POSTSCRIPT
Current management theory touts a technique known as “best practices,” where organizations examine the successes—best practices—of similar organizations to learn what others are doing well and how they are doing it. I have labeled this final chapter “Worst Practices,” for I catalog not the successes, but the failures in the army’s selection, training, support, and assignment of advisors for the Vietnam War.
I have not attempted, in the course of writing this book, to analyze the strategy of the war, discuss the role of the media, or engage in any debate over the correctness of the policy of containment or the domino theory. Others more qualified than I have written in those arenas. But in keeping with the focus of this book, I do wish to share some thoughts and observations regarding the advisory side of the war. Most of these observations have already been touched upon in various parts of the book.
An advisor’s perspective of the Vietnam War was far different than that of those whose Vietnam experience was limited to service in U.S. units. Many of my friends who served only in American units never understood the people, the country, the culture, or, in fact too often, the war itself. I believe this lack of understanding, more than anything else, has contributed to the collective confusion and guilt felt by many Vietnam veterans. It was unfortunate that all who served in Vietnam—officers, NCOs, grunts, and support types—did not have the opportunity to serve in an advisory position prior to being assigned to an American unit. It would have markedly changed their view of the Vietnamese people, and I believe it would have provided some sense of what the war was all about. I know it would have had a profound effect on the conduct of the war.
In a larger sense, it was this same lack of knowledge of Vietnam—the people, culture, history, and politics—that enabled American policy makers to blindly take our country down the path that led to our ultimate bewilderment and failure. We ultimately fought a war in a country we knew nothing about, in support of a government we neither knew nor respected, to assist a people we didn’t understand and whose culture we could not appreciate, against an enemy we completely underestimated and misinterpreted.
In earlier chapters I highlighted a number of frustrations resulting from what I believe were flawed policies regarding selection, training, support, and assignment of advisors. There are no new discoveries among these observations; I only echo the thoughts of others before me. However, as the Vietnam experience fades over time and new generations assume the leadership and policy development roles in our military and in our government, it is good that we remind ourselves once more of these mistakes.
Length of Tour. The decision for a twelve-month tour was disastrous in U.S. units, and doubly so in the advisory effort. Although defended in terms of preventing “burn out,” all it really did was cycle officers through command and other key combat assignments to punch their tickets and enhance their careers. About the time that an officer was starting to learn his job, he was moved to another position or his tour was over. We were constantly being led by the inexperienced, and the men serving under these officers paid the price. This practice led John Paul Vann to observe, “We didn’t fight a ten-year war, we fought a one-year war ten times.”
For a district- or province-level advisor to be most effective, at minimum a two-year tour would have been necessary to absorb all the knowledge that was essential, to establish rapport, and to build trust and confidence. Eighteen months should have been the minimum for those assigned as advisors to tactical units. The standard twelve-month tour was simply an insufficient length of time.
Compounding this problem was the army’s decision, in the face of mounting criticism over repeated tours, to fill many advisory positions with officers below the required grade: lieutenants in captain positions, captains in major positions, and majors in lieutenant colonel positions. The net result was inexperienced junior officers frequently being assigned to advise experienced officers senior to them. The implicit message was that a young, inexperienced American officer was somehow more capable than an older, experienced, and more senior Vietnamese officer, and could therefore effectively advise him—hardly the basis for the trust, respect, and rapport required. The enhancements in advisor training and the extension of the advisory tour to eighteen months in the latter part of the war were recognitions of this fact. While these were important improvements, they were too little, too late.
Selection of Personnel for Advisory Duty. The army failed to recognize that not everyone is cut out to be an advisor; a unique combination of skills and personality traits is required. The assumption that any U.S. officer or NCO—regardless of background, training, interpersonal skills, or combat experience—could just step in, be immediately accepted, and be an effective advisor was a delusion born of American arrogance. The lack of screening had predictable results in many cases. The post–Vietnam establishment of the Foreign Area Officer career specialty is a step in the right direction, but could not produce the quantity of advisors needed in a large-scale advisory effort. The army needs to develop some method of identifying those personnel who possess the necessary traits and skills to serve effectively as military advisors.
