5

Counter-Insurgency Strategy

American foreign policy toward Vietnam under the four presidents after Eisenhower consisted of a patchwork of indecisive strategies. Inconsistent military strategies prevented US forces from winning the war in the field. “The different personalities and politics of different presidents, along with their varying military strategies, led to an inconsistency in presidential philosophy and leadership that the U.S. military could not overcome,” said American historian John Dellinger.¹

Their communist opponents, on the contrary, maintained a consistent policy with the firm objectives of liberating South Vietnam and building a socialist and communist society. Ho Chi Minh wrote in 1960:

In the beginning it was patriotism and not Communism which induced me to believe Lenin and the Third International. But little by little, developing step by step in the course of struggle, and combining theoretical studies of Marxism-Leninism with practical activities, I came to realize that Socialism and Communism alone are capable of emancipating the workers and downtrodden people all over the world. There was in Vietnam—as well as in China—the legend of the magic bag; anyone faced with a great problem would simply open the bag to find a ready solution. For the Vietnamese revolution and Vietnamese people, Marxism-Leninism is not merely a magic bag, or a compass, but a real sun which lights the road to final victory, to Socialism and Communism.²

From the beginning, the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) was created to fulfill these objectives (later, in 1951, it changed its name to the Vietnamese Workers’ Party, VWP). Its Central Committee’s members knew the war was a political war fought for ideological objectives. Therefore, the practical means to gear the war via the armed forces would be to develop a political army with extreme discipline hardened through indoctrination. Soldiers of the VWP’s People’s Army became ready to fight with fanaticism, to the point of sacrificing their lives for the sake of the party. Vo Nguyen Giap, the commander in chief of the People’s Army, wrote in his book, People’s War, People’s Army: “The People’s Army is the instrument of the Party and the revolutionary State for accomplishment, in armed form, of the tasks of the revolution. Profound awareness of the aims of the Party, boundless loyalty to the cause of the nation and the working class, and a spirit of unreserved sacrifice are fundamental questions for the army, and questions of principle. Therefore, the political work in its ranks is the first importance. It is the soul of the army.”³

In 1947, Truong Chinh formulated a doctrine called “The Resistance Will Win” which was adapted from Mao Tse-tung’s “On Protracted War,” also termed the “People’s War” or the “Revolutionary War.” The ICP applied this “Resistance” (Trường-ký Kháng-chiến) as its “doctrine of war” in its struggle in Vietnam like the Chinese Communist Party did in China. This kind of war laid out 3 phases of transformation: (1) a strategic defensive phase of prolonged attrition from insurgency and guerrilla warfare; (2) the “war of movement,” to gain equilibrium of force, and (3) a “general offensive” and “general uprising” phase (Tổng Công-Kích vā Tổng Nổi-Dậy).⁴

The most important stage of this doctrine was the first phase of strategic defense or insurgency and guerrilla warfare, which had a twofold purpose. First, the party sent out politico-military cadres to carry on the so-called armed propaganda approach (Võ-trang Tuyên-truyền). These communist cadres went among the mass in order to recruit, organize, and develop armed forces from village militia to become area guerrilla units (du-kích quân); then, from district (huyện-đội) to provincial (tỉnh-đội) and regional units (bộ-đội Miền). Vo Nguyen Giap stressed that “the development of this organized system of political militia and guerrilla units would largely precede the building of a regular army.”⁵

Second, as the propaganda spread, the party—which then became the VWP—continued to terrorize the South Vietnamese people, mostly in the countryside. The party’s terrorist policy had two important goals: intimidation of the populace and elimination of enemies throughout the village and district infrastructure. This policy of terrorism was officially outlined in one of the COSVN’s resolutions and practiced by both the People’s Army and VC regular units. The most skillful were the secret assassination squads (tiểu-tổ ám-sát) found at most communist local units including the Du-kích xã (village guerrillas), the Huyện-đội (district units), and the Tỉnh-đội (provincial units). The resolution’s strategy stated that “integral to political struggle would be the liberal use of terrorism to weaken and destroy local government, strengthen the party apparatus, proselyte among the populace, erode control and influence of the South Vietnam Government and its armed forces.”⁶ These communist units carried out barbarous acts of terrorism, such as killing and cutting the victim’s body to ribbons or leaving his head dangling from a bamboo pole in the middle of the village. Others simply gunned down the victim after reading his “death sentence.” These violent acts of terrorism were more effective for their political and psychological effects among the masses than for their military effects.

Communist insurgency in South Vietnam increased considerably from 1960, after the creation of both the Southern Liberation Front and the Liberation Army, the latter formed by hard-core officers such as General Tran van Tra, Le Trong Tan, and Tran Do. These officers infiltrated into the South, with more than 10,000 southern-born cadres, passing through the DMZ by crossing the Ben-Hai River in Quang-Tri Province and then using the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Infiltrations by the front’s cadres and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) troops went undetected until mid–1960.

Until that time, the communist insurgency had not directly defeated any South Vietnamese battalions or regiments but simply aimed to eliminate the government rural officials such as hamlet and village chiefs, district policemen, schoolteachers, recalcitrant villagers, and those who sympathized with the South Vietnam regime. In the Central Highlands and remote areas of the Mekong Delta, they intimidated villagers by assassination, abduction, kidnapping, or harassment in order to force their cooperation, to collect taxes, food, and other supplies; and to discourage them from giving intelligence to the government officials. This first phase of the insurgency, which had been the Viet-Minh’s source of success against the French in the 1940s and 1950s, now became a real threat for Ngo Dinh Diem’s administration and the American authorities in South Vietnam. This was especially true after the “arc of insurgency” was established around Saigon that killed, maimed, or kidnapped several American officers and officials in November and December 1960. The newly appointed American ambassador to Saigon, Frederic E. Nolting, narrowly escaped a hand grenade thrown at his car in early 1961.

Official estimates of the number of South Vietnamese village officials killed by communist insurgents, from May 1957 to April 1961, exceeded 8,000. Countless innocent villagers and farmers were also killed or kidnapped.

At this point, the war was one of insurgency, staged by the North Vietnamese Communists disguised as the Liberation Front. Faced with this situation, John F. Kennedy, the new president of the United States, had trouble formulating a suitable military strategy. The war conducted by the communists in North Vietnam was clear but the subversion of the people “inside” South Vietnam was not. Common opinion held that the VC (Việt-Cộng) in South Vietnam fought the war for independence with the “help” of the NVA (North Vietnamese Army). Accordingly, the true nature of the “liberation war,” or “revolutionary war,” was not grasped by the United States. In fact, the war in South Vietnam was a unique war conducted by Ho Chi Minh and the VWP, or really the Vietnamese Communist Party. This was the true nature of the Second Vietnam War.

Although the true opponents were misidentified and the nature of the war misunderstood, the Kennedy administration was credited by some historians for its prompt action in South Vietnam and in Indochina, especially in Laos, which was then in a state of war, involving the Royal Laotian Army and the Pathet-Lao.

