communist campaign against the Strategic Hamlet Program reflected the Vietcong’s increased confidence, strength, and areal reach.  Vietcong strength rose dramatically in 1962 and 1963.  In 1962, the Vietcong increased to 23,000 “elite” fighting men and an estimated 100,000 irregulars and sympathizers.  This was likely an underestimation. [PP, Vol. II, 690]  In 1963, the number of fighting men jumped to 140,000. [Gibson, The Perfect War, 332]  The increasing strength of the Vietcong resulted directly from the failures of the Strategic Hamlet Program.  Thousands upon thousands of peasants flocked to the Vietcong banner in response to the Government repression, administrative incompetence, police abuse, and official corruption they witnessed in the hamlets.

In summer 1963, JFK began to reconsider U.S. support for Diem.  The Buddhist Crisis, in conjunction with widespread peasant dissatisfaction with the GVN, and the increase in Vietcong influence in the countryside, caused Kennedy to reassess the U.S.-South Vietnamese relationship.  Kennedy’s main concern was that Diem was losing the war, and that if he was allowed to remain in office, the Communists would eventually take South Vietnam.  But before he abandoned Diem, Kennedy sent Maxwell Taylor and Robert McNamara to Saigon to meet with the South Vietnamese president and assess the situation prevailing in the countryside.

In a meeting in late September 1963 between Diem and U.S. officials, who included Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, McNamara, and Taylor, Diem’s ignorance of the situation prevailing in the countryside became readily apparent.  Diem claimed, “…The war was going well, thanks in large measure to the strategic hamlets’ [sic] program.  Due to that program the VC enemy was having increasing difficulties in finding food and recruits, and was being steadily forced into increasingly difficult and unrewarding tactical situations….”  [Pentagon Papers, Volume II, 749]  This is exactly what was NOT happening in the countryside.  Diem went so far as to claim that the formation of big Vietcong units, of company size and larger, meant the strategic hamlet program was working.  The Communists had to form larger-sized units because the countryside had become so hostile to their presence.  According to Diem, the GVN was winning the war. [Pentagon Papers, Volume II, 750]

What was surprising about these statements isn’t that Diem made them.  He was known to engage in such flights of fancy.  What is shocking about Diem’s statements is that top U.S. officials believed them.  After returning to Washington, Taylor and McNamara informed the president that, “…the strategic hamlet program is sound in concept, and generally effective in execution….”  Taylor and McNamara went so far as to claim that the insurgency could be reduced to nothing more than “sporadic banditry” by the end of 1964 in all the Corps areas except the delta.  “Victory in IV [the delta] will take longer – at least well into 1965.” [Pentagon Papers, Volume II, 757]  Taylor’s and McNamara’s report on the war in South Vietnam, and the “success” of the counter-insurgency effort there, likely caused Kennedy to question whether Diem should be removed from power.

But less than three weeks later, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research provided Secretary of State Dean Rusk a very different assessment of the situation prevailing in South Vietnam than the one proffered to the president by McNamara and Taylor.  It is unknown whether Rusk passed the report on to Kennedy.  If he did, it may have given the president the hard facts he needed in order to support a coup against Diem.  The State Department report concluded, “Statistics show that the Viet Cong have accelerated their military and subversive effort since July 1963.” [PP, V.II, 771]  It continued, “On the basis of available statistical trends, there appear to have been a number of significant and unfavorable changes in the military situation in South Vietnam since July of this year.” [PP, V.II, 780]

In late summer, early fall 1963, U.S. officials, including the President, expressed an unwillingness to accept any responsibility for the decline in the GVN’s position.  No one admitted that the botched Strategic Hamlet Program had been the primary reason for the decline in GVN popular support in rural South Vietnam.  Instead, American officials placed the blame for the dismal state of affairs in South Vietnam on the shoulders of Diem and Diem alone.  The Americans hadn’t screwed up, Diem had screwed up. Kennedy’s attempt to distance himself, and his administration, from the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam became apparent in an interview with Walter Cronkite on September 2, 1963, at the Kennedy property at Hyannis Port.  Beneath a glaring sun, Kennedy told Cronkite, “I don’t think that unless a greater effort is made by the Government to win popular support that the war can be won out there.  In the final analysis, it is their war.  They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. [Williams, America in Vietnam, 198-199]  What Kennedy did not mention is that U.S. support of the Strategic Hamlet Program had contributed mightily to South Vietnam’s waning fortunes.  Kennedy blamed Diem for the GVN’s troubles, even though he deserved a good deal of blame.  Kennedy spoke to Cronkite to deflect the media’s attention away from his own failed Vietnam policy.  In other words, it wasn’t Kennedy’s war after all.  It was Diem’s war, and Diem had screwed it up.  If that line of reasoning was to be believed by the media and the American public, than all of the U.S. monetary aid and military assistance given to the Diem regime over the past two and a half years had to be ignored.  In reality, the war was as much Kennedy’s as it was Diem’s.  Without U.S. assistance, the GVN could not have continued the struggle nor implemented the Strategic Hamlet Program. Kennedy’s words to Cronkite must have been difficult for the proud Diem to have heard coming from a supposed ally, someone who had fully backed his construction of strategic hamlets.

By late October, 1963, Kennedy was willing to let Diem go.  The primary reason Kennedy backed a coup against Diem had to do with Diem’s lack of popular support.  Kennedy believed that without the backing of a majority of the South Vietnamese people, especially the rural populace, Diem and the GVN could not defeat the Vietcong insurgency.  A CIA report from mid-1963 noted that Diem had never gained the loyalty of the peasantry.  It stated, “…the GVN has been hampered by its lack of confidence in and its inability to engage the understanding and support of a considerable portion of the Vietnamese people – including large segments of the educated classes and the peasantry.” [Pentagon Papers, Volume II, 730]  On November 2, 1963, a group of disgruntled South Vietnamese generals disposed Diem in a coup.

Diem lacked the personality and the leadership qualities necessary to win the allegiance of the rural peasantry.  His monopolization of power, his promotion of Catholics to positions of influence, and his reliance on his brother Nhu further alienated him from the majority of South Vietnamese.  Diem certainly had his problems.  But it was the Strategic Hamlet Program and the peasant opposition to it that caused the GVN to lose so much ground in 1962 and 1963.  Kennedy, as much as Diem, held responsibility for the debacle that became the Strategic Hamlet Program.  That program made millions of South Vietnamese enemies of the GVN and its American ally.  The Americans who backed the coup against Diem hoped that his removal from office would stop, and possibly reverse, the downward slide of the GVN in rural South Vietnam.  They hoped that better governance in the provinces would be the result of the coup.  But the reverse happened.  Diem’s removal actually accelerated the decline in the countryside.  At the time, the U.S. Mission concluded that the worsening situation in rural South Vietnam resulted from the political chaos and successive coups taking place in the capital.  Political instability played a part in the loss of large swaths of the countryside in late 1963 and early 1964.  For example, the cabal of generals in-charge in Saigon after the coup removed the Diemist appointees at the district and provincial levels.  Because those appointees were not immediately replaced with new men, a political vacuum developed in the countryside.  In some areas, the Government presence simply vanished from the scene as officials were recalled to Saigon.  Military commanders refused to conduct military operations, fearful of upsetting the new leaders in Saigon or waiting for clear directives from the capital, which did not come in the chaos of late 1963 and early 1964.  The resulting political vacuum in the countryside enabled the Vietcong to make huge territorial and demographic gains.  However, it was continued peasant opposition to the Strategic Hamlet Program, and its American and GVN backers, that contributed most to the loss of the countryside.

Strategic hamlets became the first target of the Vietcong in the post-Diem era.  Hundreds disappeared in the months after the coup.  In striking at the strategic hamlets, the Vietcong acted as the liberators of the people and defenders of traditional village life against a tyrannical regime.  Once the peasants returned to their original villages, they became more easily controlled by the Vietcong.  With the rural population once again dispersed over a wider geographical area, it became more difficult for Government forces to control that population.  The Strategic Hamlet Program illustrated how the traditional dispersed settlement pattern in rural South Vietnam militarily favored the insurgents, while the concentration of the population along roadways and canals favored the Government.  For the Vietcong, returning the peasants to their villages was politically expedient and a military necessity if the insurgency was to survive and ultimately succeed.

As the Strategic Hamlet Program collapsed and the rural population dispersed again across the countryside, Vietcong strength rose.  In the early months of 1964, the U.S.’s Maxwell Taylor noted the ominous trends in the countryside.  He stated, “…there were signs of general deterioration in security throughout the country since the New Year.  The Vietcong were boldly attacking the strategic hamlets and in Binh Dinh province alone had severely damaged seventy-five in the first three months after Diem’s fall.  Governmental control of rural territory was diminishing and with it the freedom of circulation without armed escort.” [Taylor, Swords Plowshares, 309].  In early 1964, the country was going over to the Communists.  The trends were so negative, the Communists were making such huge advances with the rural populace and in acquiring territory, that if the trends continued unchecked South Vietnam would collapse, possibly before the end of 1964.

The enhanced power of the Vietcong was reflected in the number of armed guerrilla fighters.  Vietcong troop strength increased from 140,000, organized in mostly local, paramilitary, units in 1963, to over 500,000 in 1965, including main-force units of battalion and regimental size. [Gibson, The Perfect War, 332]  This increase in strength did not occur in isolation.  It stemmed from the failure of U.S. and GVN policy.  The Kennedy administration, and the Diem regime, had helped to make the Vietcong dominant in the countryside.

The United States, through the GVN, implemented a series of rural resettlement programs to pacify the countryside and defeat the Vietcong insurgency, including the formation of agrovilles (1959-1961) and strategic hamlets (1962-1963) and later the Hop Tac, Chien Thang, and New Life Hamlets.  But as U.S. Army General Douglas Kinnard admitted, “For a variety of reasons, all of these efforts failed.” [Kinnard, The War Managers, 100].  The anonymous author of the Pentagon Papers’ study on the Strategic Hamlet Program concluded, “The weight of evidence suggests that the Strategic Hamlet Program was fatally flawed in its conception by the unintended consequence of alienating many of those whose loyalty it aimed to win.” [PP, Vol.II, 131]

But the single greatest reason for their failure was the people’s resistance to resettlement.  Resettlement turned millions of peasants against the U.S. and GVN.  After the ill-treatment of such a large segment of the rural population, it was questionable that the U.S. could ever win their allegiance to the GVN.  The U.S. and Saigon regime may have lost the war to win the hearts and minds of rural South Vietnam as early as 1963.  And since the war was all about winning the loyalty of the peasantry, it could be argued that the U.S. may have lost the Vietnam War in 1962 and 1963, long before the big troop build-up of 1965-1968.

In 1891, the Corps began building a six-foot deep navigation channel along the Missouri from the river’s mouth to Kansas City.  In order to constrict the Missouri’s channel area and deepen the stream to six feet, Army engineers erected thousands of pile dikes and revetments along the river’s bank line.  It took the Corps over four decades to complete that navigation channel.  On June 27, 1932, in a ceremony at Kansas City’s waterfront, the bombastic Secretary of War, Patrick Hurley, declared the channel open to barge traffic.  But barge operators stayed clear of the Missouri.  The railroads and highways between St. Louis and Kansas City carried products cheaper and faster than the river route.

In the mid-1930s, the Roosevelt administration authorized and funded the extension of the six-foot navigation channel northward to Sioux City.  Federal officials believed a longer navigation channel, which extended further inland and opened a larger market area to river traffic, would surely attract barge operators to the stream.  In 1940, the Corps completed the navigation channel to Sioux City.  But the hoped-for barge traffic still did not materialize because the railroads continued to provide a cost-effective alternative.

Not long after the completion of the navigation channel to Sioux City, the Lower Missouri began to flood with alarming regularity.  The river bounded out of its constricted navigation channel in 1941, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, and 52.  Never before had the Missouri flooded so often.  The successive floods were the direct result of the completion of the Corps’ navigation channel.  At the time, people recognized the Corps’ culpability in the floods.  In 1944, Missourian J.A. Gray noted, “Now the river is gorged by piling dams, and the floods came [sic] twice a year – two last year and two this year….  What about the future?  Can anyone deny [flood] conditions are getting worse every year?  Of course the floods will be worse.  Until the obstructions [the pile dikes and revetments] are removed there is no hope for the valley.”

In order to halt the flooding, the Corps built five colossal dams in North and South Dakota between 1946 and 1966.  Officials believed the water storage capacity of the resultant reservoirs would compensate for the diminishment of the lower river’s conveyance capacity and the elimination of its natural water storage capacity, which had been provided by its former, wide channel area.  Essentially, the Corps exchanged the lower valley’s natural water storage capacity for artificial water storage capacity in the reservoirs.  The Army’s dam-building program also represented a great land swap. Native Americans in the Dakotas forfeited their agricultural lands for reservoir space while white farmers in the lower valley gained land in the river’s former channel area.  But to the consternation of the Corps, the big dams and reservoirs did not stop flooding in the lower valley.  The Missouri went out of its banks in 1960, 71, 73, 84, 93, 95, 97, 10, and of course in 2011.

Recently, the Corps’ John LaRandeau stated, “To say the [navigation] channel has resulted in increased flood heights is not true….”  In making that statement, LaRandeau knowingly deceived the public.  The historical, and hydrological, record proves without a doubt that the navigation channel has contributed to flooding along the Lower Missouri.  If you need further proof, look at the flood of 2011.  At the peak of last year’s high flows, the UNCHANNELIZED Missouri (the river reach without pile dikes and revetments) from Yankton to Ponca remained almost entirely within its banks.  But as soon as the floodwaters emanating from Gavin’s Point Dam reached the navigation channel at Ponca, the Missouri jumped its banks and shot out across the valley floor.  This is an indisputable, verifiable fact.

LaRandeau also asserted that, “Removing the [navigation] channel would make the river more unpredictable and meandering which would destabilize banks and threaten roads, farms, and towns up and down the river.”  This is another boldfaced lie.  The Dakota dams curtail the Lower Missouri’s ability to meander and erode by decreasing, but not eliminating, flood flows.  Flood flows are the single greatest cause of river meandering and bank erosion.  Last year, along the unchannelized reach, the Missouri did not dig a new course across the valley lowlands, even though its banks remain largely free of riprap.  Gavin’s Point Dam put the brakes on the river’s propensity to wander. LaRandeau also knows that a wider, unchannelized river could be engineered in such a way so as not to threaten roads, farms or towns.  The Corps has already successfully widened the river at several locations south of Sioux City, including the Boyer Chute and Lisbon Bottom.  Neither of those projects has resulted in damage to human constructs in the valley.  The Corps could replicate those projects up and down the river, without posing any risk to society.

Finally, the Corps and the miniscule Missouri River barge industry claim that the navigation channel must be maintained at great cost to society (in both taxpayer dollars and flood damages) because someday in the future – and they never specify when – barges just might make an appearance on the river.  This claim has been made since the early 1880s.  We should not be duped by it yet again.  The navigation channel has never lived up to the expectations of its backers.  It has never carried enough traffic to justify the cost of its construction.  It worsens flooding.  It represents one of the greatest environmental disasters in U.S. history.  It does not make an ounce of economic or environmental sense to maintain it.  It’s high time we envisioned a different river- one appropriate for our times.

Since the end of the last ice age, the Missouri River has experienced extreme fluctuations in volume.  The Missouri has always bounced up and down because the weather across the Great Plains quickly shifts between hot and cold and between bone dry and monsoonal.

Since last year, Missouri Basin residents have witnessed firsthand the river’s capricious character.  In June 2011, the Upper Missouri (the river northwest of Sioux City) hauled an astounding 13.8 million-acre-feet (MAF) of water.  Never before, in 114 years of recording keeping, had the Upper Missouri carried so much water in one month. By the end of 2011, a total of 62.3 (MAF) entered the Upper Missouri.  That equaled two and a half times the upper river’s normal annual runoff of 24.8 MAF.  Last year’s runoff shattered the previous high flow record of 49 MAF, set back in 1997.

This year, valley residents experienced an altogether different river.  Last month, the upper river’s inflows amounted to a paltry 285,000 acre-feet.  That was the lowest runoff ever recorded for the month of September.  The Army Corps predicts the Missouri’s total runoff in 2012 will equal 19 MAF, or less than a third of last year’s total discharge.  The reason for the low runoff is the ongoing drought gripping the Great Plains.