Recognition for Advisory Duty. The army not only failed to assign its best to the advisory effort, but also through its personnel practices discouraged those who might have wanted to serve as advisors from seeking such assignments. Worse yet, it penalized those who did serve as advisors by refusing to recognize and credit advisory duty as equivalent to duty in U.S. units. This discrimination, evidenced through promotions, assignments, and selection for command and senior service schools, was well recognized in the officer corps with predictable consequences. Advisory duty was to be avoided at all costs.
Language Training. Failure to properly train advisory personnel in the language was, in my judgment, perhaps the major deficiency. Many advisors, myself included, received only a cursory introduction to the language as part of the MATA course at Fort Bragg. A few who were more fortunate received extended language training at Monterey, Fort Bliss, or at the State Department in Washington. Some received none. The rapid turnover, resulting from the one-year tour policy, didn’t allow sufficient time for adequate training. The results were predictably disastrous. The inability to speak the language isolated the advisor socially, culturally, professionally, and in all the unofficial subtleties. The reliance on often inferior interpreters gave rise to misinterpretation, delays, and frequent lack of candor as the interpreter softened or modified the translation so as not to offend. It also interjected a layer between counterparts that made rapport and trust much more difficult to build and sustain. It’s a no-brainer—language training for advisors is a must.
Cultural Training. Perhaps the most difficult adjustment of all was that necessary to live and work in another culture. This book is replete with examples of American failures to understand and appreciate the Vietnamese culture, which led directly to failures of U.S. programs. Nowhere was serious attention given to this critical shortcoming.
Preparation for Advisory Duty. Since selection for specific advisor assignments often occurred after arrival in Vietnam, in most cases officers and NCOs did not know what their jobs would be; they knew only that they were being assigned to MACV. Without prior identification, critical preparation for specific jobs was impossible. The training that would have been most helpful for district and province advisory teams was far different from the training that would have been best for advisors going to combat unit advisory teams. The MATA course at Fort Bragg was the army’s catch-all course; it was inadequate on all counts. Once arriving in Vietnam, some going to advisory assignments received short in-country orientations prior to joining their units. Most did not.
Support for Advisory Teams. As this book illustrates, a great deal of the advisory teams’ time and effort was devoted not to advising or assisting the Vietnamese, but to the fundamental tasks of supply, repair, and support of the team itself. The advisory organization from the MATs through the district and province to the corps had no logistical support elements. Food had to be scrounged from U.S. units or purchased either locally or at the commissaries, if they were accessible. The same for repair materials for the team house. Except for weapons, radios, TA-50, and vehicles, it was all self-help. Even those items frequently required supplementing through scrounging. There is a clear need for a support element to be included in any future advisory organization to ensure adequate support and to relieve advisors of this time-consuming distraction.
Commitment to Training the VN Armed Forces. Finally, although not directly falling into the categories of selection, training, support, or assignment of advisors, the lack of commitment of U.S. forces to the mission of supporting advisory efforts through the training of the Vietnamese armed forces represents another key shortcoming that must be overcome in future advisory efforts. To a great extent, the lack of cultural understanding contributed to the failure of U.S. units to properly train and support the Vietnamese units in their sectors of operation. There was a reluctance to conduct joint operations, Vietnamese officers were often not trusted and thus not included in the planning, and Vietnamese units were given trivial roles in operations. American officers in U.S. units were critical of the ARVN, but regrettably did little to prepare the Vietnamese Army to assume responsibility for the ultimate conduct of the war. The Americanization of the combat role had, in fact, an opposite effect. It contributed to the unwillingness and the unpreparedness of the Vietnamese Army to pursue the war, and the trivialization of the Vietnamese role in planning and operations not only failed to prepare them, but also widened the cultural chasm and added to the resentment.
THE FAILURES NOTED above were as obvious then as they are today. There has been no sudden clarity of hindsight. A true lack of understanding on the part of policymakers, arrogance, self-interest, and an expediency born of political pressure all contributed to the evolvement of policies disastrous not only to the advisory effort, but also to the conduct of the war and to the U.S. Army itself. My hope is that from this failure we learned lessons that will not be repeated at the expense of future generations.
Despite these shortcomings, CORDS and the advisory effort were successful. Pacification worked, the Phoenix Program worked, the Viet Cong were being defeated and rooted out, and the war in the villages and hamlets was being won. The change in strategy of the North to more direct conventional warfare attests to those successes. Given time and meaningful commitment, I believe Vietnamization could have worked.