A Noble Cause: American Battlefield Victories In Vietnam - Hardcover

MAPS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Corps Tactical Zones in South Vietnam

CENTER OF MILITARY HISTORY, UNITED STATES ARMY

INTRODUCTION

The United States is a country that is always looking to the future, moving forward with greater intensity, seeming to increase its national velocity with every passing decade, each succeeding generation. It is not surprising, then, that as we begin to pass the 50-year anniversary mark of America’s involvement in Vietnam, the image of the Vietnam War grows ever more blurry and unfocused in our collective rearview mirror.

The veterans who fought in that war, and who survived to come home, are in their sixties now—at least, the youngest of them are. And this, like all wars, was a conflict fought primarily by young men, each of whom was affected, some profoundly, by his tour of duty. Many Vietnam veterans have spent their adulthood living with the uncomfortable perception that the war that asked so much of them was not a successful war, that it is the first war that America “lost.”

And of course, that outcome is not in doubt, in the sense that the Communist forces achieved their objective of a single nation, controlled by Hanoi, and the United States did not prevent that from happening. It is one of the universal truths of war, even if a little counterintuitive, that it is not the winner that decides when the conflict is over. It is the losing side that must make that bitter decision. In the early 1970s, the United States of America, as a true representative democracy, collectively decided that fighting the war was no longer worth paying the toll it was costing—most notably, the toll in American lives. The toll in American unity had also been high, and both costs would have continued to soar so long as young men were being drafted and sent to Vietnam to face the very real threat of dying there.

Almost all wars are asymmetrical, in the sense that the opposing sides are not usually fighting for the same goals. For example, one nation might be fighting for its survival, while its foe may be fighting to gain territory and treasure. In this regard, the Vietnam War was more asymmetrical than most. The North Vietnamese and the insurgent Viet Cong in the south were fighting to attain national unity—and doing so under the banner of the Communist cause. They had the backing, and the doctrinal and material support, of the USSR and Communist China, very much a pair of uneasy bedfellows but united in their opposition to America and its allies. The South Vietnamese, conversely, were fighting for the very survival of their unsteady democracy. They had the backing of the United States, not just in material support, but also through the direct aid of American combat units and eventually the shedding of much American blood.

The U.S.A., in a national sense, had a lot less at stake in the war than either North or South Vietnam, as it was not remotely threatened by the Vietnamese. America was threatened, however, by the specter of communism—a much graver threat to the entire free world in the 1960s than many younger Americans currently understand. The “domino theory” was held up as gospel, in that if South Vietnam fell to communism, then the rest of Southeast Asia would inevitably follow. History disproved the theory: although Laos and Cambodia, inextricably tied to the fate and future of Vietnam, were caught up and tossed chaotically in the wake of the Vietnam War, other more populous Southeast Asian nations including Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia remained stout pillars in the anti-Communist world.

The American men who fought in Vietnam (and the American men and women who supported the combat soldiers) were not the ones who failed to achieve victory. In what has been a national disgrace, the veterans who fought in Vietnam—either because they believed in the fight against communism, or because they were drafted into the military and chose to follow the law that required them to serve (or both)—have borne a completely disproportionate share of the blame for America’s military performance in Vietnam. While in the vast majority of cases, these soldiers did their best to improve the lives, and the futures, of the South Vietnamese people they were there to defend, too many of them came home to antipathy and scorn.

In Vietnam, the United States Army and the United States Marine Corps both performed with exceptional effectiveness in battles against veteran, well-armed foes. The North Vietnamese Army was a professional organization composed of experienced officers, seasoned by a successful war of independence against the French, passionately committed to the cause of national unity. The Viet Cong insurgents were also veteran fighters, who, for a decade, had been waging war against the national government of South Vietnam. By the time America arrived in strength, the VC had carved out large pieces of territory that were effectively free of government control, where the Army of South Vietnam did not even dare to venture.

