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

1. The Evolution of Combined Action Platoons

13 chapter one The Evolution of Combined Action Platoons We had found the key to our main problem—how to fight the war. The struggle was in the rice paddies, in and among the people, not passing through, but living among them, night and day, sharing their victories and defeats, suffering with them if need be, and joining them in steps toward a better life long overdue. —Lewis Walt The practice of embedding U.S. Marines among an indigenous population did not originate in Vietnam. The World War I–era Marine Corps first combined the military and political components of a counterinsurgency in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. In all three engagements , Marines organized and commanded small units of indigenous military personnel. Alongside the local forces, the Marines conducted patrols against insurgents while providing aid to civilians. The Marines’ experiences in these conflicts spawned doctrinal developments in the Marine Corps during the early 1930s that spoke to counterinsurgency and counterguerrilla warfare. However, the later wars against the empire of Japan and the Communists in Korea rendered counterinsurgency doctrine and training obsolete. By the start of the Vietnam War, the Marine Corps had dedicated itself to mirroring the fundamental strategies and tactics of World War II and the Korean War, which had brought the institution military success and the American public’s admiration and attention . From the 1930s through the early 1960s, the Marine Corps had developed into America’s finest amphibious assault force. In the decades preceding Vietnam, the Marine Corps had paid little attention to the 14 Defend and Befriend concept of counterinsurgency. Yet in Vietnam, Marine commanders such as Lewis Walt and Victor Krulak quickly realized that the geographic, political, and military landscape of the war was incongruent with the decades of conventional training they had both received and helped to advance. The program emerged spontaneously as part of a larger strategic framework in which Marine commanders sought to gain military and political leverage among the indigenous people in I Corps. Learning from its experiences in the Caribbean, the Corps formalized a small-wars doctrine in the 1930s.1 The development of the Fleet Marine Force in 1933, confirming the Marine Corps as an amphibious landing force tied to the U.S. Navy, sparked much controversy within the service over the development of its small-wars doctrine. Many Marines, including the assistant commandant, Lt. Gen. John Russell, envisioned a future Corps prepared for a large conventional confrontation with the world’s major powers. Focusing on small wars in peripheral regions would undermine the development and ultimate success of the Fleet Marine Force. Yet the Marine officers advocating the development of small-wars doctrine pushed hard enough to get a manual published in 1935, ultimately titled the Small Wars Manual five years later.2 The 1940 version of the manual defines small wars as “operations undertaken under executive authority, wherein military force is combined with diplomatic pressure in the internal or external affairs of another state whose government is unstable, inadequate, or unsatisfactory for the preservation of life and of such interests as are determined by the foreign policy of our Nation.”3 The manual included detailed descriptions of the military and political components of a small war, much of it based on the Marines’ experiences in Latin America. Throughout the late 1930s, Marine schools gradually increased the amount of time allotted for small-war instruction, but lessons never surpassed 10 percent of the overall academic curriculum. In the two decades following the publication of the Small Wars Manual , pacification and counterinsurgency fell by the wayside. In the years preceding World War II, the Marine Corps collaborated with the navy in perfecting the doctrine and practice of the Fleet Marine Force. The Marine Corps hammered its officers with schooling and joint exercises with the navy, learning and practicing the art of launching amphibious assaults to capture forward bases. From 1932 to 1941, Marine officers tackled scenarios in the classroom that tested their ability to devise solutions The Evolution of Combined Action Platoons 15 for assaulting enemy beachheads. “Fleet landing exercises” every winter off the coast of San Diego gave Marines and sailors the opportunity to rehearse the developing Fleet Marine Force doctrine.4 In World War II, the aggressive, offensive-minded approach to waging a successful war in the Pacific justified the continuance of the Fleet Marine Force concept. The triumphant Marine amphibious assaults against a...