COUNTER-INSURGENCY: CONCEPTS AND MEASURES

On May 11, 1961, a United States presidential memorandum set forth the Kennedy administration’s policy for South Vietnam, essentially affirming the previous Eisenhower policy. It stated: “The U.S. objective and concept of operations stated in the report are approved: to prevent communist domination of South Vietnam, to create in that country a viable and increasingly democratic society, and to initiate, on an accelerated basis, a series of mutually supporting actions of a military, political, economic, psychological and covert character designed to achieve this objective.”⁷

All supporting activities by the U.S. were accelerated. An inter-agency “Vietnam Task Force” was set up, military aid was accelerated, and an endless stream of inspection missions of all kinds began to invade Saigon. In addition to these activities, one week before issuing the memorandum, President Kennedy declared in a press conference on May 5, 1961, that he would consider the use of U.S. forces if necessary “to help South Vietnam resist communist pressure.” But after an overwhelming majority had re-elected Ngo Dinh Diem (on April 9), Diem let Ambassador Nolting know that the people of South Vietnam did not want combat troops from the United States. This was the first direct conflict between these two presidents. Their disagreement would later deeply affect the “termination” of Diem and his brother Nhu. At the time, vice-president Lyndon Johnson left Washington immediately for talks with Diem on the subject.

Back in Washington on May 20, 1961, Johnson proposed to increase the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) to 170,000 men, double the provincial Civil Guards (Bẚo-an roàn) around the country, from 60,000 to 120,000 men, and equip the village Militia (Dân-vệ) with modern small weapons. His most interesting proposition to President Kennedy was that he construct more strategic hamlets and “increase … the agrovilles from 22 to 100 in one year.”⁸ The problem of “American combat troops” was not discussed at that time. However, President Diem was told to accept the “pacification plan” involving the ten Mekong Delta provinces known as the “Delta Plan” and the Central Highlands project, called the “Boun Enao Project” and involving the participation of U.S. “Special Advisory Teams.”

On December 15, 1961, in officially exchanged letters, President Diem stressed that South Vietnam faced the “most serious crisis in its entire history,” while President Kennedy promised that “the United States would promptly increase its aid” and expressed his “full confidence in the determination of the people of South Vietnam.”⁹

French historian Bernard B. Fall emphasizes the United States’ expansion of military involvement in Vietnam after the exchange of these presidential letters. President Kennedy informed Saigon of plans to increase the number of American advisers from 900 to 16,000 over a two-year period. Within weeks, Kennedy dispatched the first helicopter units, called “Eagle-Flights,” to Vietnam. More than 300 American pilots were ordered to lead Vietnamese troops into battle but not engage in combat—unless in “self-defense.” By early 1962, the number of American advisers increased to 4,000, including Green Berets units, or Special Forces, especially trained to deal with guerrilla warfare. They belonged to the new Counter-Insurgency Council chaired by General Maxwell D. Taylor. On February 8, 1961, MAAG-Vietnam became the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), bringing the American role from a few hundred advisers, as started by President Truman, to thousands of Americans committed to the field.

Professor Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was then Kennedy’s political adviser, used a metaphor to compare Kennedy’s “gradual escalation” policy in Vietnam to a drink; he wrote: “It’s like a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another. Yet, he felt obligated to offer a small drink himself and he increased the number of military advisers.”¹⁰ Bernard Fall further developed Schlesinger’s idea, “it could well be argued that it was the Kennedy administration that brought the bottle to the party.”¹¹ Fall also stated in The Two Vietnams (1964) that: “And thus, degree by degree, the United States slid into the Second Vietnam War.”¹² Later, in a retrospective article in 1967 on President Kennedy’s military commitment to Vietnam, he commented: “It was he (or men under him) who made all the decisive mistakes in the Vietnam situation. Probably no chief executive in recent memory was so badly informed about an increasingly serious situation as JFK was about Vietnam. It was during his administration that the politics of inadvertence blossomed into full-gear commitment.”¹³

After the war, many American scholars and politicians agreed with Fall’s comment, but polls from the early 1960s showed that a large majority of Americans favored going to war, if necessary, to prevent a communist takeover of any friendly nation. Ostensibly, the United States’ reason for military involvement in Vietnam was based on the general philosophy of strategic containment of communism. However, the lure of building a personal “theory of war” suitable to a new arena, in which the so-called wars of liberation largely developed, also influenced President Kennedy. His aim was to be the father of a new worldwide theory of “Counter-Insurgency,” which he realized by “giving birth” to the Green Berets Corps of the U.S. Armed Forces. South Vietnam became an appropriate and timely turf upon which he could test his “theory” and his “tool.” Indeed, his secretary of defense, McNamara, had confirmed in mid–1962: “We still win even on present ground rules…. South Vietnam is a test of U.S. firmness and of U.S. capacity to deal with wars of liberation.”¹⁴

Thus, South Vietnam became the “testing-ground” of a new concept of war for the United States under the Kennedy presidency. This was one of the root motivations of his policy of military escalation in South Vietnam. Degree by degree he slid into the Second Vietnam War. Not with the out-of-control manner, as stated by Schlesinger in his metaphor of “a drink after a drink,” but with a well-planned intention, as secretary of state Dean Rusk said: “Vietnam posed for us a serious question about where we’re going in respect of collective security. If the US had done nothing about Vietnam then its allies would have been the first to say ‘You see, you cannot trust the Americans.’”¹⁵ And, Rusk’s deputy, Roger Hilsman, a close Kennedy aide, stated that the president was extremely sensitive over Vietnam and saw it in a global context, with the thinking that “the world [was] deemed to be exploding into wars of national liberation and communist-led insurgency.”¹⁶

A new concept of war in South Vietnam and in other Indochinese countries was sorely needed, with effective countermeasures against communist “revolutions.” This was especially true after Soviet Premier Khrushchev made a pointed speech in support of world revolution just days before Kennedy’s presidential inauguration on January 20, 1961. However, Kennedy’s new initiatives turned out to have serious psychological and political ramifications for the outcome in South Vietnam and in Laos.

First, in South Vietnam, President Kennedy decided to firmly handle the war despite the opposition of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. Peter Brush, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, wrote a remarkable observation in Vietnam Magazine: “The more the US took control of the war to avoid the defeat of the GVN [Government of Vietnam] by the communists, the easier it was for Hanoi to portray the United States as a neocolonialist power and the GVN as merely as puppet regime.”¹⁷ It was ironic but it was, in fact, true. President Kennedy’s second big mistake was his initiative to neutralize Laos.

