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

Conclusion

145 Conclusion The driving core of Marine culture, even more than a sense of the past, is its sense of future vulnerability. Every Marine is taught that the very existence of the Marines is always in danger. —Thomas E. Ricks The U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College in Quantico, Virginia , has produced numerous studies of the program, most of which offer fervid appraisals of CAPs in Vietnam. In 2002, Maj. Curtis L. Williamson ’s study argued that the dispersal of CAPs throughout South Vietnam would likely have preserved the country’s sovereignty. His revisionist approach estimates that placing a CAP in every village of South Vietnam would have required a “reasonable sum” of thirty-two thousand Americans and seventy thousand PF.1 Overall, scholars examining the “what ifs” of military history can make countless estimates and predictions about the Vietnam War. In the end, however, one can only speculate how the Vietnam War would have turned out if the program had expanded to every corps tactical zone in South Vietnam. Nobody knows exactly what would have happened to the U.S. military effort in Vietnam if American war planners had employed the CAP strategy on a much larger scale. However , historians and scholars can certainly research and write accurately about what did actually happen. In the case of CAPs, many Americans in the program left the war with a newfound respect for the Vietnamese people. In 1967, Corson proposed to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara 146 Defend and Befriend plans to ultimately place four hundred CAPs in I Corps. Although the number of CAPs obviously never reached anywhere near that mark, the former program director was a true believer in the effectiveness of CAPs. To achieve that mark would have required more than forty-four hundred Marines and corpsmen in the villages alone. This high number of CAPs also would have necessitated the creation of new combined action companies , each manned with several Marines and PF. Moreover, the increase in CAPs would either have created new combined group headquarters or would have brought more Marines to the already existing ones. Not only would it have taken more manpower to accomplish this feat, but in a strategic sense it would have handcuffed IIIMAF’s ability to fend off enemy main force units with Marine infantry and artillery that otherwise would have supported the CAPs. The vast majority of program veterans agree with Corson’s assessment of the effectiveness of CAPs. One of the exceptions is Edward Palm, who from July 1967 to January 1968 served as a Marine corporal in CAP “Tiger Papa Three” in Quang Tri province. After his return to the United States, Palm declared in an article in the Marine Corps Gazette that his CAP “had been a failure that can be attributed almost totally to intercultural misunderstanding.”2 In Al Hemingway’s collection of oral histories of CAP veterans, Palm expands on his earlier article, arguing that there were not enough Marines in Vietnam with the “intelligence and sensitivity ” to make the program successful on a larger scale.3 Palm’s assessment further supports the truism that every American in Vietnam, and more specifically every member of the Combined Action Program, had his own experiences and perceptions of his individual involvement in the war. As this book has addressed, many of the leading Marine commanders during the war despised the U.S. Army, Westmoreland, and MACV in general for their strategy. Throughout history, the U.S. Marines have always fought with a chip on their shoulders. In addition to constantly attempting to live up to their “devil dog” and “leatherneck” reputation, which they embrace, they have always fought for institutional survival. The Vietnam War was no different. With the U.S. Army representing the only other land-based branch of the American military, the Marines felt the need to justify their individuality as a service. When the U.S. Army challenged the strategy they had built, Marines such as Wallace Greene and Victor Krulak, both of whom had experienced the downsizing of the Conclusion 147 Corps in the decades before Vietnam, fought back with vigor. In light of the history of the U.S. Marine Corps in the twentieth century, it is easy to understand why Greene and Krulak were so defensive about the use of Marines in Vietnam. On the other hand, the U.S. Army had no institutional plans to extinguish the...