President Johnson, in 1965, made the decision to send American combat forces to Vietnam. Because he was not at heart a warlike man, and because he was haunted by the disastrous consequences of the massive Chinese intervention, fifteen years earlier, in the Korean War, he put restrictions on his military to try to prevent the conflict from escalating. Those restrictions included strict limits on where the United States could employ its overwhelming airpower, and banned American forces from operating in Cambodia and Laos, leaving those countries as untouchable sanctuaries for battered, but not destroyed, enemy forces. These two factors combined to create an unwinnable war.

While in Vietnam, the American military fought an impressive sequence of significant battles, and they won the vast majority of those battles. They introduced revolutionary new concepts to warfare, most notably the use of large numbers of helicopters to give combat formations unprecedented mobility. United States’ soldiers fine-tuned tactics used by their forefathers, including the traditional American reliance on overwhelming support by artillery and, as in more recent wars, the effective use of direct strikes by aircraft to aid the efforts of the men on the ground. In the end, as always, it would be the individual “grunt,” the Army infantryman and the Marine rifleman, who would win the battle with his M16, his bayonet, hand grenades, and the unflinching support of his fellow soldiers to the right and left.

The cost of the war to America is well known. The tally of men and women lost has been carved into black marble on our national mall. The Vietnam War would cost Lyndon Johnson his optimism, his presidency, and most of his legacy. The lives of the war’s survivors, in many cases, were scarred deeply. Some of them were disabled by physical wounds. The health of others was weakened or destroyed by the impact of chemical poisons widely used, and too poorly understood, at the time. Dark memories have caused too many to remain silent about their experiences there, or have festered to overshadow futures, families, and lives.

But it is a mistake to think of Vietnam as some kind of hopeless lost cause. Albeit at a terrible cost, the United States let the Communist bloc know that they could not attack American allies with impunity—that at some point the forces of the “free world” would line up against them and fight. Those forces fought in Vietnam, and quite possibly that willingness to fight led the USSR to consider, very carefully, the impact of further aggressive actions in Europe and elsewhere in the world. During, and after, the Vietnam War, both the Soviet Union and China chose to accept the status quo rather than risk another military confrontation with the United States and its allies.

It is even possible that when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, and the satellite subject governments of the Soviet Union toppled like—one has to say—“dominoes,” one of the causes of that collapse was America’s willingness to stand and fight in Vietnam. Perhaps that noble, if unsuccessful, struggle did have a significant impact on the course of world history through the rest of the 20th century, and beyond.

With the advantage of years, of historical perspective, and with a reflection on subsequent events far removed from Vietnam, perhaps the image of the war in America’s rearview mirror may become just a little brighter, and more clear.

ONE

FIRST TO FIGHT

OPERATION STARLITE AND THE UNITED STATES MARINES

We intend to convince the Communists that we cannot be defeated by force of arms or by superior power. They are not easily convinced.

PRESIDENT LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON, PRESS CONFERENCE, 28 JULY 1965

By the spring of 1965, the South Vietnamese Army—or the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN)—was so heavily engaged with the Viet Cong rebels of their own country, and with the invading North Vietnamese Army (NVA), also known as the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), that the south was losing the equivalent of a battalion of soldiers every week. Often posted at remote bases and camps, surrounded by either unpopulated terrain or villages and hamlets sympathetic to the enemy, the ARVN units were often subject to violent, intense attacks. The Viet Cong had practically made an art form of laying and executing ambushes against relief columns that would invariably be dispatched to the threatened outposts along readily predictable routes.

At the time, American involvement in Vietnam was limited to a robust Special Forces presence, mainly through the United States Army’s legendary Green Berets. These skilled and independent-minded soldiers were advising and training the ARVN, and had established a number of camps throughout the country in an attempt to monitor much of South Vietnam’s rugged and roadless interior. But it was clear that Special Forces would not be enough to stem the tide of Communist North Vietnam’s aggression.