THE NEUTRALIZATION OF LAOS IN 1962

In Laos, the pro–Chinese regime of Prince Souvanna Phouma was replaced, in July 1958, by the right-wing reform regime of Prince Boum Oum and General Phoumi Nosavan. From May 1959, Laos was in the midst of a bizarre war between three different forces. The United States backed the rightist forces of General Phoumi Nosavan. Nosavan fought both the neutralist forces of rebel Captain Kong Le (later major general), who was backing Prince Souvanna Phouma, and the Communist Pathet-Lao under Prince Souphanouvong, who were backed by both the Soviet Union and Red China. The Pathet-Lao was greatly influenced by the North Vietnamese Army. There were at least 4,000 NVA officers and soldiers serving in Pathet-Lao units.

Most of the fighting and an endless series of inconclusive clashes occurred in the Plain of Jars area in north central Laos. Meanwhile, in the southeastern panhandle and Laotian border, the 559th Special Groups of the North Vietnamese Army, with a total of 35,000 men, continued to expand and improve the existing trails along the Truong-Son Chain (Day Truong-Son) into a major road network known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. During that period (1959–1961) this invasion and exploitation of Laotian territory by the communists of North Vietnam for their purposes in South Vietnam was of critical importance.

According to Roger Hilsman, assistant secretary of state for Far-East Affairs, ex–President Eisenhower had given incoming President Kennedy urgent advice about Laos. Eisenhower warned that Laos was important and would be a big problem for the Kennedy administration. If Laos fell to communism, he feared that other Asian nations would follow, toppling like a row of dominoes. He also suggested to Kennedy that the United States might have to send troops to Laos.

In the eyes of master strategist Eisenhower, Laos occupied an area in Indochina that was very important militarily and geographically. Were the United States to fight a ground war, the best place for it would likely be in Laos instead of South Vietnam. Had President Kennedy advanced and directed an open war in Laotian territory at that time, he would have won the war. First, North Vietnam’s invasion of Laos meant the United States would be engaged in the cause of helping a free nation against communist invaders. Such an undertaking would gain global support and the cooperation of the Western allies. Second, the 40,000 North Vietnamese communist troops in Laotian territory would be considered conquerors of Laos. Accordingly, they could not retain their purported nationalistic “reason” of a “liberation war.” Third, by fighting in Laos, the Kennedy administration could gain more easily the support of the U.S. populace, the media, and the Congress.

While there may have been other reasons such a course would have been a winning solution, the Kennedy administration unfortunately chose a narrow path in Indochina: neutralizing Laos and fighting a “limited war” in South Vietnam. Kennedy wished to avoid a “second” Korean War by drawing Red China into an intervention in Indochina. Also, Kennedy had been elected president by a very small margin and “realized that in his first term he needed to make sure he would become a popular president so that he could address more difficult issues in his second term,” wrote Dr. Jane Hamilton Merritt, a Pulitzer Prize winner.¹⁸

Under the Kennedy presidency, the U.S. followed two contrasting strategies in Indochina, a formal official one and a tacit one, especially in Laos. In fact, one of Kennedy’s advisers, under-secretary of state Averell Harriman, proposed that Laos be “neutralized.” He assured Kennedy that the neutralization of Laos would “block the use of Laos’ territory against South Vietnam,” making it possible to “solve the South Vietnam problem in South Vietnam, rather than by military action in Laos.”¹⁹

On May 16, 1961, a fourteen-nation conference on Laos convened in Geneva. American delegates were two men who had damaged American policy toward Indochina from the beginning: Averell Harriman and his assistant William Sullivan, who later became American ambassador to Vientiane. These aides to Kennedy designed and controlled the application of Laos’ neutral treaty, which ensured Hanoi’s success in waging its long-term conquest of South Vietnam.

The Geneva Accords, signed on July 23, 1962, supposedly neutralized Laos by stipulating that no foreign troops were to be on Laos’ soil and by setting up a neutral government in Laos with the purpose of ending its civil war. Accordingly, on October 5, 1962, all 800 American advisers to the Royal Laotian Army withdrew from the country. However, it quickly became clear the North Vietnam would not follow suit, but would insist on keeping large forces in Laos. Although the coalition government was officially neutral—under the premiership of Prince Souvanna Phouma and two vice prime ministers, the rightist General Phoumi Nosavan and the Pathet-Lao leader, Prince Souphanouvong—Laos remained divided. The Royal Laotian Army held the few cities and provinces in the western part of the country and the Pathet-Lao controlled the countryside and the mountainous regions in the eastern part. The nexus between these two opposite sectors was that North Vietnamese troops already held southeastern Laos. They had the capacity to intensely resist any forces, including those from the United States.

In order to deal with this troubling dilemma; the United States decided not to stick with its initial and official solution of “neutralization.” A second solution, one of a tacit strategy, was then adopted by President Kennedy based on Harriman’s recommendation. Harriman persuaded the president to carry out, on the surface, United States obligations under the Geneva Treaty terms, but covertly to engage in a secret war with the NVA in Laos. This would defend the status quo of the neutral government in Laos until the war in South Vietnam was resolved. Hanoi continued to send troops and supplies through Laos to South Vietnam. Norman B. Hannah, a retired State Department foreign affairs officer, related Harriman’s argument: “[Only i]f the Communists [North Vietnam] using the Laos routes should lose in South Vietnam could Laos ever become neutral.”²⁰ To realize this tacit strategy, a north-south line was drawn through Laos, based on the de-facto holding line between the Royal Laos forces and the Pathet-Lao. This became known as the “Harriman Line” and was supposed to protect Vientiane and Luang-Prabang, the two capitals of Laos, although it admittedly conceded half of the country to Hanoi’s use. This was, as Hannah pointed out, “Ironic, but inevitable as the Harriman Line paralleled and protected the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”²¹

Later, in March 1964, Robert McNamara, secretary of defense, confirmed this Harriman strategy: “As a consequence of these policies [on Laos] we and the Government of South Vietnam have had to ‘condone’ the extensive use of the Cambodia and Laotian territory by the Viet-cong both as a sanctuary and as infiltration routes.”²² The Harriman Line and the concept of “condoning” the communists’ extensive use of Laotian territory were a reality that allowed the North Vietnamese to officially deny their presence and involvement in Laos. They continued to construct and develop the Ho Chi Minh Trail with extensive networks of roads, trails, and support stations for movement of tens of thousands of troops and materiel to battlefields in South Vietnam.

The damage from this strategy was made clear when William Sullivan was assigned to Laos as ambassador. According to Michael Maclear, author of The Ten Thousand Day War (1981), Sullivan, as ambassador in Laos, exercised total control over all American political and military activities in the large but unacknowledged war in Laos. Sullivan had no coordination of actions with any American military or diplomatic authorities in South Vietnam, but only within his embassy in Vientiane. Since the Geneva Accords would only superficially be carried out and the war against North Vietnamese in Laos was kept secret, Ambassador Sullivan determined that Laos was his own field of responsibility and jurisdiction. In fact, he opposed Pentagon plans to use ground forces against the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Sullivan placed restrictions on U.S. ground activities and air strikes in Laotian territory, particularly in the east sector of the Harriman Line and the panhandle along the border of Laos and Vietnam, which was occupied by communist North Vietnam. His restrictions worked to the distinct advantage of the NVA’s logistics operations and troop infiltrations along the Ho Chi Minh Trail—to the point that American troops dubbed the trail “Sullivan Speedway.” This strategic network of trails and roads fed the communist revolutionary war in South Vietnam.