We know the Missouri has always gone up and down.  But what is different about the river now is that it is jumping up higher and dropping down lower than ever before.  We have had the highest monthly flow rate and the lowest September flow rate in recorded history in just the past 16 months.  This is a very disturbing trend.  It means the Missouri is becoming a wilder, less predictable, and more dangerous river.  The Corps has long tried to keep the Missouri caged behind riprap.  (By the way, the Corps loves rock.  It believes nearly every hydrological problem can be solved with more rock).  But this new, erratic river is going to increasingly defy the Corps’ efforts to not only manage it, but to contain it.

In April 2011, the Bureau of Reclamation released a report that examined the future effects of climate change on the Missouri’s hydrology.  The Bureau concluded that increases in annual precipitation across the northern plains would result in a corresponding increase in the river’s mean annual runoff at Omaha of 9.7% by the 2050s and 12.6% by the 2070s.  Remember, the mean is only an average.  The river’s maximum runoff for any given year in the 2050s and 2070s could be far higher.  Additionally, warmer temperatures in the winter months will cause a jump in the river’s wintertime discharge rates.  Finally, the Bureau stated that the Missouri’s flow regime in the 21^st century would be more haphazard, with greater oscillations in volume.  The report stated, “…stream flow variability over the basin is expected to continue under climate change conditions…future hydro climate conditions may produce weekly acute runoff events….”  The term “weekly acute runoff events” is a benign way of saying the Missouri is going to flood on short notice.

Now you would think that the Bureau’s report, the flood of 2011, and the drought of 2012, would have set off alarm bells at Corps headquarters.  But surprisingly, and inexplicably, the Corps has done very little to address climate change along the Missouri.  As a matter of fact, it is actually taking steps that will exacerbate the negative effects of climate change on the river.  For instance, since last summer, the Corps has rebuilt the lower valley’s levee system.  In an act of utter folly, the new levees were rebuilt at the same locations as the old levees.  The old levees sat too close to the Missouri.  As a result, the old levees compressed the river’s flood flows, forcing the river up and then over the tops of the levees.  The new levees are going to do the same thing in the decades ahead, especially with higher flows predicted to descend the river.

To make matters worse, the Corps is rebuilding the lower river’s navigation channel.  That channel increases the likelihood of floods because it reduces the lower river’s conveyance capacity. The Corps should be increasing the lower river’s conveyance capacity, not reducing it!  Finally, the Corps has not altered its management of the upstream reservoirs in the face of climate change science.  Just this year, it precipitously drained the reservoirs to keep a nine-foot depth in a navigation channel that carries almost no barge traffic.  So it is business as usual at the Corps.  Meanwhile, we just had the third hottest summer in U.S. history.

What might surprise you is that the damage to the navigation channel has had a number of benefits.  In knocking down the Army’s control structures, and naturally widening its channel area, the Missouri increased its conveyance capacity.  In other words, the river enhanced its ability to safely carry away flood waters without overtopping its banks. Additionally, the new, wilder river created habitat for fish, birds, and certain mammals. It is not a mere coincidence that fishing is now so phenomenal on the Lower Missouri.  Fish are doing well this year because of the new aquatic habitat created last year.

And yet, the Army has no intention of allowing the Missouri to remain outside of its navigation channel.  It is going to put the Missouri back inside its rock-lined cage.  The Army plans on fixing every single one of the damaged wingdams and revetments along the lower river.  In order to accomplish that goal, the Army will pay private contractors $8.3 million dollars to dump 250,000 tons of quarried stone along the Missouri from Sioux City to Rulo.  To put that amount of rock into perspective, consider that that is enough stone to fill 2,500 standard 100-ton capacity railcars or 12,500 twenty-ton capacity Army M917 dump trucks.  By the way, those dump trucks, if lined up bumper-to-bumper on Interstate 29, would stretch all the way from Sergeant Bluff, Iowa, to Missouri Valley, Iowa, a distance of 69 miles.  Put another way, the Army is going to place 107 twenty-ton dump truck loads of rock along each river mile between Sioux City and Rulo. This is all going to be done to rebuild a segment of the navigation channel that carries no barges and worsens flooding.  If that isn’t batshit crazy, I don’t what is.  What’s worse, in August, the Army awarded a $45 million dollar contract to several construction firms to repair the navigation channel from Rulo southward.  So even more rock is going into the river along that reach. An Army spokesperson, when referring to the reconstruction of the navigation channel, noted rather gleefully that the Army is now “swinging rock,” which means it is using backhoes to “swing” tons of rock from floating barges to the river’s banks.

The Army is rebuilding the navigation channel despite the fact that: 1) doing so will constrict the channel area of the river, decrease the Missouri’s conveyance capacity, and increase the likelihood of floods in the lower valley; 2) the navigation channel did not carry a single barge between Omaha and Sioux City between 2004 and 2009 (data on barge traffic for the period 2009 to 2012 is sketchy, but it is unlikely any barges arrived at Sioux City during that later period because of excessive high and low flows); 3) the navigation channel harms fish and wildlife and destroys habitat; 4) the navigation channel fosters degradation, which has contributed to a nearly 15-foot drop in the elevation of the Missouri River, and the water table, at Sioux City since 1955; 5) Army leaders have acknowledged that the navigation channel is an impediment to the effective management of the Missouri River hydraulic system; 6) the maintenance of the navigation channel’s nine-foot depth from March through November each year requires the draining of the Dakota and Montana reservoirs – even during drought episodes.  The loss of reservoir water to the navigation channel in dry years hurts the reservoir fishery and the tourism industry based on it.

So why is the Army swinging so much rock into the Missouri River when basic common sense rules against such a course of action?  Because the Lower Missouri is not managed in the public interest.  It is actually managed to financially benefit a small, politically powerful, wealthy group of corporate farmers (represented by the Farm Bureau and Corngrower’s Association) and energy corporations such as MidAmerican Energy. This corporate elite owns the Lower Missouri.  You may believe the U.S. is the greatest democracy on earth (and I have prime river bottom real estate (sand dunes) west of Onawa, Iowa, to sell you), but the reality is that Joe and Jane Average Citizen have almost no say in how the river is managed by the Army.

Last fall, corporate farmers pushed to have the navigation channel rebuilt because that narrow channel allows them to grow more corn and soybeans (now at record high prices) in the valley bottomlands.  A wider, less flood-prone river would require more of the valley bottomlands for its channel area.  Valley farmers do not want to give the river any extra wiggle room.  Energy companies also wanted the navigation channel’s reconstruction so they could continue to siphon millions of gallons of free water from a constricted, deep river instead of having to extend their precious intake pipes into a wider, shallower river.  That the navigation channel increases the odds of another catastrophic flood in the lower valley is of little concern to the river’s corporate masters and apparently to the Army Corps of Engineers. The corporate elite are going to do what they damn (no pun intended) well please with the river.

The current management problems along the Missouri are emblematic of what ails the U.S. political system and U.S. environmental policy.  The U.S. lacks effective, socially beneficial environmental policies because Corporate America, acting through its political lackeys, has repeatedly undermined scientifically-based policies. Corporate interests torpedoed federal government action on climate change, oil well fracking, and now Missouri River flood mitigation and ecosystem restoration. Last year, the farm lobby labeled the environmental groups working to prevent the reconstruction of the navigation channel as radicals.  But in fact, the farm lobby holds the most radical, dangerous policies for the Missouri River. Corporations, in their pursuit of profits, are ignoring the public interest and jeopardizing public safety, and their doing it with the acquiescence of both political parties.  But it must be noted that in the Missouri Basin, the GOP has been more accommodating of corporate farm interests and energy companies than the Democratic Party.  That is partly because the GOP dominates the levers of power in the Midwest, and partly because the GOP is unabashedly pro-corporate. Governors Branstad and Heineman, Senators Grassley and Johanns, and western Iowa’s U.S. representative, Steve King (who once praised the despicable Senator Joseph McCarthy), have long kowtowed to the Farm Bureau, Corn Grower’s Association and energy conglomerates on environmental policy. Sadly, political leaders like these are failing the majority of us, while they work diligently to promote the interests of a select, wealthy minority.  All of this explains why the Missouri is going to flood again in the future.  So remember, when the next flood comes barreling down the valley and carts your house off to the Gulf of Mexico don’t blame a vengeful Mother Nature or an incompetent Army Corps.  Rather, you’re flood losses will have been hoisted upon you by the corporate masters of the Missouri.

Between June and August 1965, General William C. Westmoreland formulated his strategy to defeat the Viet Cong insurgency in South Vietnam.  His strategy evolved in a political and military environment rife with uncertainties.  The unknowns made the general’s planning for the conduct of the war exceedingly difficult.  Westmoreland did not know how many U.S. ground troops President Johnson would agree to send to South Vietnam.  Would the president cap the U.S. ground force level in South Vietnam at 100,000 troops or 200,000 or would LBJ be willing to commit even larger forces to South Vietnam?  Westmoreland did not know.  Each troop increment would provide Westmoreland with greater latitude; while a small force would limit his military options.

In the spring and summer of 1965, as the U.S. geared up for a ground war in South Vietnam, the president made it clear to the military chiefs and his closest circle of advisors that he wanted to limit the size of the U.S. troop commitment to South Vietnam.  He did not want to commit the U.S. to a big war on the Asian land mass.  Rather, he repeatedly indicated to the military chiefs that he wanted to get the job done in South Vietnam with the least number of soldiers, at the least cost to American society, and with the lowest possible number of U.S. casualties.

Westmoreland did not know how the PAVN and Viet Cong would respond to the deployment of U.S. ground forces to South Vietnam.  Would the enemy retreat from the battlefield with the first major U.S. show of force?  This was the hope of both Johnson and McNamara.  Would the enemy abandon its main force conventional war strategy and revert to a protracted war of small units?  McNamara feared that this is what the communists would choose to do in the face of an overwhelming U.S. presence.  He claimed that there was a good chance the communists would “go back into the woods” and wait out the U.S., eventually returning to the populated areas after the U.S. tired of the conflict.

There also existed the possibility that if the communists did not fade away from the battlefield, or return to the woods to wait out the Americans, that they would instead try to match the U.S. troop build-up with a massive build-up of their own.  They might even attempt to exceed the size of a U.S. build-up through an intensified program of recruitment in rural South Vietnam and an increase in infiltration of PAVN regulars down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.  In the worst case, the DRV might seek the participation of Chinese “volunteers” in the struggle in Vietnam.  Those Chinese soldiers would either serve in the DRV as rear echelon troops, where they would free up more PAVN soldiers for duty in the South, or they would directly serve in communist combat units in South Vietnam.  Granted, the likelihood of Chinese intervention appeared low.  The U.S. governmental consensus held that the Chinese would not come into the war, so long as the ground combat remained confined to South Vietnam.  But the Chinese would come into the war if the U.S. marched north and attempted to topple the Hanoi regime.  CIA Director John McCone concluded in 1965 that the Hanoi regime and the Viet Cong would neither fade away nor return to the woods and wait.  Rather, McCone warned the administration that the communists would likely respond to a U.S. escalation of the ground war with an increase in the infiltration of PAVN troops into South Vietnam.  McCone’s analysis held ominous portents.  If correct, the war would continue at a higher level of violence.

In contrast to McCone’s perceptive analysis, many American troops being deployed to South Vietnam in the summer of 1965 believed the Viet Cong and PAVN would opt out of the war after facing the U.S. Marines and elite troopers of the U.S. Army.  To many GIs, it appeared inconceivable that the ill-equipped, ground bound Viet Cong and PAVN troopers could win the war in the South.  The U.S. military was the most technologically sophisticated in the world.  It could deploy helicopters, artillery, jet aircraft, and naval gunfire against communist units.  U.S. infantry units excelled at rapid cross-country movement and the massing of firepower.  There was just no way the communists could stand against the American juggernaut.  Racism also contributed to the belief that the communists would lose, and lose quickly, once large numbers of GIs entered the conflict.  The small stature of the Vietnamese compared to the large GIs led GIs to believe they were stronger and able to endure more hardships, than the Vietnamese.  They erroneously concluded that bigger physiques made better soldiers.  GIs also believed that Americans, because of the material successes of their society, were smarter than the Vietnamese and therefore more likely to win the war against the “dumber” Vietnamese.  The use of the derogatory term “gook” to describe the Vietnamese communists, and frequently the non-communist Vietnamese, represented a means by which GIs dehumanized the Vietnamese while simultaneously expressing their own racial superiority.  In 1965, few GIs believed the communists could win the war.  It just did not seem possible.  Robert Mason, a helicopter pilot with the 1^st Cavalry Division, who went ashore with the unit in August 1965, was one of those who believed the U.S. would quickly win the war.  He thought that superior U.S. technology, the quality of U.S. troops and U.S. training, and the esprit de corps found in U.S. units, would make a rapid victory possible.

U.S. officials did not know how the rural South Vietnamese would respond to a big U.S. presence.  There was a real fear in the civilian U.S. government departments that the South Vietnamese would view any large U.S. ground force as akin to the unpopular French army during the First Indochina War.  George Ball, Undersecretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, speculated that a U.S. troop level of 75,000 or less could be tolerated by the South Vietnamese populace.  Seventy-five thousand GIs in-country would be neither highly visible nor overly intrusive.  However, Ball worried that a troop deployment of 100,000 or more GIs would foster South Vietnamese animosity toward U.S. forces.  The South Vietnamese, especially in rural areas, would consider such a large force as an army of occupation, much like the French Expeditionary Corps of the late 1940s and early 1950s.  Ball wondered at what point the U.S. troop commitment would cross a tipping point and become counter-productive to U.S. goals.  More specifically, he argued that at some point in the build-up of U.S. forces, the U.S. presence would lead to an increase in South Vietnamese hostility toward the U.S. and a boom in Viet Cong recruitment.  Others in the Johnson administration shared Ball’s fear, including McGeorge Bundy.  Yet, at the end of the day, no one at the Pentagon, MACV, the White House, or the State Department knew how the South Vietnamese would react to the presence of large numbers of GIs in their midst.  Officials could only hope that a major build-up of forces did not lead to a backlash amongst the South Vietnamese.  But most officials, including the president, believed a major troop commitment worth the risk of raising the ire of the South Vietnamese.  South Vietnam could not be lost even if in the process of trying to save it with a large U.S. expeditionary force our ostensible allies turned against us.

Westmoreland harbored no such doubts about the South Vietnamese.  He thought the illiterate, parochial Vietnamese peasant would have the ability to discern the differences between the French and Americans.  He did not believe they would turn against the U.S. after the troop level exceeded 75,000.  Rather, the presence of large U.S. forces in-country might convince the peasantry to shift its allegiance.  Westmoreland believed that the peasantry would align with the side it considered likely to win the struggle, its loyalty was not based on ideology or economic self-interest, but merely on the perceived military strength of the belligerents.  If the peasants concluded that the Viet Cong would lose the war they would come over to the GVN.  A large troop build-up would have that effect.  Rather than turn the people against the Americans, it would secure their support.  It is not clear on what information Westmoreland based his conclusion.  In all likelihood he derived this conclusion from his belief that the Viet Cong were not in fact popular in South Vietnam.  Instead, Westmoreland believed the Viet Cong gained the loyalty of the peasantry through intimidation and terror.  Once U.S. forces ended the Viet Cong presence in an area, and effectively ended the communist reign of terror, the peasants would flock to the U.S./GVN banner.  Westmoreland’s simplistic assessment of the South Vietnamese peasantry and the reasons for its loyalty to the Viet Cong completely ignored the ideological and economic appeal of communism to the poor of South Vietnam.  Westmoreland’s incorrect assessment of what motivated peasant loyalties to the Viet Cong would have deadly consequences for thousands of GIs.

Westmoreland and administration officials also did not know how the South Vietnamese government and army would respond to a big U.S. build up?  There was a real concern that if the Americans came in big, the ARVN would stand down and take a back seat to the fighting.  In other words, the ARVN would let the Americans bear the brunt of the fighting.  Rather than becoming more effective, the ARVN would become less effective.  As for the Government of South Vietnam (GVN), a U.S. build up might make it more corrupt, as its officials found no reason to reform their conduct.  It might become more abusive of the peasantry, knowing the Americans would not let the government fail after such a large commitment of men, material, and prestige.  As for pacification, which was so important to winning the war, it might actually be set back by a large U.S. troop presence because GVN officials might find little reason to offer the peasantry land reform or social programs.  Reform programs might stall as GVN officials realized they had no need to reform with the Americans taking over the war and supporting their corrupt government.

