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

Introduction

1 Introduction Up to that point they were gooks. After that they were Vietnamese. —Tom Morton Thus Tom Morton, a former U.S. Marine corporal in the Vietnam War, succinctly expressed how his perception of the Vietnamese people changed during his tenure in a combined action platoon (CAP). Morton, a squad of his fellow Marines, and a U.S. Navy corpsman lived in a South Vietnamese village for months, training the local militia, conducting twentyfour -hour patrols, and rendering civil and medical aid to civilians, all to keep the area free of enemy influence and control. Morton’s statement may come as a surprise to students of the Vietnam War who have read some of the countless published memoirs and oral histories of American veterans. Those in the general public who have spoken with Vietnam veterans about their experiences would also likely find Morton’s assertion about the Vietnamese uncommon. Some of the most popular firsthand accounts of the war reveal that the American military viewed the Vietnamese through a racist lens. Many Americans’ perceptions of the Vietnamese as subhuman never wavered during their tours in Vietnam. Fighting a war of attrition against guerrillas proved to be a frustrating experience for U.S. infantrymen , or “grunts,” in Vietnam. Told to search for and destroy an elusive enemy hidden in the jungle or disguised as civilians in the villages, American infantrymen frequently patrolled for days without seeing one guerrilla combatant. As the days without enemy contact mounted, many American infantry units unleashed their frustrations with deadly force against vil- 2 Defend and Befriend lages and their civilian occupants. The irritated grunts often assumed the civilians were the enemy they had failed to find on patrol. Many Americans who joined the Combined Action Program, as Morton’s quote suggests, arrived in their assigned villages with a racist perception of the Vietnamese people. Starting in boot camp, drill instructors dehumanized the enemy that American recruits would encounter in Vietnam. Racial slurs such as “gook” and “slant eyes” characterized the discourse of American military personnel before, during, and after the war. Yet these CAP Marines and corpsmen lived in South Vietnamese villages, leaving the hamlets when the local militia, the Popular Forces (PF), had proven they could operate effectively without the Marines’ assistance . The small group of Americans in each CAP village had to adapt to the Vietnamese way of life. Personal and unit survival depended heavily on creating and maintaining an amicable rapport with the villagers, for the Vietnamese civilians held information about recent and upcoming enemy movements and attacks near the villages. Moreover, the traditional Vietnamese village housed generations of families living in close quarters, which meant that many of the civilians were cognizant of who in the cluster of hamlets supported the Viet Cong (VC) or had outright joined it.1 The most effective and humane means of extracting intelligence from the Vietnamese was for the Americans to make the indigenous peoples comfortable with their presence, which proved a daunting task for the Marines when they initially entered the villages. In other words, the Marines and corpsmen had to defend and befriend people whom many had already learned to hate. Yet by the time of the Marines’ departure from their assigned villages, many of the Americans had accepted dinner invitations to village elders’ homes, attended festivals and weddings, and taken part in funeral processions for PF and Americans in the CAPs who had recently fallen in battle. This book seeks to explain how and why the program as a whole and the individual Marines and corpsmen in the villages attempted to overcome military and cultural obstacles in CAP villages. As part of the U.S. military’s efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of the people, the CAP Marines performed civic action duties to bolster village infrastructures, most often consisting of the distribution of sanitary supplies and helping to procure materials to build pig pens, wells, office buildings, schoolhouses, and the like. In the process of implementing civic action, the Marines began to interact with the Vietnamese. How- Introduction 3 ever, more than any other element of a CAP, the daily medical services provided by the corpsmen, known as medical civic action patrols (MEDCAPs ), helped to create and maintain cordiality between the Americans and the villagers. At a central location in the villages, the corpsmen remedied common ailments such as headaches and stomach viruses, and in some cases...