Defend and Befriend: The U.S. Marine Corps and Combined Action Platoons in Vietnam

6. The Combined Action Program and U.S. Military Strategy in Vietnam

123 chapter six The Combined Action Program and U.S. Military Strategy in Vietnam I think the Army people thought of the CAP as something the Marines had started, so that was why Saigon didn’t adopt it nationwide. —William Westmoreland During the war, Westmoreland told the FMFPAC commander Victor “Brute” Krulak that fighting with CAPs “will take too long.” The quickwitted Krulak, the most vocal Marine opponent of the U.S. Army during the war, quickly responded, “Your way will take forever.”1 This brief but direct exchange between Westmoreland and Krulak epitomized the blame game that took place between the U.S. Army and Marine Corps over which service was applying the correct strategy in Vietnam. Caught in the middle of the interservice debate was the Combined Action Program. CAPs undermined the army’s institutional obsession with conventional war, which Andrew Krepinevich has termed “the Concept.”2 For four years beginning in June 1964, Gen. William C. Westmoreland served as the commander of MACV, the unified command structure for the U.S. military in Vietnam. Westmoreland had operational control over all U.S. forces in South Vietnam. From his headquarters in Saigon, the MACV commander formulated and finalized all major strategic decisions for the U.S. military. During his four years of command in Vietnam, Westmoreland continued to enforce the attrition-based strategy that his predecessor and inaugural MACV commander, Gen. Paul Harkins, had applied during his two-year stint in Saigon. Westmoreland used U.S. mobility superior firepower, and advanced technology to attain high enemy 124 Defend and Befriend body counts. U.S. forces scoured the jungles of South Vietnam to search for and destroy enemy main force units, and these missions were the primary means of measuring success (enemy bodies) in the war of attrition.3 The MACV commander held steadfast to the belief that to win the war, the U.S. military had to apply overwhelming offensive force, as it had in all the major wars of the twentieth century. During his time as IIIMAF commander, Lt. Gen. Lewis Walt gradually began to realize that a strategy determined by the number of dead enemy bodies was not a wise choice in Vietnam. As IIIMAF commander from June 1965 to June 1967, Walt had operational control of the U.S. Marines in I Corps. Although he came from an institution that had its own historical attachment to conventional war, Walt believed in and implemented a strategy that differed from Westmoreland’s. Unlike Westmoreland , Walt defined a successful body count as “three thousand healthy, secure people, living decently, with hope for the future.”4 Walt, as well as his successors at IIIMAF headquarters, pursued a strategy that paid ample attention to aiding and securing the rural population. Yet this contradicted William Westmoreland’s insistence on seizing the offensive initiative via search and destroy missions. Confining squads of Marines to areas of operation averaging two square miles did not fit the strategic mold Westmoreland had formed as MACV commander. Living in the villages, interacting with the people, and training the PF did not require an overwhelming use of firepower and superior technology. CAP Marines accessed artillery and air support when needed, but they rarely participated in large offensive airmobile assaults or “search and destroy” missions outside their small areas of operation. When the Marines landed in 1965, they had already mapped plans to identify heavily populated urban areas along the I Corps coast; they would establish a secure perimeter around each of those enclaves. As the war progressed, each enclave would expand like an “inkblot” once more manpower became available to provide security to the people within each area of responsibility. Ultimately, the Marines envisioned one large “inkblot ” that would blanket a significant portion of I Corps. Westmoreland hated this strategy because it inherently focused on the people and institutions within the enclaves. The MACV commander wanted the Marines to break out of the enclaves to find the enemy’s main force units hidden in the jungles of I Corps. The Combined Action Program and U.S. Military Strategy in Vietnam 125 Although the Marine enclaves contradicted Westmoreland and MACV’s strategy, the war of attrition played only a minor role in the program’s failure to escalate at the rate CAP proponents envisioned. The program hoped to have 114 CAPs in I Corps by the end of 1967, a number not reached until two years...