Still other disturbing unknowns included whether American GIs, trained in the techniques of highly mechanized warfare in a European environment and acclimatized to a temperate climate, lacking in cross-cultural understanding and many socialized with racist attitudes toward non-whites- whether they could fight in a tropical climate amongst an Asiatic people.

The United States and Soviet Union emerged from World War II as the world’s two most powerful nation states.  Yet, the United States far surpassed the Soviet Union in economic and military might.  For instance, four years after the conclusion of the war, it was estimated that the United States possessed a Gross National Product (GNP) of 250 billion dollars compared to the U.S.S.R.’s 65 billion [May, Interpreting NSC-68, 36].  The larger, diversified U.S. economy translated into an impressive standard of living for its citizens.  The American people experienced an unprecedented material abundance.  No other society in world history had ever been so wealthy.  Nor had any other country developed such high levels of efficiencies in manufacturing and agricultural production.  U.S. economic strength underpinned the U.S.’s military might.

In the closing days of the Second World War, the U.S. Army Air Force, the predecessor to the U.S. Air Force, had in its inventory 63,715 aircraft of all types, including the long-range B-29 strategic bomber [Army Air Forces Statistical Digest, World War II, Table 84].  It was this air force that made possible the daily carpet-bombing of German and Japanese cities from mid-1943 to August 1945.  And it was the B-29 that carried the atomic bombs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  While the Army Air Force ruled the skies, the U.S. Navy dominated the world’s oceans with its 6,768 ships, including 28 full-sized aircraft carriers, 71 smaller escort carriers, 23 heavily armored battleships such as the U.S.S. Iowa, and 377 destroyers.  No other navy even came close to the American Navy in number of vessels and global reach [www.history.navy.mil/branches/org9-4.htm]

A total of 16.1 million men and women served in uniform during World War II [www.va.gov].  In 1945, the U.S. military consisted of 12,055,884 soldiers, sailors, and marines. [www.infoplease.com] The Army alone had over 8 million members.  American troops had at their disposal incredible amounts of weaponry, ammunition, and equipment, gratis of the U.S. industrial sector.  In the end, it wasn’t the fighting quality of the GIs that defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.  As a matter of fact, the soldiers of the Wehrmacht and the Japanese Imperial Army tended to fight more tenaciously than the Americans.  Rather, it was the millions of machines made by America’s factory workers that won the war.  America overwhelmed the Axis powers with the sheer mass of its gadgetry and firepower.

After the detonation of the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, the U.S. was in a category of its own in terms of military strength.  No other nation possessed the A-Bomb.  And in that eventful summer of 1945, no one knew when the U.S.’s sole competitor for global dominance, the U.S.S.R., would develop its own bomb.  Following the test at Alamogordo, the United States truly became a superpower.  It was the only nation on earth with the military capability to utterly lay waste to an enemy’s urban centers and industrial base.

Yet, interestingly, just as the U.S. reached the pinnacle of its military and economic preeminence, its political leadership expressed a palpable insecurity.  President Harry S Truman and members of the State Department viewed the Soviet Union, and the global communist movement supported by the Kremlin, as a serious threat to the United States and its overseas empire.  The Soviets posed two primarily challenges to the United States.  The first threat stemmed from the Soviet military machine and the 9.8 million-man Red Army – the largest land army on the globe [Armed Force of the Russian Federation Land Force, Agency Voeninform of the Defence Ministry of the RF (2007), 14].  American leaders rightly considered the Red Army a juggernaut.  That army had just smashed the vaunted Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front.  Its battle-hardened soldiers now stood face-to-face with the Americans in central Germany.  The Red Army possessed the troops, tanks, and artillery to push the American Army aside and march across Western Europe to the English Channel.  Only U.S. airpower and the A-Bomb seemed to deter a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

U.S. leaders perceived Communist ideology as the second main threat posed by the Soviet Union.  Communism, with its advocacy of egalitarianism, economic and social justice, atheism, worker’s rights, and overturning the West’s social, economic, and political model, directly challenged Western civilization and its stoutest defender – the United States.

In the immediate post-war years, with large swaths of Western Europe in ruins, Truman worried that the continent’s downtrodden would flock to the communist banner as a means of alleviating their plight.  The possibility existed of a communist takeover of Western Europe through non-military means, through revolution, staged coups, or even democratic elections.  Truman did not need to look too hard to see examples of Soviet expansionism through subterfuge, subversion, and the democratic process. In 1947, A Soviet-supported coup deposed the King of Romania.  In France and Italy, the communists made strong showings in national elections.  In Greece and Turkey, armed communist rebels challenged U.S. backed regimes.

In order to check communist expansionism, the U.S. relied on a variety of tools.  U.S. air power and the A-Bomb deterred any Soviet conventional invasion.  But American officials considered the other forms of communist expansionism more difficult to check.  The Truman administration tried a combination of economic aid, military assistance, and covert operations to halt the spread of communism in Western Europe, Greece, and Turkey.

Initially, Truman’s foreign policy team responded to the communist initiatives in Europe on an ad hoc basis.  The administration utilized covert political operations to stop the communists in Italy, economic aid to Western Europe, and military assistance to the royalist Greek government.  The various programs succeeded in turning back the Reds, but the president, and the executive departments involved in foreign affairs, desperately needed a long-term, consistent, effective policy toward the communist bloc.  U.S. officials also needed the means of framing the struggle with communism within a larger historical and geographical context.  Creating a reliable policy vis a vis the U.S.S.R. and communism would help stabilize the international scene, foster predictability in U.S. relations with the U.S.S.R., and most importantly, avert a general war between the superpowers.  An intellectual and policy vacuum existed in U.S.-Soviet relations between 1945 and 1947.  Into that vacuum stepped a man who would have the largest influence on U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century.

George F. Kennan served in the U.S. embassy in Moscow in the middle 1930s.  During that decade, the Soviets wooed Western diplomats, journalists and artists with examples of industrial and agricultural success.  To many on the Left at the time, the U.S.S.R. provided a stellar example of communist achievements.  But Kennan never fell for Soviet propaganda.  He knew that Soviet achievements had come at a great cost to the people of the Soviet Union.  He remained a cool-eyed realist who viewed the country and its leaders with a healthy dose of skepticism.  Although he readily admitted the sincerity and dedication of junior-grade communist officials, he also recognized the brutality of the Stalin regime and its murderous secret police – the NKVD [Sources of Soviet Conduct, Foreign Affairs, 567].  Kennan had no love for the top Soviet leadership.  He observed that Stalin and his immediate subordinates acted in a manner similar to a cabal of thugs.  They maintained their positions of authority through violence and fear rather than popular appeal.  He wrote, “…the men in the Kremlin have continued to be predominantly absorbed with the struggle to secure and make absolute the power which they seized in November 1917.” [Sources of Soviet Conduct, Foreign Affairs, 569].

Kennan believed Russian leaders were horribly insecure because of an underlying uncertainty that pervaded the Soviet system.  Their insecurity stemmed from a number of factors, including the absence of an institutionalized succession process.  Since there existed no legal means of attaining the top position in the country, leaders were unsure as to their own status within the Soviet hierarchy.  They were forever jockeying for position.  The succession process became a free-for-all, pitting members of the Politburo against one another, and fostering a sense of perpetual uneasiness amongst its members.  Kennan stated, “Meanwhile, a great uncertainty hangs over the political life of the Soviet Union.  That is the uncertainty involved in the transfer of power from one individual or group of individuals to others.  This is, of course, outstandingly the problem of the personal position of Stalin.  We must remember that his succession to Lenin’s [position]…took 12 years to consolidate.  It cost the lives of millions of people and shook the state to its foundations.” [Sources of Soviet Conduct, Foreign Affairs, 578].

In July 1947, Kennan wrote an article in the journal “Foreign Affairs” titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.”  Kennan used the pseudonym “X” because he feared a negative response to him from the Soviets if they learned he had authored the piece.  The “X” article asserted that Soviet communism behaved in a manner similar to water, it would move to areas of least resistance, taking advantage of human misery and hopelessness.  He penned, “Its [communism’s] political action is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal.  Its main concern is to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power.  But if it finds unassailable barriers in its path, it accepts these philosophically and accommodates itself to them.” [Sources of Soviet Conduct, Foreign Affairs, 575].

Kennen argued that the Soviets, or their proxies, if left to their own devices, would find recruits in regions beset by poverty, war, and political repression.  To counter the spread of communism, especially in areas around the periphery of the Soviet Union, he favored a program of containment.  He remarked, “In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies”[Sources of Soviet Conduct, Foreign Affairs, 575].

Kennan favored all practical methods of containment, but he believed economic containment should take priority over military containment.  He wanted the U.S. to provide economic aid to the pro-Western countries along the borders of the U.S.S.R., as well as in Western Europe, and northern Asia.  U.S. economic assistance would bolster the economies of those regions, raising the standard of living of their residents, and stabilizing their institutions.  With prosperity and material well-being, people would resist the advance of Soviet communism.  He believed that over time, the vibrant economies of the West, and those situated along the edges of the Soviet Union, would undermine the U.S.S.R. and its communist ideology.  Capitalism and democracy would be shown to meet the needs and aspirations of humanity more effectively than totalitarian communism.  At some future date, the Soviet leadership would recognize the superiority and steadfastness of the Western economic and political model and mollify their aggressive behavior.  The visible success of the Western model might even convince the people of the communist bloc to overthrow their repressive governments, bringing about the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Officials in the Truman administration read Kennan’s article.  The president himself understood that Kennan’s article provided a blueprint for U.S. relations with the communist bloc.  Less than a year after the publication of the “X” article, the Truman administration initiated the European Recovery Program, also known as the Marshall Plan.  During the life of the Marshall Plan, the U.S. provided a total of $13 billion in economic aid to 16 European nations.  The three largest recipients of aid included Germany at $1.44 billion, France at $2.29 billion, and Great Britain at $3.29 billion.  The administration also carried out a Japanese equivalent of the Marshall Plan, which directed approximately $2.5 billion to assist in Japan’s industrial recovery [www.marshallfoundation.org].  Although the western Europeans and Japanese were largely responsible for the recovery of their own economies, the billions of U.S. dollars pumped into the war-ravaged areas of Asia and Europe hastened the recovery.  U.S. aid rebuilt industrial facilities and infrastructure.  Most importantly, U.S. aid turned former enemies into allies.  It also made the Japanese and the Germans into strong proponents of democratic capitalism.

Kennan’s economic containment policy appealed to U.S. leaders for a variety of reasons.  First, it played on U.S. strengths in the industrial arena.  In 1945, the United States possessed roughly 50% of the world’s economic output, or gross national product.  American manufacturers required markets for the goods streaming out of U.S. factories.  If Western Europe and Japan remained economically stagnate, the U.S. would lack necessary trading partners.  A policy of reviving the economic standing of Western Europe and Japan meant the reestablishment of markets for U.S. manufacturers.  The reconstructed economies of Europe and Asia could complement the U.S. economic system in another way.  Those economies could sell the low-value-added manufactured products and raw materials demanded by the more sophisticated U.S. economy.  Essentially, through U.S. foreign aid, the Truman administration would create an economic system in which the core area (the United States) sold high value, manufactured products to the periphery.  Peripheral areas in turn would supply cheap labor, raw materials, and lower value manufactured products to the core.  It was a classic imperial arrangement, much like the British imperial system in the 19^th century.

President Truman found economic containment attractive because its application would check Soviet influence, and possibly lead to the implosion of the Soviet Union itself, without war.  The U.S. would be able to dismantle the Soviet empire peacefully, rather than through a potentially catastrophic Third World War.  Such a war would likely cost the U.S. untold billions of dollars, countless lives, and leave Western Europe and the Soviet Union in ruins.  Even worse, the ideology that prompted the establishment of the Soviet Union might still remain intact after World War III, with the Soviets finding more followers in the rubble left behind by the conflict.  As the State Department’s Paul Nitze would later write, “Military victory alone would only partially and perhaps only temporarily affect the fundamental conflict [over beliefs and values], for although the ability of the Kremlin to threaten our security might be for a time destroyed, the resurgence of totalitarian forces and the re-establishment of the Soviet system or its equivalent would not be long delayed….” [May, Interpreting NSC 68, 32]  Economic containment would bring about the peaceful demise of the Soviet Union.  But even more importantly it would lead to the extirpation of communist ideology.

Additionally, with economic containment, the U.S. would not have to maintain a large military establishment to bring about the downfall of the Soviet Union.  A small, nuclear-armed military, which would act as a deterrent to Soviet aggression, would do the job.  In Truman’s mind, a smaller U.S. military guaranteed a freer society at home.  There would be no need for high taxes to keep a large standing army equipped, fed, and housed.  Consequently, the American people would have more disposable income for the purchase of automobiles, houses, and labor-saving appliances.  They would also have money to spend on leisure travel.  In America, money equaled freedom.  Reining in the size of the defense budget would ensure greater freedoms for the American people.

Limiting the military’s role at home and abroad would also lessen the impact of the draft.  In 1943, during the height of World War II, the Selective Service inducted 3.3 million men into the U.S. Armed Forces.  By 1947, that number had dropped to zero [www.ss.gov].  If economic containment succeeded, the need for the draft would no longer exist, or if it did remain necessary, the number required for the military would be less than if the U.S. had to engage in a massive military build-up to counter the Soviet Union.  The draft was inherently undemocratic because it inducted individuals into the service without their consent.  The social and economic penalties for dodging the draft were so severe that few men chose to avoid the draft.  Without the need for large draft calls, more men would be able to pursue their own interests without government interference in their lives.

Eisenhower was not the first president to worry about the growth of the military-industrial complex.  Since the nineteenth century, presidents have expressed concern about war profiteers.  Truman believed a permanent, sizable military-industrial complex could undermine America’s democratic institutions.  He understood that war profiteers, and their great wealth, could corrupt politics, Wealthy industrialists would bribe politicians, or fund their election campaigns, to ensure continued government contracts.  Corrupt politicians, and their supporters in the business community, would be more apt to encourage an aggressive U.S. foreign policy to ensure continued profits from government military contracts.

The mere presence of a large, ready, permanent military would encourage a president to use it.  The very existence of a muscle-bound U.S. military, rather than serve as a means of discouraging war, might actually induce a president to jump into a war more quickly than he otherwise would if a force had to first be mobilized and trained for war.

The military was, and remains, an undemocratic institution.  It indoctrinated its recruits to obey orders without question, it taught them to respect hierarchy and institutional status, and it sent many of them to their deaths without their consent.  Soldiers did not democratically elect their leaders, nor could they opt out of the service if they chose to do so.  The U.S. military was a totalitarian, undemocratic, coercive institution in a country that professed to be the most democratic nation in the world.  Its very existence represented one of the great contradictions in a society rife with contradictions.  Truman did not want a large military establishment.  Thus, Kennan’s ideas on economic containment coincided with Truman’s own goals for the United States and the role of the military in American society.  Truman’s adoption of Kennan’s ideas on economic containment in 1947 marked a watershed moment in U.S. foreign policy.  Kennan’s ideas would shape U.S. foreign affairs from the 1940s to the present day.

And yet, by 1949, economic containment did not appear to be enough to halt the advance of communism.  In the late summer and early fall of that year, the U.S. suffered a series of foreign policy setbacks.  On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb at a test site in what is today northeastern Kazakhstan.  The successful test ended the U.S. atomic monopoly.  A little over a month after the Soviet nuclear test, Mao Zedong’s communist army pushed Chiang Khe Shek’s Nationalist Army off the Chinese mainland.  The defeated remnants of the Nationalist army crossed the Taiwan Strait to the island of Formosa, where Chiang Khe Shek, who was once referred to derisively as “The Peanut” by his top American advisor, established the Republic of China.  On the mainland, the triumphant Mao declared the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).  In the United States, the Republican Party, including its most rabid anti-communists, Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) and Richard M. Nixon (R-CA), blamed Truman and the Democrats for the “loss of China.”  But China had never been the U.S.’s to lose.  Revolutionary forces existed in China in the 1940s that no American president or American policy could have kept in check.  Mao’s victory had tremendous import for the U.S. position in Asia.  China was the most populous Asian country and its geographical position put it in the center of Asia – with the ability to influence a number of countries on southern and western border, such as India, Burma, Laos, and Vietnam.