All American and South Vietnamese authorities in Washington and in Saigon agreed that the infiltration of North Vietnamese Army supplies and troops through Laos had to be barred and the Ho Chi Minh Trail demolished. However, the awkwardly inconsistent policies and the incredibly self-imposed restrictions on U.S. ground combat forces in Laos (and Cambodia) by American politicians prevented a fully effective strategy to eliminate this serious external threat to South Vietnam.

The 1962 Geneva Accords did not aid the United States’ cause in Laos. Instead, they betrayed that cause by giving communist North Vietnam virtual immunity against ground attack on their main supply line, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, through the Laotian panhandle. Many scholars contended that the Geneva Accords marked the beginning of the downfall of Laos and resulted in North Vietnam’s ability to develop and use the Ho Chi Minh Trail to sustain the war in South Vietnam. Some stressed that the accord was one of the most self-defeating aspects of the entire Second Indochina War. Indeed, the Ho Chi Minh Trail was more important than the communist revolutionary ideology. Scholars point out that the communists of Vietnam could not win the “hearts and minds” of the South Vietnamese people, but they won the war by sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to sustain and prolong the war. Thus, the United States failed in Vietnam because the American people were just not prepared to support a prolonged war of attrition.

THE HO CHI MINH TRAIL

Military experts from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) described the Ho Chi Minh Trail as a network of forested and mountainous trails, crude paths, gravel roads and sophisticated highways some 3,500 miles (5,645 kilometers) in length. However, Hanoi’s first ambassador to the United Nations, Ha van Lau, asserted that the network of roads making up the trail extended to more than 13,000 kilometers. The trail paralleled the thousand kilometers of Laos’ border with South Vietnam and spread along the Trường-SΩn Chain (or the Long-Mountains range), that forms Indochina’s bony spine and dominates the whole southern part of Laos, Central Vietnam, and the northern part of Cambodia.

The trail originally began with crude trails used by tribal hunters and smugglers moving contraband from China to the port cities of Southeast Asia. During the First Indochina War, these trails were expanded to serve as a primitive communication path for the Viet-Minh in their “To the South Movement” (Phong-trào Nam-tiến). They used local tribesmen as guides to evade French outposts along the border and the French Deuxième Bureau’s intelligence networks. During the initial stages of “insurgency” in South Vietnam that followed the 1954 Geneva Accords, North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap kept some of his valuable regiments in Laos. In addition to training the Pathet-Lao, he made plans to construct a strategic network of supply routes to South Vietnam in order to carry out the Vietnamese Workers Party‘s goal “To Aim for the South.” The Ho Chi Minh Trail became a complex web of narrow jungle paths throughout Laos, on which the VWP, at first, sent back southern-born cadres, who had migrated North in 1955, and brought modest shipments of small arms to organize guerrilla resistance in the South.

The real construction and development of the modern Ho Chi Minh Trail and military relay stations, or Binh-trạm, began in the spring of 1959. This work was done under the protection of the NVA 301st Division and a specially combined group known as Group 559, 35,000 men strong, commanded by Colonel Vo Bam. All of these NVA units were placed under the direction of Colonel Dong Si Nguyen, the architect and commander of this extensive construction project. Group 559 expanded and improved existing trails into a major road network with spurs leading into base areas in the Ashau in South Vietnam’s I Corps & Region, the Duc-co Pleime in II Corps & Region, and war-zones D and C in III Corps & Region (see Map #2).

Colonel Dong Si Nguyen, who later became a member of the VWP Political Committee and minister of construction in Hanoi after the war, brought in engineer battalions equipped with up-to-date Soviet and Chinese machinery to build roads and bridges. Anticipating powerful American bombing of this supply route, Colonel Nguyen placed sophisticated anti-aircraft defenses, underground tunnels and barracks, hospitals and bunkers, garages, and storage facilities all along the trail.

Military relay stations (Binh-trạm) manned by engineers, transportation staff, and anti-aircraft crews were located at intervals of approximately one-day’s march, or about 15 or 20 kilometers, depending on the terrain along the trail. Each Binh-tram was mainly protected by two anti-aircraft battalions armed with 12.7mm, 23mm, and 37mm guns and a SA-2 missile battalion, but also typically had two engineer battalions, two truck transportation battalions, a signal battalion, a communication liaison battalion, a security battalion, and a food-production unit.²³ Group 559, which was also in charge of all infiltration groups all along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, operated these military relay stations.

Group 559 provided complete management of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Responsibilities included construction and repair of roads and bridges; air defense and security of the Binh-tram; transportation of all supplies and war materials and equipment to South Vietnam; communication and liaison among Hanoi, the COSVN headquarters, and other communist regional headquarters; and complete support and guides for any infiltration groups at any site throughout their journey on the trail. At its maximum strength, the Group had an estimated 50,000 troops assigned to 20 Binh-tram and an addition of supportive forces of 100,000 civilian workers.²⁴ The continual functioning of the trail depended on the regular management of each Binh-tr’m.

In the early 1960s, transportation of supplies to the South along the trail depended upon thousands of human porters with ponies, and occasionally, bicycles. The first groups used elephants to help carry supplies over the first barrier, the crossing of the 1,300-foot Mu-gia Pass on international Road 15, into Laos. The elephant-led groups entered the Laotian town of Tchépone (or Sépone), which is located near the border of South Vietnam, a few miles south of the DMZ. This became the northern terminus of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Protected by the Harriman Line, the Communist North Vietnamese greatly exploited the trail. The transportation network developed elaborate footpaths, river-ways and even two-lane highways that wound along the 7,000-foot heights from above the 17th parallel to the 11th parallel. These roads were capable of supporting the heaviest of tracked military vehicles that poured interminable supplies and troops to the battlefields in South Vietnam.

The growing number of North Vietnamese Army soldiers fighting in South Vietnam reflected the subsequent high rate of traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In 1959, an estimated 5,000 political cadres born in the South infiltrated back from the North. From 1962, the cycle of escalation greatly increased in response to the American military escalation in South Vietnam. Considering replacements for casualties as well as new units committed to the battlefields, at the heights of the war from 1964, the trail became the principal entrance for as many as 60,000 to 90,000 infiltrators a year.

In the meantime, most American foreign policy advisers knew that the Ho Chi Minh Trail carried into South Vietnam all kinds of weaponry, equipment, and materiel manufactured in the Soviet Union and in China and used by North Vietnamese soldiers. But no one “accepted” the direct solution to cut off the trail by ground forces. The Ho Chi Minh Trail became legendary as a myth with two particular characteristics. First, the trail was invisible but progressively developed; second, it was indestructible and ever-lasting.