The senior American soldier in the country was General William Westmoreland, commander of the headquarters known as the Military Assistance Command—Vietnam (MACV). Recognizing that the situation was a true crisis, and that South Vietnam would fall sooner rather than later without significant American assistance, Westmoreland requested such support from President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Armed with the freedom to act granted to him by Congress in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which had been signed the previous summer following a minor clash between United States Navy destroyers and North Vietnamese torpedo boats, Johnson quickly agreed. Even as he made plans to organize and move to South Vietnam an army force of over 100,000 men, the president took immediate steps to deploy America’s most combat-ready military force: the United States Marines.

COMING ASHORE

By March, the 3rd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment (3/9) had been aboard ships near the South Vietnamese coast for the previous two months; these would be the first Marines to land. Other units had completed training in Thailand, or would be moved from bases in Okinawa, Hawaii, and California. Before long, some 5,000 men of the USMC would be in position in country to protect the base at Da Nang, and to expand their missions as the war developed.

When the initial Marines rolled toward Red Beach at Da Nang, on March 8, 1965, they did so in a style that would have made their predecessors from World War II and Korea feel right at home: they deployed into landing craft and amphibious tractors from their sea transport ships, and rode right up onto the sand beach, a few miles south of the large airfield that would become the center of USMC presence in South Vietnam for the next eight years.

I Corps; USMC Operational Area

HISTORY AND MUSEUMS DIVISION, UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS

Of course, what happened after the landing was a little less traditional. Instead of machine-gun and artillery fire, the Marines were met by a bevy of pretty young Vietnamese women who insisted on draping flowered leis over the necks of the sodden leathernecks as soon as they emerged from the surf. After this not-altogether-unpleasant welcome to the country, the Marines boarded trucks and rode to the Da Nang air base. Cheering Vietnamese civilians lined the road for much of the way, and a banner proclaiming “Vietnam Welcomes the United States Marines” swung above the gate as the vehicles rumbled onto the post that would become one of America’s primary bases for the rest of the war.

These Marines, the BLT 3/9 (battalion landing team, 3rd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment), formed the vanguard of the unit that would initially be known as the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB) under Brigadier General Frederick Karch. A second formation, the 1/3 Marine battalion, flew into Da Nang from Okinawa. Although their arrival was a little more martial, in that snipers fired at the huge USAF C-130 transports that arrived at Da Nang every 30 minutes throughout the day, no hits were scored upon the transport planes.

On 9 March, 23 helicopters that would form the HMM-162 (Marine Medium Helicopter) squadron, took off from the carrier USS Princeton, which lay just over the horizon from the South Vietnamese coast. The choppers, which had been based in Vietnam for more than a year before a brief return to Okinawa, flew back to Da Nang to form the initial wave of USMC airpower in support of what would be a steadily increasing commitment of American strength.

Over the course of the next months following the initial landing at Da Nang, the Marine presence in country grew significantly. Fixed-wing aircraft of the VMA (Marine Attack Squadron) 311 and VMFA (Marine Fighter Attack Squadron) 542 arrived at the base. The Marine Expeditionary Brigade thus had the ability to support ground troops with helicopter transport as well as A4 and F4 ground-assault aircraft. In addition to the large base at Da Nang, a smaller air base near the city of Hue in the north of the country was fortified and expanded at Phu Bai, and a new base, with a quickly established airfield, was built south of Da Nang in Quang Tin province. This base, which was created in an area lacking an existing name, was located during a flyover by the Marine force commander, General Krulak. He called it “Chu Lai,” using the letters in the Mandarin alphabet for his initials.

By the middle of May 1965, the US had deployed seven of the nine battalions of the 3rd Marine Division to Vietnam. These Marines were supported by an artillery regiment, transport troop, and a number of air-support squadrons. Though most of this strength remained centered in Da Nang, which was subject to continued harassment by the Viet Cong, both the northern base at Phu Bai and the southern installation, Chu Lai, had significant garrisons and well-established defensive perimeters. As a capstone to the initial deployment—and at least in part because the term expeditionary invoked in the Vietnamese unpleasant memories of the war against the French—the name of the Marine Expeditionary Brigade was changed to the III Marine Amphibious Force.

FITTING INTO A COUNTRY, AND A WAR

Throughout May, June, and July...