The communist triumph in China meant the global communist movement now controlled the world’s largest country by land area (the Soviet Union) and the world’s largest country by population (China).  With the recent communist acquisition of the atomic bomb, it appeared to U.S. officials, including the president, that communism had gained the initiative in its struggle with West [May, Interpreting NSC 68, 36, 65].  A question on everyone’s mind in Washington in the fall of 1949 was whether the United States could stop the communists.  Could communism in fact be contained through economic means and U.S. threats of nuclear annihilation?

Although Kennan’s vision of containment gained wide acceptance within U.S. government circles, there were those who believed it alone would not contain the Soviet Union or one of its proxy states.  Paul Nitze, who headed the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, doubted the effectiveness of economic containment.  Nitze agreed with Kennan that economic containment would foster the creation of strong, capitalist nation states; yet, he also believed that conventional communist military forces might quickly overrun those prosperous, pro-Western societies.  A vibrant capitalist economy would not protect an American ally from an invading Soviet army or the conventional forces of a Soviet satellite state.  Nitze noted that unless the U.S. wanted to destroy invading communist armies with nuclear weapons, the U.S. needed to alter its defense strategy.  More specifically, he argued that the United States should rebuild its conventional military capabilities.  Economic development within the American sphere of influence could only go forward with the protection offered by a strong military shield.  He stated in National Security Memorandum number 68, dated April 7, 1950, the following, “The frustration of the Kremlin design requires the free world to develop a successfully functioning political and economic system and a vigorous political offensive against the Soviet Union.  These, in turn, require an adequate military shield under which they can develop [May, Interpreting NSC 68, 71].  In NSC 68, Nitze proposed the military containment of the Soviet Union and the communist bloc.

NSC-68 made a number of far-reaching policy recommendations.  Nitze urged the permanent mobilization of the U.S. military.  Because as he stated, “a question which may be of decisive importance in the event of war is the question whether there will be time to mobilize our superior human and material resources for a war effort” [May, Interpreting NSC 68, 45].  Modern mechanized warfare meant an invading army could conquer another nation state in a matter of days.  Consequently, according to Nitze, the U.S. had to keep its military forces in a constant state of readiness, prepared to respond to communist aggression on short notice.  If the U.S. demobilized its military forces, as it had done at the end of all previous wars, it would not have the forces on hand to repel communist aggression.  It would be left with two unpalatable choices, either accept the results of the aggression, or rapidly escalate the conflict to nuclear war.

Nitze believed the U.S. military would have to possess the air assets and sealift capability to respond to communist aggression anywhere in the world, in places as environmentally diverse and distant as the Central Plains of Europe and the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East.  Nitze urged the president to seek the creation of a military force capable of fighting 2 ½ wars simultaneously.  Such a force would be able to fight a World War II-style conflict; that is, it would fight and win a big war in Europe, a second major war in Asia, and a ½ war, or low intensity conflict, in a peripheral area of the globe.  Nitze’s idea of military containment entailed the establishment of military bases, supply depots, and staging areas in likely theaters of operation, particularly in the U.S.’s far western Pacific island chain and within West Germany.  He wanted supply depots with prepositioned weapons, equipment, vehicles, and ammunition.  Those depots would accelerate the deployment of U.S. forces to any trouble spot.  Rather than being required to send their gear to an active war front on slow-moving oceanic vessels, American troops would have their supplies waiting for them near the scene of the conflict.  Arriving U.S. troops would deplane or disembark from vessels, immediately go to their stored equipment, and rapidly depart for the front [May, Interpreting NSC 68, 50, 66, 72].  This rapid deployment capability would be especially important for the defense of Western Europe, where the Soviet Red Army, positioned in East Germany, sat poised to quickly overrun the European continent.

Adoption of NSC-68 would remake the military establishment into a large, permanent, pervasive fixture in American society.  When the document first came across Truman’s desk in the spring of 1950, the president rejected its recommendations for the same reasons he favored economic containment.  Truman considered the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal sufficient to deter communist military aggression, while economic containment would remain the cornerstone of the U.S.’s effort to stem the communist tide.

Months before the submission of NSC-68, on January 12, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a speech to the National Press Club.  In his address, he examined the U.S.’s foreign policy in Asia.  He noted the strategic importance to the U.S.’s containment policy in Asia of the off-shore islands stretching from Alaska to the Philippines.  He said, “The [U.S.] defensive perimeter runs along the Aleutians to Japan and then goes to the Ryukyus.  We hold important defense positions in the Ryukyu Islands, and those we will continue to hold…The defensive perimeter runs from the Ryukus to the Philippine Islands…So far as the military security of other areas of the Pacific is concerned, it must be clear that no person can guarantee these areas against military attack.  But it must also be clear that such a guarantee is hardly sensible or necessary within the realm of practical relationship.” [Acheson to National Press Club, “Speech on the Far East, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library.

Surprisingly, Acheson did not include South Korea within the U.S.’s Asian sphere of influence.  Acheson’s public comments to the press club may have influenced North Korean leader Kim Il Sung’s decision to invade South Korea.  It is conceivable that Sung interpreted Acheson’s exclusion of South Korea from the U.S.’s Asian defense system as an indication that the U.S. would not defend South Korea in the event of an invasion from the North.  Acheson’s comment that the U.S. could not “guarantee” the security of areas beyond the island chain likely reinforced Sung’s belief that the U.S. would stand aside while he marched on the South.  Yet, it is important to recognize that Sung had sought for years to reunite Korea under his rule.  The Acheson speech likely served as just one more justification to invade South Korea, rather than the sole reason.

In July 1945, at the Potsdam conference, President Truman and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin agreed to establish two zones of military occupation on the Korean peninsula.  The 38^th parallel acted as the dividing line between the two zones.  The Soviet Red Army occupied the zone north of the 38^th parallel, while the American army occupied the zone south of that line.  The division of Korea at Potsdam, and the subsequent formation of separate regimes at Pyongyang and Seoul, temporarily stymied Kim Il Sung’s dream of a unified communist Korea.  But in the winter and spring of 1950, Sung prepared for a war against South Korea that would forcibly reunite the country.  On June 25, 1950, the North Korean People’s Army struck across the 38^th parallel in a blitzkrieg operation.  The speed and violence of the North Korean offensive caused the rapid collapse of South Korean defenses.  Within days, NKPA troopers marched through the South Korean capital.  But the North Koreans did not stop there.  Their army drove on toward the south, hoping to push the South Korean army, and its American advisors, into the Sea of Japan.  Recognizing the gravity of the situation in South Korea, and the very real prospect of the country’s complete seizure by the communists, President Truman wasted no time in committing U.S. ground forces to the Korean peninsula.  Their job was to stop the NKPA and preserve South Korea as a Western outpost on the Asian mainland.

The North Korean invasion of South Korea brought home to the Truman administration the failure of nuclear deterrence.  America’s nuclear arsenal did not dissuade the communists from launching a conventional invasion against an American ally.  Unwilling to deploy nuclear weapons to stop the NKPD, Truman’s only other means of containing communism in Korea involved the deployment of conventional U.S. forces.

By October 1950, the U.S. had shoved the NKPA back above the 38^th parallel.  But rather than stop at the former dividing line, Truman authorized the advance of U.S. forces to the Yalu River, which served as the border between North Korea and the People’s Republic of China.  By sending U.S. units to the Yalu, the president abandoned containment for a new policy of Rollback.  Rollback entailed the rolling back of communist territory and its liberation by the forces of the West.  Rollback represented an offensive strategy vis a vis global communism, instead of the previous defensive strategy of containment.

As U.S. units marched northward, Chinese foreign minister Chou En Lai issued repeated warnings thru third-country intermediaries to the Truman administration to keep American troops away from the Yalu River or risk Chinese intervention in Korea.  The Chinese wanted a geographical buffer between themselves and the American Army.  Mao and Chou had concluded that an American expeditionary force on China’s border posed too much of a threat to the regime in Beijing.  But Truman and his military chiefs dismissed the Chinese warnings.  Some in the administration actually hoped the Chinese would come into the war, so that the U.S. would then have an excuse to militarily punish the Chinese communists, who were referred to derisively as “Chicoms,” for their supposedly bellicose attitudes.

By early November, American troops peered across the wide, sandy Yalu into communist China.  Only days later, the Chinese entered the war.  At first, small Chinese units crossed the Yalu to confront the Americans.  In all likelihood, these Chinese forces were to act as a further warning to the Americans to back away from the Yalu.  But the Americans did not heed these warnings either.  Instead, U.S. troops continued to stream north toward the Yalu.  Eventually, the Chinese decided to forcibly push the Americans away from the banks of the Yalu.  In late November and December 1950, Mao ordered hundreds of thousands of “volunteers” to cross the Yalu and smash the American expeditionary force.  Outnumbered American units quickly fell back.  In what turned out to be one of the greatest debacles in U.S. military history, one American unit after another caught what was referred to at the time as “Bug Out Fever,” which involved a pell-mell dash to the south.  By early 1951, U.S. forces had retreated south of the 38^th parallel.  Seoul once again fell to the communists.  Not until the summer of 1951 did the U.S. stabilize the front line at the former dividing line at the 38^th parallel.

After the disaster that befell the American military in Korea in the winter of 1950-1951, Truman decided to return to a containment strategy on the peninsula.  From then on, U.S. forces would attempt to hold the line at the 38^th parallel.  Rollback had proven too costly for the United States.  Not only had it resulted in the deaths of thousands of troops, it had increased the likelihood of a global war with the Soviet Union.  Plus, Rollback had made the prospect of a favorable end to the Korean War more remote.  China, with its inexhaustible manpower pool, would be a far more difficult adversary to defeat than the North Koreans.  Rollback had been one of Truman’s greatest foreign policy blunders, on a par with his decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though U.S. intelligence predicted the imminent collapse of the Japanese war effort without the necessity of an American invasion of the home islands or the deployment of atomic weapons.  Although he would not publicly admit that he had made a mistake in agreeing to Rollback, Truman knew it had been a disastrous decision.  This is why in early 1951 he tried to rectify the mistake by insisting on a limited war strategy.  Not coincidentally, Truman’s decision to fire the overly aggressive General Douglas MacArthur in April 1951 signaled the president’s new, limited approach to the conflict.  The U.S. would never again go north of the 38^th parallel and it would not again practice a Rollback strategy until the administration of the Ronald Reagan.

In the fall of 1950, with the conflict in Korea weighing on his mind, Truman adopted the recommendations of NSC-68.  He believed that Korea had proven the need for a remilitarization program.  The U.S. defense budget rose from $127.8 billion in 1949 to $437 billion by 1953 (1996 dollars) [www.academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu].  Part of the increase funded the war in Korea.  But billions of additional dollars went into other programs, including the modernization of the Air Force and Army.

During the 1950s, economic and military containment became the philosophical foundation of U.S. foreign policy.  Containment policy shaped war planning, the location of overseas bases, troop deployments, and appropriations.  It determined the modalities of mutual defense pacts, such as NATO and SEATO.  It influenced the contents of foreign economic aid packages.  It shaped which nations received U.S. aid.  The U.S. overseas empire rested on containment.  From the American point of view, world order depended on containment and communist acceptance of it.

To force communist compliance with containment, successive U.S. administrations threatened the Soviet Union, China, and their communist allies with military action.  For example, in 1953, the Eisenhower administration threatened China with nuclear annihilation unless it ended the war in Korea and accepted the 38^th parallel as the demarcation line.  JFK risked war with the Soviet Union in order to maintain the U.S. position in Berlin, Germany.  In 1962, JFK threatened war in Laos in order to check Russian influence in that small country.

Containment policy sought to stabilize the international order by freezing the geographic systems of the U.S. and U.S.S.R.  American leaders wanted to keep the geography of the two empires inflexible because they feared that without static, stable borders between the two superpowers, there existed the potential for conflict as one side or other vied for influence in a contested zone.  In American foreign policy circles, geographical stasis equaled international security.  Without stasis, the two superpowers risked war.  In the nuclear age, war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would almost certainly end with Armageddon.

The U.S. had to have a large military force to ensure communist compliance with containment.  Without an imposing deterrent force, conventional and nuclear, the communists, so thought the Americans, would seek to undermine containment and the U.S. imperial system, leading to confrontations over territory and then to nuclear war.  U.S. officials saw themselves as repeatedly having to convince the communists to comply with containment.  This explains why U.S. officials believed the communists were intent on world instability.  They equated containment with security and efforts to undermine it as dangerous and brazen.  American leaders saw the communists as aggressive, purveyors of disorder, and untrustworthy.  Conversely, U.S. leaders perceived themselves as the guarantors of peace and order.  They viewed containment policy as the primary means of preventing World War III and the destruction of the globe.

South Vietnam’s land, resources, and population were not vital to U.S. national security, but the country became central to the U.S.’s foreign policy as a symbol of the viability of the containment policy.  Every president from Ike through Nixon believed that if South Vietnam fell to the communists, containment would no longer serve as a credible policy.  Successive U.S. presidents also believed that in the absence of communist compliance with containment, the Soviets and the Americans were more likely to confront one another in a global war, because the Soviets or one of their proxies would be emboldened to challenge the U.S. elsewhere.  General Maxwell Taylor, who served as a key advisor to two presidents on Vietnam and who’s thoughts reflect the mindset of top officials in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, summed up this line of reasoning, “The Sino-Soviet bloc is watching attentively the course of events in South Vietnam to see whether subversive insurgency is indeed the form which the “wave of the future” will take.  Failure in Southeast Asia will destroy U.S. influence throughout Asia and severely damage our standing elsewhere throughout the world.  It would be the prelude to the loss or neutralization of all of Southeast Asia and the absorption of that area into the Chinese empire [Kinnard, The War Managers, 19, Beschloss, Taking Charge, 266, 394].  South Vietnam had to be held or the repercussions for world peace were huge.

In 1954, soon after the Geneva Conference, Eisenhower spoke to the American press on the situation in Indochina.  He stated that the recently partitioned Vietnam resembled other areas of the world divided by the Cold War.  He compared southern Vietnam to West Germany and South Korea.  In making that comparison, Eisenhower signaled his intention to contain communism at the 17^th parallel.  His news conference warned Hanoi, Beijing, and Moscow to keep their hands off South Vietnam or risk war with the United States.

In order to contain the Vietnamese communists at the 17^th parallel, the United States Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in Saigon trained and armed a conventional South Vietnamese army.  Its primary task, like that of the American armies in West Germany and South Korea, was to halt a conventional communist invasion.  It was an army designed for a defensive containment strategy.  U.S. war plans involving Indochina called for a combined U.S.-South Vietnamese defense of South Vietnam against either a PAVN (People’s Army of Vietnam, also known to U.S. officialdom as the North Vietnamese Army) conventional force or a combined Chinese/PAVN conventional army.  At the time, U.S. officials had little reason to believe the DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam, also known as North Vietnam) would attempt to conquer South Vietnam through an insurgency.  The available intelligence data pointed to a conventional invasion across the 17^th parallel.

In the final stages of the war against the French, the Viet Minh had progressed from a guerrilla army to a main force army.  Their main force army, employing standard siege tactics, defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu.  At the end of the 1^st Indochina War, the majority of guerrillas south of the 17^th parallel regrouped to the DRV.  Once back in the North, those guerrillas were integrated into the DRV’s conventional force structure.  Although several thousand communist guerrilla cadre stayed behind in the South, a large communist guerrilla army did not exist in the South in the 1950s.

In the wake of the Geneva Accords, the DRV expanded the ranks of its conventional army.  It included regular companies, battalions, regiments, and divisions.  These units were armed with Russian and Chinese weapons.  The North’s force structure, weapons, and tactical doctrine indicated that if the North attempted to take South Vietnam it would do so with a conventional invasion.  Consequently, the U.S. trained and equipped the ARVN to meet that perceived threat.

In 1959, Ho Chi Minh and his cohorts on the Politburo decided to wage war against the Saigon regime and its American backers.  But rather than carry out a conventional cross-border invasion of South Vietnam, the communist leadership opted for a strategy of protracted guerrilla war against the South.  The Saigon regime would be toppled, and the country reunited, through the use of hit-and-run operations, selective terrorism, political agitation, and propaganda.