American pilots who executed flying missions on the trail related the first characteristic. Sol Sanders, a former pilot of an American T-28 had been flying regularly over the trail. He wrote for U.S. News & World Report that he had been astonished by what he did not see. U.S. military intelligence reported that tens of thousands of North Vietnamese troops and massive supply trucks were known to be using this jungle web of man-made roads. But Sanders could not see any men or trucks moving on the trail. “The whole flight had an eerie quality. Although there was no doubt that we were flying over a heavily traveled road, I saw no sign of life during the entire time,” Sanders wrote.²⁵

The rate of infiltration by the North Vietnamese Army along the Ho Chi Minh Trail was estimated to have tripled since 1962, so in early 1964 the U.S. began a secret air campaign of strafing missions. Flights of American T-28 propeller aircraft, which were funded by the CIA to support the Royal Lao Air Force, surveyed the Ho Chi Minh Trail within Laotian territory. The code-name for this operation was Steel Tiger and, like other conflicts between the United States and North Vietnam in Laos after the neutralization, was kept secret. The complete silence on the Ho Chi Minh Trail at daytime could be explained by the 559 Group’s well-organized and disciplined movement along the trail. Infiltration efforts began at nightfall. Daily, hundreds of loaded trucks with war goods waited to make the nightly run into South Vietnam from their staging points at each Binh-tram in the Laotian panhandle. The truck drivers were expected to know every turn and obstacle along the route, covering only about a 20-mile stretch of the trail during each nightly run. At dawn, the whole movement stopped. All trucks pulled off the roads and were hidden in camouflage truck parks, or in any of the thousands of caves carved into the hillsides along the trail. The mysterious and secret movement along the Trường-Sơn Range created the “eerie silent quality” all along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The second characteristic of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, “immortality,” was inexplicable to the Americans. No one could understand how the trail could survive the heavy and regular bombings of the American B-52s. After the war, Ha van Lau, Hanoi ambassador to the United Nations, explained: “The routes were permanently maintained by groups of young pioneers, men and women, who were ready every moment to repair the roads immediately after every bombing in such a way that despite the very strict surveillance by American planes, this roads network was never cut. Every night the roads were immediately repaired.”²⁶ The Ho Chi Minh Trail, constructed by turning ancient paths into a sophisticated logistic network, was continuously repaired for years with no expense but the sweat, tears, blood and bones of generations of North Vietnamese youth who maintained the trail’s “immortality.” According to the communist press, the road repair gangs, or the so-called Youth Shock Union (roàn Thanh-Niên Xung-phong), permanently numbered more than 50,000. They were teenaged men and young women who volunteered to work along the trail for three years’ service. With males drafted into the army at eighteen, the majority of the Youth Shock groups were young women. The casualties from American bombing and sickness among these civilian workers on the trail must have been enormous. American firepower deployed to cut the trail was unprecedented in history. The bomb ordinance expended along this single network exceeded what had been used in all theaters of war during all the years of World War II. From 1965 to 1972, under the Johnson and Nixon administrations, 2,235,918 tons of ordinance was dropped in vain over the trail, including 171,000 tons of B-52 bombs (in World War II, two million tons of air ordinance were dropped). The Ho Chi Minh Trail was unshakable and ever-lasting as the communist North Vietnam’s glorious way to their final victory.²⁷

Later, after the Paris Accords came into effect by January 1973, the NVA began a massive build up of roads and highways in order to reinforce their units in South Viet Nam. What they established was called “Truong Son Ðông” (the Long Mountain Eastern Route, or Corridor 613). The Corridor 613 ran along the eastern side of the Truong-Son Ðông in parallel with the old Ho Chi Minh Trail on the western side. The two were connected by a network of crossroads. This new corridor, which started from Dong Hoi and ran all the way south to Loc Ninh, was completed by early 1975.

After the war, General Van Tien Dung, NVA General chief of staff who commanded the communist final offensive in South Vietnam in 1975, described the trail in his account of that campaign: “The strategic route east of Truong Son Ðông [i.e., the Long Mountains or the Annam Cordilla] was the result of labor of more than 30,000 troops and shock youths. The length of this route, added to that of the other old and new strategic routes and routes used during various campaigns built during the last war, is more than 20,000 kilometers [12,500 miles]. The eight-meter [24.4 feet] wide route of more than 1,000km [625 miles], which we now see, is our pride. With 5,000 km [3,125 miles] of pipeline laid through the deep rivers and streams and on the mountains more than 1,000 meters [3,300 feet] high, we were capable of providing enough fuel for various battle fronts. More than 10,000 transportation vehicles were put on the road.”²⁸

Without the neutrality of Laos, the Harriman Line, or the self-restricted deployment of ground forces in Laos, communist North Vietnam would not have been able to construct the Ho Chi Minh Trail. If this were the case, communist guerrilla warfare in South Vietnam would have followed a course similar to that in Malaysia: it would have been crushed in a few years and history would have changed for the three countries of Indochina.

Thus, the biggest mistake of the United States in the whole Second Indochina War, that led to military failure in this far land, especially in South Vietnam, was the Kennedy administration’s foreign policy toward Laos. President Kennedy overemphasized the “counter-insurgency” process in South Vietnam and ignored the important position of Laos that allowed North Vietnam to build up the strategically vital Ho Chi Minh Trail. Thus, the Johnson administration had to take the onerous task of cutting the trail. Since 1964, the United States foreign policy toward Indochina turned on the absurd “existence of a Laos neutrality” and all military strategic measures taken by President Johnson were based upon the menacing existence of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The second important mistake of the Kennedy administration was its arbitrary and brutal handling of South Vietnamese leadership. The United States’ previous judicious policies under the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were turned into a policy of oppression and rude interference in an allied country. This deep interference was the primary cause of the dangerous situation in South Vietnam during the critical period of 1963–1965, and it created the precedence of military escalation for the following administrations of the United States.

In the eyes of South Vietnamese intellectuals, the American oppression and interference in their country were considered a new form of foreign autocracy that concentrated all political, military, economic, and diplomatic powers of the country within the American embassy in Saigon. The American ambassador became a new colonial governor. As a result, South Vietnamese officials were reticent to cooperate with the American authorities in South Vietnam and the efficacy of the combined anti-communist measures was diminished.