It is not surprising that the communist leaders in Hanoi rejected a conventional war strategy against the South.  South Vietnam’s environment does not lend itself to an overland invasion from the north.  In central and northern South Vietnam, a series of east-flowing rivers, along with a number of high mountain ridgelines (which run from west to east) act as major physical obstacles to the southward advance of an invading army.  A PAVN conventional force, attempting to cross South Vietnam’s rivers would be slowed down or completely halted while it prepared for the cumbersome task of conducting a river crossing.  The resultant delays in the invading army’s southward advance would make it possible for U.S. air power to congregate in the skies above the communist force.  That airpower would in-turn decimate communist units.  Moreover, while communist forces waited to cross South Vietnam’s rivers, U.S. ground forces could launch destructive counterattacks.  South Vietnam’s high mountain passes would have an effect on an invading army much like South Vietnam’s rivers.  A communist army would be slowed or stopped altogether as it attempted to traverse the passes.  Again, any delay in the southward march of the communist force would make it vulnerable to U.S. airstrikes.  What was even worse from the communist perspective was the fact that the passes would concentrate communist troops along narrow, highly visible highways, ensuring easy targets for U.S. aircraft.  For example, the winding highway that overtopped Hai Van Pass north of Da Nang would slow a communist mechanized army to a crawl, while the U.S. naval forces in Da Nang harbor and the U.S. airplanes at the Da Nang airbase mobilized to hit the communist troops bunched up on the slopes of Hai Van.  Finally, an invading communist army, moving down the narrow coastal plain, would be subject to withering gunfire from not only U.S. warships cruising in the waters just offshore but also from carrier-based aircraft patrolling the skies.  The communists recognized that American naval and air forces would likely destroy their conventional army long before it ever reached Saigon.

Ho Chi Minh, Le Duan, and Nyugen Giap learned a number of lessons from the war in Korea.  One of the biggest lessons of that earlier war related to logistics and lines of communication.  From 1950 to 1953, American airpower took a heavy toll on North Korean and Chinese supply lines.  The successful interdiction of southbound supplies on the Korean peninsula hindered the offensive capabilities of the communist armies facing the Americans.  The Vietnamese communists decided that supplies for military operations needed to be pre-positioned, placed out in front of the troops before the battle, rather than moved up to the troops from the rear during the battle.  Creating a “logistical nose” rather than a “logistical tail” offered a greater measure of insurance against air interdiction by the Americans.  Thus, front-line troops would have the supplies necessary to carry out the battle or campaign rather than having the battle derailed because of American air interdiction.

The Hanoi regime was also acutely aware of the potential for a U.S. Inchon-type landing behind the lines of an invading PAVN force.  If the PAVN invaded down South Vietnam’s coastal plain, U.S. amphibious forces could land behind the advancing communist army, cutting it off from its sources of supply and from its reinforcements in the North.  If that occurred, the invading army would wither and die in the South, just as the NKPA did at Pusan, South Korea, after MacArthur landed the U.S. Marines at Inchon in September 1950.  A conventional invasion down the coastal plain played to U.S. advantages.  It invited communist defeat.

The only other invasion route into South Vietnam lay through Laos.  Communist units could pass from the DRV into Laos via the Mu Ghia and Ben Karai passes, skirt the western border of South Vietnam, and then turn east from Laos into South Vietnam, entering it through the highlands.  This invasion route avoided U.S. naval power, eliminated the threat of an Inchon-like landing behind communist lines, and had the added advantage of limiting the effectiveness of U.S. airpower, since the weather, terrain, and vegetation in the highlands would afford communist troops both cover and concealment from patrolling American aircraft.  In 1959, the Politburo rejected a conventional invasion of South Vietnam through Laos because neither a well-developed road network, nor a logistical base capable of supporting a conventional army, yet existed in the Laotian Panhandle.

Another reason the Politburo voted against any type of conventional invasion of South Vietnam, either through Laos or down the coastal plain, related to world opinion and the threat of U.S. intervention.  The DRV wanted world public opinion on its side in its struggle against the Diem regime and its American supporters.  A conventional invasion of the South would have been perceived by many not as an attempt to liberate the southern populace from a repressive regime, but as an act of blatant aggression.  It would have earned the DRV the western world’s condemnation, as had the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950.  Such an invasion might even persuade otherwise disinterested states, such as Great Britain, to join the U.S. in the defense of South Vietnam.  The DRV wanted to isolate the U.S. in Vietnam, rather than take actions that garnered it allies.  An insurgency, made up predominately of southerners, would be perceived on the world stage as a more legitimate expression of popular discontent against the American-backed Saigon regime.  The choice to pursue an insurgency in the South was as much a public relations strategy as it was a military strategy.  A war of national liberation in the South would win the DRV allies, while a conventional invasion would win the U.S. allies.

The Korean War showed that the United States would respond massively to a conventional communist cross-border invasion of an American ally.  The DRV wanted to avoid direct U.S. intervention in Vietnam.  The communists hoped that a protracted guerrilla war would keep the U.S. out of Vietnam.  Such a war would be harder for the Americans to label as an invasion.  A southern insurgency would also be harder to peg as a war instigated from the outside.  A southern insurgency would conceal the DRV’s role in the South.  It would be difficult for the Americans to brand an insurgency as communist aggression if most of the insurgency’s material support and manpower came from sources within South Vietnam.  Additionally, Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues understood that the high-tech, equipment-bound Americans would have more difficulty defeating an insurgency than a conventional army.  The Politburo hoped that the insurgency’s indigenous, popular character might dissuade the U.S. from committing its own ground troops to the suppression of the popular will of the South Vietnamese people.  It was one thing for the Americans to defeat an invading communist army, but it was something altogether different, and morally ambiguous, for the democratically-inclined Americans to defeat an insurgency that reflected widespread popular support.

Article 11 of the 1954 Geneva Accords referred to Vietnam as one country, not two.  All the great powers agreed to this geographical interpretation.  Only the U.S. refused to accept it.  Later, the organization charged with supervising the provisions of the Accords, the International Control Commission (ICC), denoted the areas north and south of the division line at the 17^th parallel as re-groupment zones, rather than as North or South Vietnam [Gettleman, American and Vietnam, 69].  The ICC viewed the re-groupment zones as temporary expedients.  The zones served as a means of physically separating the belligerents, of ending combat, and of allowing for the peaceful withdrawal of the French expeditionary corps from Vietnam.  Article 6 of the Geneva Accords made it clear that “…the military demarcation line is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary” [Williams, America in Vietnam, 169].

The zones were slated to exist only until July 1956.  At that time, national elections would be held throughout Vietnam.  Those elections would establish a new government with the authority to rule over a re-united Vietnam.  In 1954, neither the Vietnamese in the southern re-groupment zone nor those living in the northern zone considered Vietnam to be two distinct nation states.  Ngo Dinh Diem, the American appointed head of the southern zone stated, “We [the South Vietnamese] are not bound in any way by these Agreements [Geneva Accords], signed against the will of the Vietnamese people.  Our policy is a policy of peace, but nothing will lead us astray from our goal: the unity of our country – a unity in freedom and not in slavery” [Gettleman, Vietnam and America, 104]  To all nationalistic Vietnamese, both communist and non-communist, the country remained indivisible, regardless of the partition at the 17^th parallel.  Both the Viet Minh and the pro-western Vietnamese in the South (who were mostly Catholic) feared the 1954 partition would be made permanent.

Immediately after the signing of the Geneva Accords, the Eisenhower administration worked to undermine the idea of Vietnamese national unity.  It did this by first installing a separate regime in Saigon under the leadership of the monkish Ngo Dinh Diem.  Diem came to power without any popular mandate whatsoever.  He was not elected to office.  His power base rested not on popular support, but on American economic and military aid.  At the same time, the U.S. began calling the southern zone the Republic of Vietnam, which was a ploy to enhance the legitimacy of the southern government.  It was a stretch to consider the southern area a republic.  Its barely functioning government was really a dictatorship propped up by a foreign power.  In 1955 and 1956, the Eisenhower administration encouraged Diem to reject talks with Ho Chi Minh on a series of issues, including the 1956 elections, inter-zonal travel across the demarcation line at the 17^th parallel, and economic cooperation.  Ike and Dulles urged Diem to scuttle the national elections scheduled for July 1956.  The Americans knew that genuine national elections would lead to the election of a communist government in Vietnam, with Ho Chi Minh as the reunited country’s first president.

By the time of the Kennedy administration, the State Department referred to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as North Vietnam and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) as South Vietnam.  This was a simple, and effective, means of distinguishing the Vietnamese in the north from their southern brethren.  U.S. officials even declared the citizens of the DRV as North Vietnamese and those of the RVN as South Vietnamese, as if there existed two separate peoples in Vietnam.  There had always been regional, cultural, and linguistic differences in Vietnam, but never had the people north of the 17^th Parallel been considered distinct from those in the South.  There had always been only one Vietnamese people.  Yet, the Americans now insisted on two.  The Americans needed such distinctions in order to frame the intensifying war in the South as an act of aggression by one nation against another, by North Vietnam against South Vietnam, rather than as a Vietnamese struggle against a foreign power (which is how the communists framed the war).

To JFK and his hawkish Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, it did not matter that the Vietnamese communists did not consider their war in the South an act of aggression.  The Americans were unwilling to accept the communist view that the southern insurgency was a war of national liberation against an invading foreign power and its Saigon puppets.  As the Vietnamese communists saw it, the presence of communist forces in the South could not be an act of aggression by one nation against another, since Vietnam remained one country.  South Vietnam was entirely an American creation and without the American presence, it would cease to exist.  Thus, the communists defined the struggle in the South as a war of liberation against an outside force, the United States.

Throughout the early and middle 1960s, the U.S. made every effort to portray the PAVN fighting in the South as an invading army, or as in the case of the Viet Cong, an army supported by an outside power.  Leonard Unger, the American Deputy Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs in the State Department, summarized the U.S. perspective on the war in the South.  On April 19, 1965, he told the Detroit Economic Club, “After the Communists’ open aggression failed in Korea, they had to look for a more effective strategy of conquest.  They chose to concentrate on ‘wars of national liberation’ – the label they use to describe aggression directed and supplied from outside a nation but cloaked in nationalist guise so that it could be made to appear an indigenous insurrection…[yet] The simple issue is that military personnel and arms have been sent across an international demarcation line [the 17^th parallel] (just as valid a border as Korea or Germany) contrary to international agreements and law to destroy the freedom of a neighboring people [Pentagon Papers, Volume III, 731-733].  But the communists never accepted how the U.S. framed the struggle in the South nor did they ever accept the imposition of the U.S.’s containment policy upon Vietnam’s geography.

At its most basic, the United States wanted the communists to accept the following: the existence of two separate Vietnamese governments, the legitimacy of the unelected, dictatorial Diem regime, a permanent division of Vietnam at the 17^th parallel, and the applicability of the U.S.’s containment policy to Vietnam.  It almost goes without saying that the Americans were asking a lot from the communists.  But successive U.S. administrations believed that the U.S., as the most powerful nation on earth, could impose its containment policy, and the geographical manifestations of that policy, on small countries such as the DRV.  But what would surprise the Americans, and cause them consternation for over a decade, was that the Vietnamese communists never accepted the American geographical system.  In short, the communists considered the American insistence on the division of Vietnam as arrogant, tyrannical, and a manifestation of neo-colonialism.  The division of the country ignored the will of the majority of the Vietnamese people.

In 1959, to mark its defiance of the U.S. geographical system, Hanoi launched its war of national liberation in the South, which sought to reunify the country under communist rule.  Unable to reunify the country peacefully through the provisions of the Geneva Accords and the electoral process, the communists decided to achieve reunification through violence.  The U.S. defined this war as an act of aggression directed by the North against the South.  The Eisenhower and JFK administrations considered the war of national liberation as a threat to its creation – South Vietnam.  But it was even more than that.  The war challenged the validity of the containment policy, the U.S.’s conception of world order, and the U.S.’s standing as the most powerful nation on earth.  American leaders feared that if the communists successfully defied the U.S. in South Vietnam, U.S. national security would be compromised across the globe.  JFK stated on April 20, 1961, “…we face a relentless struggle in every corner of the globe that goes far beyond the clash of armies or even nuclear armaments.  The armies are there, and in large number.  The nuclear armaments are there.  But they serve primarily as the shield behind which subversion, infiltration, and a host of other tactics steadily advance…We dare not fail to see the insidious nature of this new and deeper struggle.  We dare not fail to grasp the new concepts, the new tools, the new sense of urgency we well need to combat it – whether in Cuba or South Viet-Nam” [Williams, America in Vietnam, 190]  Kennedy warned that if the U.S. did not stand up to this new form of communist aggression, the U.S. would face a dire future – with its very survival at stake.

Successive U.S. administrations came to view the communist insurgency in the South as a movement directed from Hanoi, Beijing, and Moscow.  U.S. officials purposely downplayed the indigenous character of the insurgency.  Throughout his tenure as Secretary of State, Dean Rusk emphasized the role of the DRV in the war in the South.  For example, on May 18, 1967, Rusk stated, “I hear it said that Viet-Nam is just a civil war, therefore we should forget about it, that it is only a family affair among Vietnamese.  Well it’s quite true that among the Viet Cong and the National Liberation Front there is a large component of authentic Southerners who are in rebellion against the several authorities who have been organized in Saigon.”  And in a statement that stretched the truth he claimed, “But those are not the people who explain the presence of American combat forces in South Viet-Nam…It was what the North is doing to the South that caused us to send combat forces there….” If Rusk is to be believed, the U.S. went into South Vietnam to stop the DRV rather than the Viet Cong [Pentagon Papers, Volume IV, 671].

Rusk repeatedly argued that without the DRV’s material support and its provision of trained cadres to the war in the South, the insurgency would wither and die.  He even made the absurd assertion that if the North ceased its efforts in the South, the war “could be resolved peacefully, literally in a matter of hours” [Pentagon Papers, Volume IV, 671].  How peace would be achieved with so many Southerners still under arms against the Saigon regime was anyone’s guess.  The Secretary of State went further by making the unfounded assertion that “There is no evidence that the Viet Cong has any significant popular following in South Viet-Nam.  It relies heavily on terror.  Most of its reinforcements in recent months have been North Vietnamese from the North Vietnamese army” [Pentagon Papers, Volume III, 735]

Contrary to Rusk’s assertions, a National Security Council working group on Vietnam noted only a few months earlier that the Viet Cong drew the bulk of its political and military influence from its supporters in the South.  The working group reported that “The basic elements of Communist strength in South Vietnam remain indigenous: [these are] South Vietnamese grievances, war-weariness, defeatism, and political disarray; VC terror, arms capture, disciplined organization, highly developed intelligence systems, and ability to recruit locally; and the fact that the VC enjoys some status as a nationalist movement.  The high VC morale is sustained by successes to date and by the receipt of outside guidance and support” [Pentagon Papers, Volume III, 653.

McNamara admitted in the spring 1965 that most of the Viet Cong were southern born.  Even more damning to Rusk’s claims, the majority of arms for the insurgency came from captured ARVN stocks.  In mid-1966, CIA National Intelligence Estimate 14.3-66 put the total communist military force in South Vietnam at between 260,000 and 280,000.  Of that total, 38,000 were North Vietnamese troops.  Thus, North Vietnamese made up between 13.6% and 14.7% of the total southern force.  As these figures indicate, the insurgents in the South were mostly indigenous [Pentagon Papers, Volume IV, 325].  Because the insurgency drew its strength from the South’s people and natural resources, the Viet Cong could have continued the war without Hanoi’s material and manpower.

The DRV could have exerted pressure on the Viet Cong, but may not have been able to stop the insurgency, even if it had wanted to.  Had Hanoi tried to end the insurgency, it risked losing its southern supporters.  It would have also lost legitimacy amongst the northern populace.  The communists claimed they were the only true nationalist voice within Vietnam.  Their insistence on reunification was central to their nationalist credentials.  Had the Hanoi regime abandoned the struggle to reunite the country, one of the primary reasons for its popularity would have vanished overnight.  To accept partition would have threatened the stability of the communist regime.  Thus, the U.S. insistence that the North accept partition, and end its support of the war in the South, was viewed in Hanoi as the equivalent of the DRV’s unconditional surrender.  To accept partition may have meant the destruction of the Hanoi government.