THE “ELEVEN POINT PROGRAM”

The creation of a “full-fledged” American Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (US-MACV), to take control of the rapidly rising American military build-up, showed that the Kennedy administration intended to stay in the struggle for South Vietnam and win it. “We are going to win in Vietnam, we will remain there until we do win,” said Robert F. Kennedy, U.S. senator and President Kennedy’s younger brother, on February 15, 1962.²⁹ But this point of view was based upon President Kennedy’s thinking about the war as one of “counter-insurgency.” According to an American historian, the president himself viewed Vietnam as an almost perfect place to use counter-insurgency warfare: “There he could show his interest in the Third World, demonstrate conclusively that America lived up to her commitments, and play the exciting new game of counter-insurgency.”³⁰

Counter-insurgency warfare was overestimated in the early 1960s as the U.S. Army’s doctrine or dogma. It received enormous attention in the military schools and training centers, and was envisioned as the United States’ primary response to internal wars promoted by the communists in underdeveloped countries. Noted historian Harry G. Summers, Jr., a retired U.S. Army colonel, remarked: “It stultified military thinking for the next decades.”³¹

This counter-insurgency was not readily accepted by South Vietnamese leaders, particularly Ngo Dinh Nhu, President Diem’s brother and political adviser. President Diem and his brother Nhu actively resisted this counter-insurgency program and instead implemented the “Strategic Hamlets” project, which concentrated peasants into newly built hamlets in the countryside to protect and isolate them from communist guerrillas. Assistant United States secretary of state Roger Hilsman described those hamlets as “concentration camps,” as did North Vietnamese prime minister Pham van Dong.

The Kennedy administration appeared to underestimate the efforts of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu in their strategy. Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime was accused of arrogant autocracy by Kennedy’s important aides and many reporters in the American press. Those who opposed Diem’s regime wished to see in South Vietnam the liberal democracy of the United States. Many had extensive knowledge, wide learning, or were clever upper-class intellectuals. But they lacked knowledge and understanding of Asian culture, and did not see that Western-style democracy could not be applied to any Asian country during a time of war, such as Vietnam in the early 1960s, where people lived in an anarchic, disoriented and chaotic society. In such times, any liberal freedoms offered to them would be a double-bladed knife that would be dangerous for them. In the first steps of democracy, a moderate freedom with the respect of the ancient traditions, habits and customs in addition to some fundamental conditions such as a true independence, a Vietnamese leadership, and socio-economic development, would satisfy them and encourage them to work for their future.

The first period of democracy under Ngo Dinh Diem sought to satisfy these fundamental aspirations of the South Vietnamese people. The ideological “personalism” then must be considered as a viable political doctrine that would face communism in Vietnam. President Diem stated in his message to the Constitutional Assembly of April 17, 1956: “Democracy is essentially a permanent effort to find the right political means of assuring to all citizens the right of free development.”³² He meant that socio-economic development must precede political freedom. Mrs. Ngo Dinh Nhu, President’s Diem’s sister-in-law, likewise said: “Political democracy must be entirely reorganized on the basis of an effective economic democracy to modern[ize the] structure of production.”³³

However, the application of the personalism in Diem’s regime gave rise to much confusion, particularly in the intellectual circles of Washington and in the White House. The personalism concentrated national power in the hands of the Ngo family’s members. Monsignor Ngo Dinh Thuc, President Diem’s older brother, preached in the Mekong Delta. Another brother, Ngo Dinh Can, unofficially ruled Central Vietnam. His most confident brother and political adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu, the real theoretician of the regime, actively opposed the presence of American ground combat forces in South Vietnam and Kennedy’s military strategy. Diem and his regime faced a dilemma.

The regime was accused of autocracy, nepotism, and corruption. The deep sense of pride the Ngo’s family had earned recently was replaced by a deep sense of shame, the result of these allegations by the American press and American officials. It provoked a fierce response from the Ngo family, especially Mrs. Ngo Dinh Nhu, and from supporters, such as some Saigon’s newspapers and the Vietnamese Democratic Party, a reputable political party in South Vietnam in the 1960s. Mrs. Nhu answered those who constantly criticized South Vietnamese leaders in an editorial in the Times of Vietnam of March 1962:

For years, I, like others in this country, simply clenched my teeth and shut up when I had to listen to all accusations of communist propaganda against the regime and the ideal of the Personalist Republic, all reported with glee by the U.S. press. And I should continue to do this if the strange and wild behavior of the U.S. press had calmed down. But, on the contrary, it has increased to a point where it risks harming the fighting spirit of our people. The Vietnamese people do not have to be taught solidarity toward their allies … but they cannot allow the prestige of their leaders and their ideals to be unjustly and foolishly besmirched by irresponsible elements.³⁴

Before that, during the third week of November 1961, the South Vietnamese press had erupted in a wave of anti–American articles, especially after a U.S. military mission led by General Maxwell D. Taylor, military adviser to President Kennedy, returned from Saigon with a critical report that was extremely hard-hitting toward the Diem regime. The report criticized severely the absence of long-overdue political reforms in South Vietnam, including the reform of freedom of speech and a more effective decentralization. The Taylor mission’s report shocked not only Ngo Dinh Diem’s cabinet but also the whole of South Vietnam’s middle and upper classes. Tu-Do (Liberty) and Thới-Báo (Times) newspapers in Saigon and others, in a series of late November and December articles, accused Americans of “interference with the internal affairs in Vietnam” and also labeled American officials in South Vietnam (and in Washington) as capitalist-imperialists.

Washington attributed the viciousness of these attacks to political adviser Ngo Dinh Nhu. By December 6, 1961, there were hints that under the pressure of U.S. Department of State, U.S. ambassador to Saigon Frederic E. Nolting had personally asked President Diem to fire some of his relatives, particularly Ngo Dinh Nhu and his wife, from any official or unofficial positions in the regime. On December 12, Diem called in Nolting and told him that all further reforms suggested by Washington would temporarily have to be reexamined and that Ngo Dinh Nhu’s powers would remain unchanged. As a result, the honeymoon between the United States and Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime during the previous eight years lasted only until the end of 1962, despite an immense public relations effort on both sides.

In essence, the fierce opposition by Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu to the Kennedy administration’s political and military positions in South Vietnam was a real obstacle to United States efforts to apply its new anti-communist theory in this testing ground. Only one alternative solution remained: an American-induced changeover toward a more “docile” and “responsive” government, even at the price of seeking out replacement leaders. Everyone knew that the United States would directly control South Vietnam because President Kennedy wanted it to become the testing ground for his new concept of war. In mid–May 1961, France’s president Charles De Gaulle warned Kennedy: “The ideology that you invoke will not change anything.… You Americans wanted, yesterday, to take our place in Indochina, you want to assure a succession to rekindle a war that we ended. I predict to you that you will, step by step, be sucked into a bottomless military and political quagmire.”³⁵ Later, the United States’ commitment in Vietnam became even more disastrous than predicted by De Gaulle.

All the while, the problem “leadership” in South Vietnam divided Kennedy’s advisors into two distinct camps. One strong group argued that: “You can’t win with Diem,” and suggested Diem and Nhu be immediately replaced. The other group acknowledged that the United States perhaps could not win with Diem, but in the words of General Taylor, “if not Diem—who?” The question had no answer, but President Kennedy became sympathetic to the idea of a coup, provided that the Americans were not responsible and were not involved in it. A quarter of a century later, history proved it to be the other way around.