By 1963, the U.S. had provided the Diem regime approximately $2 billion in aid.  Without that aid, South Vietnam would have never existed as a state.  The bulk of the aid went into the South Vietnamese military.  It was the South Vietnamese armed forces that kept the Diem regime in power and ensured a government presence in the countryside.  Ike, JFK, and later LBJ concluded that the destruction of South Vietnam, and the U.S. investment it represented, would have grave repercussions for the U.S.’s overseas standing.  The collapse of South Vietnam would make a mockery of the U.S.’s efforts to establish a non-communist nation on China’s southern fringe.  South Vietnam’s loss would raise doubts about America’s effectiveness in stemming the communist tide in Asia.  If the U.S. could not stop communism after such a major military and economic commitment to South Vietnam, would the U.S. be able to stop it elsewhere?  Vietnam became, as the investment increased incrementally, a symbol of U.S. power and prestige.

South Vietnam also became so important because of the competition between the U.S. and Soviet Union in the developing world, or what the hierarchy-loving Americans called the Third World.  The U.S. had a stake in seeing South Vietnam succeed as an emerging state.  Democratic-capitalism, as a model for the developing nations of the Third World, was on trial in South Vietnam.  If South Vietnam fell to the communists, Third World countries would be more apt to turn to communism as a means of pursuing development.

But it was the communist war of national liberation that was perceived as the biggest threat to U.S. national interests.  Since 1947, the U.S. had constructed its global security system around economic and military containment.  The U.S. overseas empire rested on containment.  Since the 1940s, the U.S. had upheld containment repeatedly against communist efforts to undermine it.  In Korea, the U.S. had succeeded in checking communist expansionism with conventional military power.  But in South Vietnam, the communists did not respect the U.S.-imposed border at the 17^th parallel.  Instead, they sought to expand communism into South Vietnam in a new, and to U.S. policymakers – dangerous way – through infiltration, subversion, terrorism, and political agitation.

Kennedy noted the danger that wars of national liberation, like the one being waged in South Vietnam, posed to the U.S., “This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origins – war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him…It requires in those situations where we must counter it…a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force….” [Krepinevich, Army and Vietnam, 30].  “New York Times” reporter David Halberstam, who opposed the conduct of the war but not the reasons for U.S. intervention in it, summarized the Kennedy administration’s thinking with regard to the war of national liberation being fought in South Vietnam and its relevance to U.S. national security.  Halberstam wrote, “…withdrawal [from South Vietnam] means that throughout the world the enemies of the West will be encouraged to try insurgencies like the one in Vietnam.  Just as our commitment in Korea in 1950 has served to discourage overt Communist border crossings ever since, an anti-Communist victory in Vietnam would serve to discourage so-called wars of liberation.” [Halberstam, Quagmire, 202]

The Viet Cong’s war of national liberation threatened to undermine the entire U.S. overseas security system.  Secretary of State Rusk was the strongest proponent of this line of reasoning.  On July 11, 1965, in an interview on ABC Television’s program “Issues and Answers,” Rusk stated that wars of national liberation, like the one in South Vietnam, threatened both the international order and world peace.  He remarked, “Now this is utterly fundamental in maintaining the peace of the world, utterly fundamental.  South Viet-Nam is important in itself, but Hanoi moved tens of thousands of people in there in the face of an American commitment of 10 years’ standing.  Now, this is something that we cannot ignore because this begins to roll things up all over the world if we are not careful here.”  ABC TV’s John Scali responds, “Is the converse not also true – if we stop the Communists in South Viet-Nam that it will make it considerably easier to achieve an enduring peace elsewhere?”  Rusk replied, “Well, I think that one can say with reasonable confidence that both sides recognize that a nuclear exchange is not a rational instrument of policy and that mass divisions moving across national frontiers is far too dangerous to use as an easy instrument of policy, but now we have this problem of ‘wars of liberation’ and we must find a complete answer to that, and the other side must realize that the use of militancy, of men and arms across frontiers in pursuit of what they call ‘wars of liberation’ also is too dangerous” [Pentagon Papers, Volume IV, 632].  Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara shared Rusk’s fears for world peace and the U.S.’s global order if South Vietnam fell to the communists as a result of the war of national liberation.  In a hearing before the Senate on August 4, 1965, McNamara asserted, “Thus the stakes in South Viet-Nam are far greater than the loss of one small country to communism.  Its [South Vietnam’s] loss would be a most serious setback to the cause of freedom and would greatly complicate the task of preventing the further spread of militant Asian communism.  And, if that spread is not halted, our strategic position in the world will be weakened and our national security directly endangered” [Pentagon Papers, Volume IV, 634].

U.S. policymakers believed that if the war of national liberation succeeded in South Vietnam, it would be used elsewhere to undermine the U.S.’s containment policy.  If that occurred, the destruction of containment as a policy would result in the downfall of the American constructed global order.  The Americans feared that wars of national liberation would break out all over the globe.  The communists would be emboldened by the failure of containment in Vietnam.  If the U.S. could not halt the communists with containment, it would be forced to resort to extreme military measures to check future communist aggression, including the use of nuclear weapons, which would increase the likelihood of a general war between the United States and the Soviet Union and/or China.  And so the U.S. had to stop the war of national liberation in South Vietnam.  The communists had to be bludgeoned once more into accepting containment policy.

Another reason to uphold containment policy in Vietnam related to the American perception of U.S. power and the U.S.’s position in the hierarchy of nations.  In the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. leaders viewed the United States as the top nation within the world’s hierarchy of nations.  Since World War II, the U.S. had largely ordered the world.  It had exerted its foreign policy influence partly because all the other nations of the world accepted U.S. leadership.  That leadership rested on U.S. military and economic might.  U.S. officials viewed the DRV as a small, insignificant country within the hierarchy nations.  Its unwillingness to accept U.S. dictates was considered a clear challenge to U.S. global dominance and the U.S.’s status as the number one power.  If a country of 17 million could defy the U.S. superpower, and get away with it, without punishment, respect for U.S. power would diminish and the U.S. would have trouble enforcing its dictates in the future.  Vietnamese Professor Nguyen Khac Vien remarked that, “It [the Viet Cong and PAVN war of national liberation in South Vietnam] had to be crushed to serve as an example and to test all the various weapons, tactics and forms of military activity.  It was necessary to suppress Vietnam so that fear of the U.S. could be maintained all over the world.” [Emerson, Winners and Losers, 111].  Simply put, the DRV’s defiance of the U.S. could not be allowed to stand.  Because if the Vietnamese communists were successful in the South, their example would lead to future challenges to U.S. power.

Because the DRV did not voluntarily accept the U.S.’s containment policy, the U.S. decided to force it to accept it.  DoD’s John McNaughton made an interesting statement on the need to punish the DRV for its defiance of U.S. dictates.  McNaughton stated that the U.S. might ultimately lose in South Vietnam and be unable to contain the communists there, but if it did lose, it must be certain to make the communists pay an excessively high price for defying the will of the U.S.  The U.S. must also ensure that other nations – both communist and non-communist – do not draw any lessons from the war in South Vietnam that might have an adverse effect on the U.S.’s global standing.  McNaughton wrote on October 13, 1964, “It is essential – however badly SEA [Southeast Asia] may go over the next 2-4 years – that US emerge as a “good doctor.”  We must have kept promises, been tough, taken risks, gotten bloodied, and hurt the enemy very badly.  We must avoid appearances which will affect judgments by, and provide pretexts to, other nations regarding US power, resolve and competence, and regarding how the US will behave in future cases of particular interest to those nations” [Pentagon Papers, Volume III, 582].  He continued, “It follows that care should be taken to attribute any set-backs [in South Vietnam] to factors: a. Which cannot be generalized beyond South Vietnam (i.e. weak government, religious dissention, uncontrollable borders, mess left by the French, unfavorable terrain, distance from US, etc.) [Pentagon Papers, Volume, 583].  McNaughton wanted to make certain that any U.S. defeat in Vietnam would not encourage the defiance of other communist nations to the U.S.’s containment policy.  To McNaughton, containment might be weakened by a U.S. loss in Vietnam, but a defeat in Vietnam did not have to spell the end of the policy.   If the U.S. rained destruction down on the communists for challenging the policy, that destruction might discourage others from attempting to undermine containment.  Thus, the policy would continue as an effective means of ordering the world.  Maxwell Taylor shared McNaughton’s views.  On November 27, 1964, he wrote that the U.S. can “Never let the DRV gain a victory in South Vietnam without having paid a disproportionate price” [Pentagon Papers, Volume III, 672.  President Johnson – and later Nixon – followed the advice of McNaughton and Taylor.  From 1965 to 1973, the U.S. pulverized North and South Vietnam with artillery and bombs, making the communists pay dearly for their defiance of the U.S.’s containment policy.

Since the end of the Vietnam War, General William C. Westmoreland has been criticized for approving the construction of large U.S. military bases throughout South Vietnam. Critics, who included the highly decorated Colonel David Hackworth, argued that the bases were unnecessarily large, provided too many amenities to soldiers, exposed the Americans stationed on the bases to enemy fire, reduced the combat effectiveness of U.S. units by providing soldiers an all-too luxurious life in the rear, and increased the overall cost of the war without any discernible benefits.  Hackworth once described the 9^th Infantry Division base at Dong Tam as “Four hundred acres of sitting ducks.” [Hackworth, Steel My Soldiers, Photo Caption]  But critics, such as Hackworth, failed to acknowledge the multiple political, economic, and military reasons Westmoreland favored large bases.

Divisional bases in South Vietnam did resemble small American cities.  Jerry Headley, a trooper with the 25^th Infantry Division at Cu Chi, recalled the odd juxtaposition of an American base situated in the midst of the South Vietnamese countryside.  He remarked, “It was weird, really; you’d be out in the bush for two or three weeks or longer and come in for a stand down.  You could have a cookout, go to the PX, see movies at night.  It was almost like being back in the world.  I personally could never get used to that, and to me it was one of the problems.” [Bergerud, Tropic Thunder, 278]  Another GI, John Gilligan, remembered his impression of the enormous U.S. base at Cam Ranh Bay, “The first time I had a look at Cam Ranh Bay I was shocked.  It made Pearl Harbor look like a used car lot.  It was vast.  They were unloading stuff everywhere and had put in an airfield next to it.  Clearly, we had built this thing for a long stay.” [Appy, Patriots, 310]

The big bases did not blend into the Vietnamese landscape.  In a rural countryside filled with rice paddies, thatched-roofed huts, and dirt footpaths, the American bases looked out of place, examples of technological sophistication, modern architectural design, and urban development in an otherwise impoverished land.  U.S. Army and Navy engineers laid out the bases in standard U.S. fashion – streets adhered to a grid, running in straight lines, north and south and east and west.  Sidewalks skirted the road systems.  Buildings sat within square blocks, bordered by streets, much like houses in U.S. suburban neighborhoods.  GIs lived in small ply-board and canvas “hooches” or in modern two-story rectangular barracks.  What the military called “logistical” and “tactical” bases contained many of the same consumables available back in the United States.  Soldiers could visit post PXs to purchase beer, soda, candy bars, and ice cream.  GIs could buy the latest cameras and transistor radios manufactured in Japan.  Later in the war, troopers could order a brand-new automobile on base and have it waiting for them back home at the end of their tour of duty in “The Nam.”

Long Binh, located sixteen miles northeast of Saigon, was one of the largest American bases in South Vietnam.  By 1969, it encompassed twenty-five square miles and housed 50,000 soldiers.  Long Binh cost $100 million to erect. [Vietnam Studies, Base Development, 145, Ebert, Life in Year, 111]  Long Binh had separate night clubs for enlisted personnel and officers.  The clubs sold cold beer to off-duty troopers, hosted Vietnamese rock bands, and played American Rock-n-Roll on juke boxes imported from the states.  The more health-conscious GIs could swim in a post pool or play a game of tennis or racquetball.  In the hooches, GIs had electric lights, air conditioners, radios, and T.V. which showed American sitcoms, including “Gunsmoke.”  Soldiers hired “hooch maids” to clean their quarters for a few dollars a week.  Some of the hooch maids did double duty as prostitutes.  The post movie theater showed the newest releases from Hollywood.  It was possible to watch John Wayne in “The Green Berets” while serving in the Green Berets in Vietnam.  “Dan Vandenberg of the 25^th Infantry Division expressed a sentiment felt by most soldiers, “My God, base camps were incredible.  They were the size of a big town.  There were officers’ clubs, PXs, enlisted men’s clubs, and even dances.  There was a sauna…It boggles my mind how much money it must have cost to set up each base camp.  And then there were swimming pools.” [Bergerud, Tropic Thunder, 35]

Not all of the GIs deployed to South Vietnam from 1965 to 1973 had the same degree of access to the big bases.  Grunts, the infantrymen who humped the Vietnamese bush day-after-day for weeks on end might only step foot on a divisional base once a month during a twelve-month tour of duty.  Once there, the front-line troops spent a few days unwinding from the stresses of combat duty before being sent back out into what the GI’s called “Indian Country” – the territory held by the Viet Cong and PAVN.  But administrative troopers, the soldiers the grunts derisively referred to as “paper pushers,” or “Rear Echelon Motherfuckers (REMFs)” spent their entire 12-month (Army) and 13-month (Marine) tour of duty on the large bases.

Since the majority of GIs in South Vietnam served as “paper pushers,” who worked within the U.S. military’s logistical system, the majority of GIs sent to South Vietnam actually spent their time in-country on a large U.S. base.  Their experience of South Vietnam differed markedly from that of the grunts.  Granted, the rear echelon soldiers still faced the possibility of death or maiming while on base, since the Viet Cong and PAVN had access to nearly every corner of South Vietnam, but the odds of death or wounding on a big base were far lower than for the soldiers patrolling the mountains or Mekong Delta for communist soldiers.  The safety and creature comforts present on the big bases upset the infantrymen and Marines doing the hard fighting.  Combat troops resented the military’s division of labor and its geographical manifestations.

There existed a degree of class consciousness among front-line troops and REMFs.  The REMFs held a more privileged military position than the men on the line, privileged in that their odds of survival were greater and their war physically less strenuous.  It can be argued that the big bases did have a negative influence on overall combat troop morale.  It fostered divisions within the ranks.  The burdens of the war were not being shared equally by the troops.  This inequality also encouraged front-line troops to seek rear positions, with detrimental consequences for fighting efficiency.  David Hackworth, who prided himself on the fighting skills of the troops under his command, made no secret of his contempt for the REMFs.  He wrote of Dong Tam and its administrative personnel, “From the air, the place [Dong Tam] looked like a huge, dirty, nineteenth-century Nevada mining town squatting in its own tailings – prefab wooden buildings with tin roofs, dusty roads and miles of green sandbags, the bunkered 3^rd Surgical Hospital, a PX and an outdoor movie theater, one short runway of prefabricated steel planking and a huge helicopter pad.  Home away from Home to rear echelons of ten infantry battalions along with aviation, signal, engineer, artillery, and military police outfits and every other kind of logistical ash and trash.” [Hackworth, Steel My Soldiers, 3-4]

Because the grunts and the REMFs lived and worked in such different domains, the two groups experienced radically different wars.  A commonly held perception of the war in South Vietnam is that U.S. troops spent their time slogging through rice paddies searching for the elusive Viet Cong or flying in helicopters from one battle site to another.  Yet, actual combat consumed the fewest man-hours.  Far more time and energy went into logistics and combat support than actual combat.  Hundreds of thousands of GIs experienced a monotonous, routine life on a U.S. base.  That life involved office work.  After working from 8 to 5 or longer, administrative soldiers returned to a hooch to shower, went to a post cafeteria for dinner, and then maybe caught a drink at one of the post nightclubs, before turning into bed and doing the same thing the next day.  In later years of the war, when the intensity of combat had dropped off, some of the troops on big bases were as safe as GIs stationed in the United States.

Although the REMFs and their mundane life in the rear earned the disdain of the grunts, the REMFs played a vital role in the overall war effort.  It was the REMFs who supplied the grunts with ammunition, equipment, weapons, and rations.  The U.S. was able to rain down such a terrifying amount of ammunition on the Viet Cong and PAVN because of the REMFs and the long logistical tail that extended from South Vietnam to the U.S.’s West Coast ports, and from there to the U.S.’s industrial heartland.