During those days, a temporary reconciliation between the Kennedy administration and Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime was achieved and lasted for nearly twenty more months. In early 1962, General Taylor declared that he and Diem had agreed that Washington and Saigon would make “a new start,” which meant political reforms in South Vietnam in return for new forms of American military aid. In Saigon, Ambassador Nolting, speaking at the Saigon Rotary Club on February 15, 1962, assured the local upper-class audience and international media’s reporters that “the Vietnamese Government, under the devoted and courageous leadership of President Ngo Dinh Diem, attempts to realize, under difficult conditions, political, social, and economic progress for the people, with the help of the United States.” He emphasized that the United States was giving its fullest support to the “elected and constitutional regime of Vietnam.”³⁶ Overall, the speech was well received in South Vietnam. By the end of February, official American opinion made a 180-degree about-face and the American press changed their unfavorable comments about Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime.

On the South Vietnamese side, President Ngo Dinh Diem signed the Accords of “Eleven Point Program” with the United States on January 2, 1962, and published it on January 4. In implementing the terms of the Accords, the United States offered to South Vietnam routine basic economic assistance. Two of the eleven points concerned the training of village officials and the formation of the mountaineers (Montagnards) in the Central Highlands. This contributed the most to the “elevation” of American advisers in South Vietnams. The January Accords therefore gave Washington some grounds for hope. (See the Appendix, “Summary of the Eleven-Point Program Accords, January 1962.”)

In the next six months the United States saw the activation of counter-insurgency activities, starting from the Highlands in Central Vietnam. Moreover, the United States hoped that the Diem administration would implement the desired reforms. It was obvious that neither of these two points satisfied President Diem and his political adviser, Nhu. They had to accept the presence of American advisers who were detached to each of the forty-four province chiefs of South Vietnam. Beginning with the First Republic (the Diem administration) a middle-ranking ARVN officer, from major to lieutenant colonel, was assigned to the post of province chief. The province chief position served both functions as provincial administrator and territorial military commander under direct supervision of the Military Tactical Zone, or Military Region commander. In March of 1962, each province was “reinforced” by an American group called the “Military Advisory Training Assistance” (MATA) group, whose major duty was emphasizing “civic action” in rural areas and training the provincial civil guard (Bẚo-an roàn) and village militia (Dân-vệ) to become more effective in counter-guerrilla operations.

Each provincial MATA group needed several more American officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) to perform these civic and training duties. However, the American provincial advisory team chief’s activities were not limited to training and civic actions but also worked in coordination with the Vietnamese province chief in any domain of the province’s activities: military organization, supply, planning and operations, administrative and economic complicated and difficult problems. He collaborated closely to help the province-chief accomplish his responsibilities and to improve the province’s counter-insurgency conditions. “Any activity must be known to be helped” was the unspoken message between the lines. Vietnamese authorities and American advisers worked in an atmosphere of harmony or reluctance, depending upon the personal relations between them. Normally, in most instances, the relationship was fair. This aspect did not satisfy Ngo Dinh Nhu. He knew that this system of cooperation between American advisers and Vietnamese officials at the provincial level would permit the United States to “penetrate” deeply in South Vietnam and interfere into Vietnamese governmental affairs, politically, economically and militarily. All initiatives in these domains, from the basic infrastructure, would be “known” and “re-examined” by American authorities in the country. South Vietnam, therefore, would gradually lose its command, national pride and sovereignty.

THE “BOUN ENAO PROJECT” AND THE CIDG CONCEPT

The other point of the Accords, Article #8, addressed the mountaineer minorities in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, the important area adjoining the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Montagnard tribes in this region were composed of five main groups of 50,000 to 70,000 each—containing some twenty distinct ethno-linguistic elements. They were the Rhade, Jharai, Bahnar, Sedang, and Bru. At that time, Montagnard tribesmen were trapped between the communists and the government of South Vietnam (GVN). They feared the NVA and VC more than they supported them.

During the summer of 1961, the American ambassador in Vietnam and advisers from various American agencies in Saigon held different solutions for securing the Central Highlands, but the best was a project proposed by a young American agricultural specialist, David A. Norwood, who was familiar with the region. His proposed project would simply give the Montagnards the opportunity to defend themselves by forming them into self-defense forces. By order of the ambassador, the CIA station’s chief in Saigon chose Norwood to lead a special combined group of U.S. Army Special Forces officers and NCOs, CIA specialists, and U.S. Army Medical Group specialists, in cooperation with a Vietnamese Survey Office (the GVN’s Central Intelligence Services) team, to realize the project.³⁷

The project was started in a Rhade tribe called “Boun Enao,” in Darlac Province, in October 1961. The tribe’s chief and elders requested that the ARVN and Vietnamese Air Force (VNAF) stop attacking Rhade tribes and that medical, educational, and agricultural assistance programs be provided to the tribesmen. These actions were taken in conjunction with the construction of a fence around the village and the military training of a 30-man village-defense force and four medics. The project proceeded at Boun Enao essentially as planned. The villagers constructed fences, shelters, and a dispensary. Most of the needed materials came from the jungle but the Americans were requested to provide any developmental aid during the experiment. The first village-defense group was formed, equipped with rifles and shotguns, and led by US Special Forces NCOs, to protect the village.

Norwood’s project was officially dubbed the Boun Enao Project. The Boun Enao complex was the beginning of what proved to be an effective counter-insurgency network in the Central Highlands. In three months, forty other Rhade tribes within a 15-kilometer radius of Boun Enao entered the program on a voluntary basis under essentially the same terms used for Boun Enao and became new village complexes. Any village’s volunteer unit, called a strike-force, was used as a reserve force to assist villages under attack. The CIA paid the majority of these strike units monthly. By April 1962, the 40-village complex had been completed. William Coleman, the chief of the Saigon CIA station, officially labeled these village defense forces the Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) program. Later, the Boun Enao Project was transferred to the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) to handle, after which the project would largely expand.

A few weeks prior to President Ngo Dinh Diem’s signing of the January 1961 “Eleven-Point” Accords, Adviser Ngo Dinh Nhu visited the Boun Enao complex. Impressed by the progress of the new village complex, especially by the formation of the village defense force, he authorized an expansion of the Boun Enao’s concept to the entire Vietnam Central Highlands, in the Mekong Delta, and in some special coastal areas.