Moreover, the big bases and the REMFs stationed on them made Westmoreland’s search and destroy strategy possible.  That strategy entailed big unit sweeps of rural South Vietnam by U.S. battalions, brigades, and even divisions.  Or as Secretary of Defense McNamara stated, “The concept of tactical operations will be to exploit the offensive, with the objects of putting the VC/DRV battalion forces out of operation and of destroying their morale.” [Pentagon Papers, Vol. IV, 298]  To carry out that strategy, big units needed to be stationed on large bases, rather than spread out across South Vietnam on small bases.  To take on VC/DRV battalions or regiments required sizable U.S. forces.  It would have been more time-consuming, more monetarily expensive, more difficult to coordinate tactically, and generally less efficient to repeatedly gather dispersed U.S. forces, stationed at isolated outposts, together to conduct big unit sweeps or to fight communist main force units.  It made tactical sense to have the big U.S. units based in one location for rapid deployment.

Westmoreland also wanted big U.S. forces to serve as mobile reaction forces for the ARVN and South Vietnamese Popular Forces and Regional Forces.  The idea behind the mobile reaction concept was that if South Vietnamese units came into contact with the enemy’s main force battalions or regiments and faced destruction, the Americans would quickly respond by sending in forces to fight the communists and save the South Vietnamese.  To make the mobile reaction force concept workable necessitated big bases acting as staging areas.  Again, dispersed units would not be able to react as quickly to communist main force attacks.

Searching the countryside required mobility and mobility meant machines, including trucks, jeeps, armored personnel carriers (APCs), helicopters, and cargo aircraft.  All of that equipment necessitated the establishment of sprawling bases.  The helicopters had to be put down somewhere.  The APCs needed to be in secure marshaling yards.  The lumbering C-123 and C-130 cargo planes had to be parked in hangars or on top of long stretches of concrete tarmac.  America’s gadgetry took up a lot of space.  The 1^st Air Cavalry Division alone had 450 helicopters, including the CH-47 Chinook and the UH-1 Huey. [Moore, Soldiers Once, 26-27]  The 1^st Cav parked those choppers in an area at An Khe’s Camp Radcliff nicknamed the Golf Course, which encompassed approximately 3.7 square miles.  Danang Airbase was another major U.S. base.  Its runways, tarmac, hangars, bomb blast walls, barracks, and assorted facilities enclosed nearly 4 square miles.  That area was necessary for all of the aircraft coming and going from Danang.  By 1968, Danang Airbase became one of the busiest airports in the world, with an estimated 55,000 take-offs and landings per month.  Everything from C-130s to C-141s cargo planes and F-100 fighter-bombers utilized Danang Airbase.

Destroying the enemy meant the expenditure of unbelievable quantities of ammunition.  In November 1965, during the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, U.S. artillery units fired 4,000 rounds in the area surrounding LZ X-Ray in less than twenty-four hours.  [Coleman, Pleiku, 229]  All of that ammunition was to support one unit, engaged in one battle, during one day.  The appetite of U.S. units for ammunition and supplies was so great that in the summer of 1965, as the U.S. troop build-up moved into high gear, American cargo vessels waited an average of two months to unload their freight at South Vietnam’s port facilities.  [Palmer, Summons Trumpet, 88]  By 1967, “Ships full of hand grenades, corn on the cob, napalm, wristwatches, artillery shells, pigs, plastic explosive, lawnmower engines, rifle ammunition, tank parts, and C-Rations were unloading one million tons a month….” [Pisor, Khe Sanh, 54]  All of that stuff, especially the ammunition, had to be secured in supply depots.  Cam Ranh Bay grew into the biggest supply depot in South Vietnam.  Its ammunition dump alone occupied much of the peninsula east of the bay.

The big bases reflected U.S. strategy.  If Westmoreland had elected to use U.S. troops in a pacification strategy, with small units stationed in South Vietnam’s 12,700 hamlets working to win the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese rather than destroying main force units with liberal amounts of ammunition, American bases in South Vietnam would have been completely different in size, layout, and location.   Besides strategic considerations, Westmoreland wanted big bases because of the political and military circumstances prevailing in South Vietnam during the 1965 to 1968 period.

In mid-1965, Westmoreland concluded that Hanoi and the National Liberation Front (NLF) had opted to pursue a conventional war strategy in the South.  Rather than continue to conduct a protracted war that involved platoon and company-sized units employing hit and run tactics, the communists had chosen to conduct conventional operations with main-force units of battalion-size or greater in the hope of quickly knocking out the Saigon regime and ARVN.  An indication of the shift in communist strategy was noted by a JCS study group, which concluded in the summer of 1965 that “…the VC/NVA can mount simultaneous attacks in each GVN corps area not to exceed one reinforced regimental (4 battalions) attack and one single battalion attack at any given time.” [Pentagon Papers, Vol. IV, 295]  Westmoreland believed he would have to confront these big communist troop formations to prevent the collapse of South Vietnam.  He understood that such large units posed not only a threat to the ARVN but also to the U.S. troops streaming into South Vietnam.  To provide protection to U.S. forces, and prevent them from being overrun by Viet Cong/PAVN regiments or battalions, he wanted big bases.  Small bases invited the destruction of the posts and their occupants.  And the destruction of a U.S. battalion, or larger unit, would threaten continued U.S. homefront support for the war.

Loss of U.S. base would also invite negative comparisons between the French experience in Vietnam (especially at Dien Bien Phu) and the American effort there, which might lead many to question whether the U.S. could win in Vietnam.  American leaders, including LBJ, Westmoreland, Ambassador to South Vietnam Maxwell Taylor, and the DoD’s John McNaughton, feared a Dien Bien Phu-type defeat for U.S. forces in South Vietnam.  LBJ’s fear of a Dien Bien Phu for the Americans in South Vietnam eventually became an obsession.  During the Tet Offensive of 1968, he became so worried that Khe Sanh would become America’s Dien Bien Phu that he required the military to provide him with regular updates on the situation at the base. [Pentagon Papers, Vol. III, 699] [Pentagon Papers, Vol. IV, 418]  [Pentagon Papers, Vol. III, 480]  Westmoreland understood that big bases, containing multiple U.S. combat battalions, would substantially reduce the risk of an American Dien Bien Phu.

Another advantage of big bases was their perceived permanence.  The size of the bases gave the physical impression that the U.S. had come to South Vietnam to stay.  The U.S. wanted to send that message to both the DRV and the GVN, to the former as a warning that the U.S. would not be easily pushed out of South Vietnam and to the latter as an indication of the U.S.’s commitment to the GVN’s survival.  In 1965, LBJ hoped that a show of U.S. determination in South Vietnam might induce the DRV to end its support of the Viet Cong.  Large bases, and the commitment they represented, might also bolster the morale of the ARVN and contribute to its willingness to continue resisting the Viet Cong/PAVN.  Small bases and transitory bivouac sites did not convey the same psychological impact as a large base with concrete and wooden structures.

The military, and particularly Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, likely had a more sinister reason for promoting big bases – it would be far more difficult for the U.S. to withdraw from South Vietnam after it had erected a system of expensive complexes.  Big bases would rule against the hasty abandonment of South Vietnam for a number of reasons.  First, big bases would symbolize a greater U.S. financial investment in South Vietnam.  The Johnson administration would find it politically more difficult to forfeit such a large monetary outlay.  Second, big bases symbolized a greater commitment of U.S. prestige to the war.  Abandoning such permanent bases would be viewed as a significant defeat for the U.S.  Plus, the image of stark, uninhabited former U.S. bases in Vietnam would provide dramatic imagery of U.S. failure.  Third, the incredible amount of material stored on the bases, including trucks, helicopters, and ammunition, would take longer to pull out of South Vietnam if a decision was made to withdraw.  The bases and the material on them would slow any withdrawal.

JCS Chairman Earle Wheeler knew that LBJ harbored severe doubts about escalating the war in South Vietnam.  Temporary bases along South Vietnam’s coast would have fed into LBJ’s hesitancy to fully commit U.S. forces to the struggle.  He could much more easily reverse himself.  The military wanted to preclude that possibility.  America’s geographical constructs influenced not only military strategy, but political considerations as well.  Withdrawal became politically and physically far more difficult once the U.S. built its infrastructure in South Vietnam.

The Vietnamese, including the Vietnamese living in the former French colony of Cochinchina, who would later become known as South Vietnamese, had long harbored anti-foreign attitudes.  British travel writer Norman Lewis experienced it in Saigon in 1950.  He remarked, “They [the Vietnamese] are too civilized to spit at the sight of a white man, as the Indians of Central America do sometimes, but they are utterly indifferent.  It is as if a general agreement has been reached among them that this is the best way of dealing with an intolerable presence.  Even the rickshaw coolie…takes the money in grim silence and immediately looks away.  It is most uncomfortable to feel oneself an object of this universal detestation, a mere foreign-devil in fact.”  [Lewis, Dragon Apparent, 30]  Vietnamese disdain for foreigners, especially the French and Americans, had not disappeared by 1965.  American officials in Saigon and Washington worried that that disdain would openly manifest itself amongst the South Vietnamese if the U.S. sent a sizable expeditionary force to South Vietnam.  Several wondered whether South Vietnam’s rural population would rally to the Viet Cong once the Americans came ashore en mass.  The State Department’s U. Alexis Johnson expressed skepticism that a major U.S. ground commitment to South Vietnam would achieve American objectives.  He believed the xenophobic South Vietnamese would respond negatively to a U.S. build-up, and that their negative response could become a major problem for the U.S. [Pentagon Papers, Vol. III, 483].  George Ball, also with the State Department, was even more emphatic in his opposition to a substantial U.S. presence in South Vietnam.  He believed the South Vietnamese would perceive the U.S. as an invading army and rise up to resist it.  He wrote on July 1, 1965.  “Once we deploy substantial numbers of troops in combat it will become a war between the U.S. and a large part of the population of South Vietnam….” [Pentagon Papers, Vol. IV, 615]  William Bundy shared Ball’s fears of a popular backlash against U.S. troops.  He wanted the Johnson administration to cap U.S. force levels in South Vietnam at between 70,000 and 100,000 troops, because a force above those numbers would produce diminishing returns, especially because major U.S. footprint in the South would spur Viet Cong recruitment.  Bundy thought that there had to exist a tipping point in troop numbers.  Once the U.S. went beyond that point, the increased South Vietnamese support for the Viet Cong would negate the advantages of further troop commitments.  Bundy also worried that the Americans would be tagged as colonists, in the same vein as the French.  He wrote, “…we [cannot] judge the extent to which the people in the countryside, who have been exposed constantly to VC propaganda, [will conclude] the fight is against the American successors to the French…and hence flock to the VC banner.” [Pentagon Papers, Vol. IV, 611]

Bundy was not alone in believing a massive American expeditionary force in South Vietnam would lead the South Vietnamese to view the Americans in the same way they viewed the hated French.  The DoD’s John McNaughton shared Bundy’s concern as did U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam, Maxwell D. Taylor.  In 1961, before he had become familiar with South Vietnam and its people, Taylor argued that the South Vietnamese would not perceive an American ground force in their country as an occupying army.  He wrote, “While the Communists [in South Vietnam] had a tide running in their favor, we agreed that they were not without vulnerabilities.  They were no longer fighting the French and could not carry the banner of national independence against colonial rule.” [Taylor, Swords Plowshares, 241]  But by 1965, Taylor, came to a very different conclusion on the subject.  On March 18, 1965 he wrote, “The introduction of a U.S. division…will increase our vulnerability to Communist propaganda and Third Country criticism as we appear to assume the old French role of alien colonizer and conqueror.”  [Pentagon Papers, Vol. III, 446] [Pentagon Papers, Vol. III, 699]  Taylor wrote this alarmist memo to put the brakes on the administration’s rush to commit major U.S. forces to South Vietnam.  He wanted to slow down the pace of the build-up and prevent a too-rapid escalation of the conflict.  He also thought the MACV should assess how well the troops already deployed to South Vietnam did in combat against the Viet Cong/PAVN before requesting additional forces for the war zone.  He was not sure that American troops would relate well with South Vietnam’s rural population, nor would they fight effectively in South Vietnam’s harsh tropical environment.

The CIA, which provided the President with some of the best intelligence on the situation in South Vietnam as well, agreed that a considerable U.S. troop presence could lead to an upswing in anti-Americanism amongst the South Vietnamese.  It also argued that the United States should avoid engaging in a pacification strategy in the South.  In a June 10, 1965, memorandum, the CIA stated, “If [U.S. troops are] used to clear and hold large areas, particularly heavily populated areas, the US forces would tend to acquire both the responsibility for the war and the stigma of an army of occupation with colonialist ambitions.” [Estimative Products Vietnam, CIA Memo June 10, 1965, 256]

Although the evidence appeared overwhelming that the South Vietnamese would object to a major U.S. troop presence, Westmoreland refused to accept the informed conclusions of Taylor, Ball, U. Alexis Johnson, Bundy, and the CIA.  He did not believe the South Vietnamese would see the United States as another colonial power.  He thought they had the ability to recognize that the U.S. had intervened in South Vietnam to uphold Vietnamese independence and to protect the fledging country from outside aggression by the DRV.  Thus, he pushed for a huge U.S. troop build-up in the South in 1965, a build-up that by December of 1965 was nearly twice as high as the 100,000 troops Bundy believed should be the maximum troop level.

For the majority Vietnamese, especially the rural peasantry, the distinctions between the Americans and the French were barely discernible.  Nguyen Thi Dinh, who served in the Viet Cong and published “No Other Road to Take,” recognized the continuity between the 1^st and 2^nd Indochina wars and between the French and the Americans [Gettleman, Vietnam and America, 179].  Both the French and U.S. propped up a minority government of Catholics and Francophile Vietnamese.  Both nations upheld the powerful status of the Catholic Church and landed elite in South Vietnamese society.  And on a more basic level, both French and American soldiers looked similar – they were white, wore the same style of helmet, drove in jeeps and GM trucks, and fought with the same weapons.  Both militaries employed the dreaded napalm – with its flesh consuming jellied gasoline – against Vietnamese peasant soldiers.  And if that wasn’t enough, the Americans occupied the same ports, airfields, and outposts used by the French in the early 1950s.  For the illiterate, parochial Vietnamese rural resident, it was easy to see the Americans as the French.  The physical representations linking France and the United States were everywhere.  Le Thi Anh expressed the sentiments of many South Vietnamese, “…I didn’t think it was a good idea to send troops to Vietnam.  Because I knew that the Vietnamese people, who had been under colonial rule for one thousand years, were extremely sensitive to the presence of foreign troops.” [Santoli, Bear Burden, 214]

It was hard for the South Vietnamese to see the French and U.S. as different.  How or why Westmoreland believed the Vietnamese would not equate the U.S. with France is not specified in the historical record.  Yet, interestingly, Westy did believe large numbers of U.S. troops in the South would upset the South Vietnamese, possibly turning them against the Americans, but not because they were like the French but because they were merely foreigners.  Westmoreland agreed with Ambassador Taylor’s argument that U.S. troops should be kept away from the South Vietnamese in order to avoid antagonizing the latter.  Taylor stated “Increased number of [U.S.] ground forces in SVN [South Vietnam] will increase points of friction with local population….” [Pentagon Papers, Vol. III, 418]  Operating in major population areas would maximize the points of contact with Vietnamese and hence maximize the possible points of friction. [Pentagon Papers, Vol. III, 446]

Westy believed he could minimize the negative effects of a considerable U.S. troop deployment by building U.S. bases in remote areas, away from population centers.  Because the big bases would act as self-contained cities, filled with amenities, there would be no reason for U.S. troops to leave their bases to interact with the Vietnamese.  Troops would also be provided with in-country R & R on a U.S. base, rather than in a South Vietnamese city.  China Beach, near Danang was one such in-country R & R location.  It was described as follows, “The facility [at China Beach] included a snack bar where you could buy beer and soda, hamburgers and hot dogs, and listen to the juke box, an outdoor theater for movies, a small barracks for Marines spending the night, and a long stretch of wide, clean beach.” [Ehrhart, Vietnam Perkasie, 122]  Westmoreland forbad U.S. troops from taking in-country R & R in Saigon, because he did not want culturally insensitive GIs upsetting Saigon’s educated, highly politicized residents – who had shown their political influence in 1963 during the Buddhist demonstrations, when they succeeded in convincing the JFK administration to abandon its support of Ngo Dinh Diem.

GI’s acknowledged that Westmoreland’s base system succeeded in separating the American from the South Vietnamese.  Tom A. Johnson remembered a conversation he had with another GI on the subject of the South Vietnamese.  Griffin said, “OK, 1^st Cavalry, I guess you people aren’t used to being around Vietnamese too much” [Johnson replied,] “Not live ones,” I…suddenly realize that he is correct.  Due to the nature of our jobs, we are rarely in a position to mingle with the populace except when we get haircuts just outside the perimeter….”  [Johnson, To the Limit, 308].  Tom O’Hara described his time at Phu Cat Airbase.  “There just wasn’t much opportunity to dramatize [to the Vietnamese] what we were doing because we were in a three-square-mile piece of the United States of America.  America had come over, slapped down asphalt, put down runways, built buildings, and put a fence around it.  The officers all had TVs in their air-conditioned trailers and we had one in the barracks…The entire year there I never established a relationship with a Vietnamese.”  [Appy, Patriots, 326-327]

Westmoreland needed to construct colossal bases because millions of South Vietnamese were either actively supporting the communists, sympathetic to the Viet Cong/PAVN, or living within communist territory.  The countryside of South Vietnam was overwhelming communist by late 1965.  At the same time, GVN authority became increasingly restricted to a handful of coastal enclaves.  McNamara wrote a memo to LBJ in November 1965 that explained the dire situation in South Vietnam, “…the Ky “government of generals” is surviving, but not acquiring wide support or generating actions; pacification is thoroughly stalled, with no guarantee that security anywhere is permanent and no indications that able and willing leadership will emerge in the absence of that permanent security. (Prime Minister Ky estimates that his government controls only 25% of the population today….” [Pentagon Papers, Vol. IV, 622]  If Ky’s estimate was correct, then approximately 10.5 million of South Vietnam’s 14 million residents had come under communist control.  Westmoreland could not put U.S. troops into the middle of that significant communist controlled population without providing them with the protection offered by big bases and the sizeable troop concentrations within their perimeters.

The decision to construct large bases in order to separate U.S. forces from the South Vietnamese raises disturbing questions about the entire justification for U.S. involvement in South Vietnam.  If U.S. officials knew that U.S. troops would be unwelcome in South Vietnam, and that there was a risk of so antagonizing the South Vietnamese that they would turn against the Americans, why did the United States go to war in South Vietnam at all?

A number of variables influenced where Westmoreland chose to construct divisional bases.  He wanted to put them right in the center of Viet Cong territory.  In 1965, with much of South Vietnam in Viet Cong hands, this was not hard to do.  He hoped U.S. bases would act as “oil spots,” meaning U.S. control over the surrounding area would gradually spread outward from the base as U.S. troops conducted sweeps further and further afield.  Other factors influencing Westmoreland’s chose of base sites included the proximity of GVN-controlled transportation routes, airfields, seaports and population centers, the location of Viet Cong/PAVN base areas, and the most likely routes of communist movement.

Quang Tri and Thua Thien provinces, located immediately south of the DMZ along the Coastal Plain, had been communist strongholds since the 1940s.  In spring 1965, Westmoreland ordered the Marines to hold the airbase at Phu Bai, eight miles south of Hue.  Phu Bai gave the Americans a toehold in the two northernmost provinces of South Vietnam.  Because the base sat astride Route 1, the Americans could monitor north-south traffic on that strategically important highway.  The base, and the troops there, also enabled the Americans to block any communist troops moving south from the DMZ or east along Route 547 from the communist base area in the Ashau Valley.  Phu Bai could also serve as a staging area for troops to enter Hue to put down a civil insurrection or to halt any communist advance on Hue.

The Marines went ashore at Danang in March 1965 to secure the airfield and port facilities there.  Danang possessed the most modern port facilities in the northern half of South Vietnam.  Quang Tin Province, of which Danang was a part, was thoroughly Viet Cong at the time of the Marine landings.  The Viet Cong ran the villages outside of the airbase.  And Marble Mountain, which sat on the southwest side of the airbase, served as a Viet Cong observation point.  From the mountain’s heights, Viet Cong soldiers watched the comings and goings of U.S. aircraft and Marine patrols.

The U.S. Marine base at Chu Lai sat on the eastern edge of Quang Ngai Province, which had been under communist authority since the August Revolution of 1945 [Pentagon Papers, Vol. IV, 429].  When Navy Seabees came ashore at Chu Lai to put down an airstrip at the site, the Viet Cong roamed the area just beyond the wire.  The engineers required armed Marines to protect them while they worked.

Westmoreland originally wanted to establish a base for the 1^st Air Cavalry Division in the plateau country near Pleiku.  U.S. Intelligence pointed to a possible communist effort to seize the highlands in the second half of 1965.  Westmoreland hoped the 1^st Cav would thwart any communist offensive in the highlands.  In “A Soldier Reports,” his autobiographical account of the war, he wrote, “I believed that if the enemy’s designs in the Central Highlands were to be thwarted, I had to put an American Army division there, establishing in the process coastal logistical bases at Qui Nhon and Nha Trang to support military operations in the central region.” [Westmoreland, Soldier Reports, 128]

However, Westmoreland’s superior, CINCPAC Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp ruled against the immediate deployment of the 1^st Cav to the highlands.  His primary concern was that the division would get cut-off from ground resupply.  Route 19, which ran from the port of Qui Nhon to Pleiku, was highly susceptible to Viet Cong ambush, especially within the tight chokepoints at An Khe Pass and Mang Yang Pass.  If Route 19 became impassable, the Air Cav would be entirely dependent on air resupply.  Sharp did not believe the division could be maintained in the highlands for a long period through aerial resupply alone.  The division went through between 600 and 800 tons of material per day.  The number of cargo craft needed to meet those daily tonnage requirements would seriously impinge on the in-country airlift capability of the Air Force. [Pentagon Papers, Vol. III, 413]  Essentially, Sharp believed Westmoreland wanted to go too far into the interior too soon.  Sharp urged Westmoreland to base the Air Cavalry closer to Qui Nhon.  Down on the coast, the division would be closer to its supply base, it would be easier for it to secure its road link to the port, and reinforcements could quickly reach the division if the need arose.

Westmoreland and Sharp eventually reached a compromise on where to put the 1^st Cav.  They decided to base it at the former French outpost at An Khe.  General Bruce Palmer Jr. explained the reason for this choice.  “When the division arrived in September, it went straight into a base hacked out of jungle at An Khe, midway between Pleiku and Qui Nhon astride strategic Highway 19.  There it was close enough to the coast to be supplied and far enough forward to reach areas of expected combat – and stood smack in the path of the projected North Vietnamese avenue to the ocean. [Palmer, Summons Trumpet, 93]  Westmoreland provided an additional reason for choosing An Khe.  He stated, “The security of Route 19 is important not only in the event of the deployment of major US forces on the high plateau, but is equally essential for the support of the population in that area and for the delivery of POL for current combat operation[s]…Highway 19 must be kept open.  There is no feasible way into the high plateau from North or South.” [Pentagon Papers, Vol. IV, 608]

Like Phu Bai, Danang, and Chu Lai, the base at An Khe sat squarely in the middle of Viet Cong territory.  The base, later named Camp Radcliffe, was in southern Binh Dinh province a little over a mile north of Route 19.  When the 1^st Cav division’s advance party arrived at the base site in August 1965, the communists owned almost all of Binh Dinh Province.  And to make that point clear to the Americans, Viet Cong snipers took pot shots at the GIs laying out the base.  A 1^st Cav officer assigned to An Khe in the early days told chopper pilot Robert Mason, “This whole area…is considered VC territory…The Cav will be the first unit to locate right in the middle of VC-land, and the idea is to be right there in the middle of ‘em, to clean ‘em out of here, pronto.”  [Mason, Chickenhawk, 64]

Besides acting as an “oil spot,” the An Khe site served other purposes.  For instance, before the deployment of major U.S. units to South Vietnam, the communists had cut the country in two.  Viet Cong guerrillas controlled the rural regions in central South Vietnam from the Cambodian border west of Pleiku to the South China Sea in Binh Dinh and Phu Yen provinces.  By mid-1965, most of Binh Dinh had fallen to the communists.  In Phu Yen Province, only Tuy Hoa remained in government hands.  Westmoreland wrote on June 13, 1965.  “The VC control Phu Yen Province except for Tuy Hoa itself….” [Pentagon Papers, Vol. IV, 607]  The DoD’s John McNaughton admitted that the communists had bifurcated South Vietnam, severing the northern provinces from Saigon. He stated in March 1965, “Defeatism is gaining among the rural population, somewhat in the cities, and even among the soldiers…the [Mekong] Delta stays bad; the country has been severed in the north.  GVN control is shrinking to enclaves….” [Pentagon Papers, Vol. III, 695]  Westmoreland ordered the 1^st Cavalry Division to An Khe, not to prevent the halving of South Vietnam, but to keep the bifurcation from becoming permanent.

An added advantage of the An Khe site was that it did not require the South Vietnamese to forfeit valuable agricultural land for its construction.  Nor did the placement of the base at An Khe necessitate the removal of a large population.  As a matter of fact, the Montagnards occupied the nearby village of An Khe.  They were not only considered more loyal to the Americans than the average South Vietnamese, but also less likely to oppose the presence of the base.  Another consideration that surely crossed Westmoreland’s mind was that the Montagnards had almost no political influence in Saigon, so even if they did oppose the base, their opposition would not reverberate in the capital city.  Thus, An Khe would not disrupt rural life in the area; it would not antagonize the peasantry; it would allow the Americans to get on with the war.

The best natural harbor in South Vietnam existed at Cam Ranh Bay.  Westmoreland intended on transforming the bay and the 18.75 mile-long peninsula located on its east side, into the largest logistical base in the country.  It was an ideal site for such a base, mainly because the Viet Cong could not attack the peninsula and the extensive facilities placed there, without first being detected by U.S. troops.  Water surrounded the peninsula on three sides.  An attacking force would have to either cross the calm, deep blue waters of the bay in the open or attempt to pass down the narrow neck of the peninsula from the north.  In both cases, American troops could interdict the enemy before reaching the base.  [Vietnam Studies, Base Development, 56]  American officials considered Cam Ranh Bay the most secure position in all of South Vietnam, more secure than Saigon and the airport at Tan Son Nhut. [Pittsburgh Press, July 29, 1969].  When President Johnson visited South Vietnam on October 26, 1966, he did not fly into Saigon.  Rather, Air Force One landed at Cam Ranh Bay.  Johnson visited South Vietnam a second time in December 1967 and again his plan landed at Cam Ranh Bay.  When President Nixon traveled to South Vietnam in the summer of 1969, he too landed at Cam Ranh Bay.

Because Saigon served as South Vietnam’s political, military, and economic center, Westmoreland correctly concluded that it had to be protected from Viet Cong/PAVN attack.  Consequently, he decided to ring the capital with American bases at Cu Chi, Lai Khe, Bien Hoa, and Long Binh.  That he built these four bases so close to the capital indicated the extent of Viet Cong influence immediately outside of Saigon.  By 1965, the Viet Cong were closing in on the city.  Cu Chi, Lai Khe, Bien Hoa, and Long Binh were established to break the Viet Cong’s stranglehold.

The four bases guarded the northwestern, northern, and northeastern approaches to the city.  Cu Chi stood 20 miles to the northwest of downtown Saigon along Route 1.  Its troops were in a position to block communist units moving toward Saigon along Route 1 from their base areas in Cambodia’s Parrot’s Beak.  Cu Chi also sat a few miles south of the Viet Cong base areas in the Fil Hol Rubber Plantation, Ho Bo Woods and Boi Loi Woods.  Cu Chi overlooked the southern half of the lush Saigon River Valley.  Viet Cong units had long utilized the valley, and the sympathetic villagers living within it, to move men and material into Saigon.  When the troopers of the 25^th Infantry Division arrived at Cu Chi in late 1965, they did not have to look far to find the Viet Cong.  As a matter of fact, the Viet Cong came to them.  Viet Cong sappers tunneled directly under the base, surfaced briefly to launch attacks, and then disappeared back into their holes, before the Americans could even return fire.

Fifteen miles to the northeast of Cu Chi, across the Saigon River, the 1^st Infantry Division built its divisional base at Lai Khe.  In 1965, nice, neat straight rows of rubber trees grew in and around the base.  When U.S. troops arrived there, they found the Viet Cong hiding in the woods.  The 1^st ID troopers had to first clear the base site of the Viet Cong before they could begin erecting the base’s troop quarters, airfield, and accompanying facilities.  CBS News correspondent Charles Kuralt reported from Lai Khe in the late summer of 1965 when the soldiers of the 1^st ID swept the base and its environs for Viet Cong.  When a firefight broke out between the GIs and the Viet Cong, the inexperience of the Americans in fighting guerrillas in heavy underbrush became readily apparent.  One GI died and others were wounded before the Viet Cong faded back into the brush.  Kuralt observed the frustration of the GIs, who failed to find the Viet Cong.

Lai Khe possessed a number of geographical advantages.  Army engineers laid it out on top of a slight rise.  A gentle slope fell away toward the Saigon River Valley to the south of the post.  The base’s elevated position enabled the Americans to monitor foot and vehicular traffic moving through the valley lowlands.  Additionally, Route 13 ran along the northern edge of the base.  Route 13 linked Saigon with An Loc and Cambodia beyond.  Deploying the 1^st ID on the Route 13 prevented the communists from using the road to rapidly move out of their base areas in the Cambodian Fishhook area and on toward the capital. [Vietnam Studies, Base Development, 73]

Bien Hoa and Long Binh secured Route 1 and the northeastern approaches to Saigon.  The four American bases ringing Saigon were far enough from the capital to keep the U.S. soldiers out of the city and away from the sensitive, politically-charged South Vietnamese.  Westmoreland could not afford to upset the urban elite living in Saigon.  Without that cohort behind the U.S. mission, the Americans would have been hard-pressed to find enough allies within South Vietnam to continue with the war.

Dong Tam was one of the more interesting bases built by the United States in South Vietnam.  Westmoreland approved the base’s construction only after he decided to station an American division in the Mekong Delta.  The site for the base had been a marshland next to the My Tho River, a branch of the Mekong.  In order to raise the base above the area’s water table, the Army dredged sand from the My Tho River and dumped it on the site of the post.  Overtime, the dredge slurry rose high enough above the water table for Army engineers to construct troop quarters, an airstrip, hospital, and ammo dumps.  But the base had problems, particularly with drainage.  During the rainy season, Dong Tam became a muddy bog.  While during the dry season it was swept by dust storms.

Yet, for all of its physical limitations, Dong Tam served several important military functions.  It controlled a key highway, Route 4, linking Saigon with the upper and middle Mekong Delta, it protected the southwestern approach to Saigon, and it sat due south of a long-held Viet Cong stronghold in the Plain of Reeds.  U.S. forces could quickly jump-off from Dong Tam into the Plain of Reeds to preempt any Viet Cong/PAVN moves on Saigon or My Tho.  Moreover, Dong Tam could be resupplied by oceanic craft via the My Tho River, its location did not require the relocation of a sizable South Vietnamese population, and it lay five miles west of My Tho, which limited American-South Vietnamese civilian interactions and the potential political complications arising from such interactions.  Finally, the Navy and Army personnel based at Dong Tam had the capacity to patrol the My Tho River, a major east-west thoroughfare within the Delta.  American patrols would limit the river’s usefulness to the communists as a transportation artery.  [Vietnam Studies, Army Engineers, 145] [Vietnam Studies, Base Development, 53] [Cutler, Brown Water, 235]

Westmoreland ruled against the basing of U.S. soldiers in the lower Mekong Delta.  Even though the Viet Cong had a strong presence in the Ca Mau Peninsula, and possessed a base area within the U Minh Forest, Westmoreland did not believe the Viet Cong in those areas posed a direct threat to the survivability of the Saigon regime.  The communists could not easily jump-off from that far southern region to challenge GVN authority in the delta’s populated urban centers or Saigon itself.  Plus, American forces would find it nearly impossible to operate in the lower delta, with its high water table, its narrow canals, its nearly non-existent road network, its dearth of dry landing zones, and its scarcity of airstrips.  To add to its unsuitability to the U.S. military, the lower delta lacked the port facilities necessary to support a U.S. division.  The lower delta’s isolation, combined with its strategic insignificance, along with the difficulty of projecting U.S. power into the region, convinced Westmoreland to leave that territory to the South Vietnamese military.