On the American side, in the summer of 1962, an official delegation from the Department of Defense–Defense Intelligence Agency (DOD–DIA) visited the Boun Enao complex to assess the progress and to help the project develop. Close air support was requested for the project. Immediately, a U.S. Air Force Air Commando unit was assigned to the “Boun Enao Project” headquarters. Air support was also ready: an L-19 observer to spot enemy concentration, a C-47 flare gun ship to assist villages attacked at night, and two helicopters to facilitate strike-force mobility. The project was then expanded to 200 villages with a total population of 60,000, village defenders of 10,600, and strike-force of 1,500. Each village participating in the programs was given a two-way voice attack alert radio by the U.S. Overseas Mission (USOM); the village radio operators were trained by U.S. Special Forces. The expansion was completed by October 1962.³⁸

The project appeared to be a success. However, only 150,000 out of the 700,000 in the Central Highlands sought refuge in government-controlled areas. During 1962, the communists maintained strong positions in the mountainous border areas between Central Vietnam and Laos, and between Central Vietnam and Cambodia, to protect and develop their sanctuaries along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. They had close support from the mountaineer tribes still outside of government control. In addition to this suspect situation, from May 1961 to June 1962, at least three NVA regiments were identified infiltrating the Highlands and the mountainous region between Quang-Ngai and Binh-Dinh. These regiments were named Mountain Regiments and were made up of Jarai, Rhade, and Hre mountaineers who had gone north in 1954. One of these was the 120th Regiment commanded by Colonel Y-Bloc, a Hre mountaineer. This regiment was operating in conjunction with the 126th Mountain Regiment in An-Lao Mountains, west of Quang-Ngai Province, while the famous 803rd Mountain Regiment was in Southern Mountain Plateau of the Central Highlands. This regiment’s activities gravely affected the development of the Boun Enao Project by conducting company-size attacks on new projected villages, platoon-size ambushes on villages’ strike-force units, and propaganda activities among the mountaineers. A significant number of village defenders deserted to this Mountain Regiment.

For these reasons, by August 1962, Adviser Ngo Dinh Nhu ordered a 30-day halt to the arming of Montagnards. He felt that the Montagnards were not to be trusted and suggested the U.S. MACV to abandon the Boun Enao Project in the Central Highlands. The defenders of the projected-villages were required to return their weapons to the government and strike-force personnel would be drafted in the ARVN. The disagreement between American authorities in Saigon and Ngo Dinh Nhu intensified. The Boun Enao Project failed and died two months later. After one year in operation, the Boun Enao Project had absorbed a great number of American military and civilian personnel into South Vietnam: Special Forces, Air force, CIA, USOM, and other agencies. The project failed, but its spirit—the CIDG program’s concept—became the American ideal counter-insurgency practice in South Vietnam for a decade later in parallel with other tactics.

U.S. military authorities in Saigon admitted that the CIDG programs were efficacious to protect and control the population in remote areas in different parts of South Vietnam. They encouraged the ARVN to absorb the CIDG program.

The concept of CIDG (Civilian Irregular Defense Group), also called the Mike Forces program, was the standard formation of a unit of natives, initiated by the U.S. Army 1st Special Forces Group—the famed Green Berets. This supposed local irregular unit was called an “A-Detachment” and commanded by an American leadership group of 12 Special Forces troops, or an A-Team. This system of formation was similar to the formation of a company of indigenous commandos of the French Army’s “Groupement de Commandos Mixtes Aeroportes” (GCMA), or Composite Airborne Commandos Group in the First Vietnam War. American authorities imagined that men of Mike Forces units could win the “minds and hearts” of the Vietnamese in the countryside. By such an imagination, many A-Detachments would be formed and stationed wherever around the country and working out of their own fixed bases. An A-Detachment (company-sized unit) comprised a number of local people that varied from 60 men to 230 men. Several A-Detachments formed a B-Detachment (battalion-sized unit) and several B-Detachments formed a C-Detachment (regiment-sized unit).

Before August 1962, in performing the counter-insurgency missions given by presidential directive in 1961, the U.S. 1st Special Forces Group formed, in each Military Region of South Vietnam, a number of A-Detachments, B-Detachments, and C-Detachments. All of these Mike Forces units were funded and supervised by the U.S.–CIA in Saigon. After the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) was created, the new commander, General Paul Harkins, and the new chief of the U.S. CIA in Saigon, John Russell, realized that CIDG programs were too complicated for civilian control. They agreed to transfer the command and support of these Mike Forces units to the U.S. MACV. By November 1962, one C-Detachment, three B-Detachments, and 26 A-Detachments in various parts of South Vietnam completed the takeover of the chain of command determined. All others were to be completed by July 1, 1963.

General Paul Harkins suggested the ARVN create its own Special Forces and organize its own mountainous, coastal, and rural CIDG units. U.S. MACV would support their training, equipping and funding. A plan was devised and approved by the Vietnamese government. The U.S. 1st Special Forces would add one more mission: training first Vietnamese Special Force soldiers at the Commando Training Center at Nha-Trang. Those trainees would form the core of the ARVN Special Forces units. The CIDG program with the A-Team formation concept subsequently became the counter-insurgency practice throughout South Vietnam.

With the same notion of an unconventional warfare, American authorities in Saigon suggested President Diem organize Ranger units for the ARVN. The 77th Mobile Training Team of the U.S. 7th Special Forces Group was sent to Nha-trang to train the first Vietnamese Ranger groups. The U.S. 1st Special Forces Group organized them into companies for counter-insurgency and counter-guerrilla warfare, and later took over the complete training of all Vietnamese Ranger units in Duc My, Nha-Trang. Nha-Trang, in the early 1960s, became the base for both American and Vietnamese Special Forces training centers. It was also the base for U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy detachments to train Vietnamese Air Force (VNAF) and Vietnamese Navy (VNN) officers, NCOs, and specialists to develop the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF).

In addition to these training efforts, a system of American Advisory Teams was developed to attach to RVNAF units. The system really needed a great number of American military and civilian personnel for South Vietnam. They were committed piecemeal along with any old and new military, administrative and economic units or organizations of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) as advisers or counterparts to their chieftains, if not officially considered as “supervisors” of almost all activities of these units or organizations. By late 1962, President Kennedy had 15,000 military “advisers” in South Vietnam and an estimated 3,000 civilian personnel, in all agencies in Saigon and around the country, with official and unofficial missions. The free “comings and goings” to and from various Vietnamese airports and seaports were unlimited for the Americans after that.

The RVNAF was strengthened considerably by the presence of American advisers and Green Beret forces in the country. But, it was generating increasing difficulties for their war against the communists. Also, this created tremendous unrest in the society. For example, Professor Vu Quoc Thuc, Dean of Saigon Law School pointed out how this would affect the economy: “The American-Vietnamese eleven-point program of January 4, 1962, will absorb some unemployed labor, and so will the newly planned industrial projects. The presence also, of close to 15,000 American troops and of additional thousands of American civilian personnel, with their extensive requirements for house servants and clerical labor, is likely to have cushioning effect on inflationary pressures as long as the United States continues to funnel sufficient amounts of consumer goods into the economy. In other words, South Vietnam is rapidly returning to an artificial war economy.”³⁹ Many Vietnamese in the capital and cities were very quickly aware of the value of the “U.S. green dollars.” The RVN had to accept de facto devaluation of the Vietnamese piaster (national currency) from the 35-to-1 official exchange rates to about 65-to-1, and the population accepted the exchange rate of 100-to-1 on the black market. In any city where American troops were present, people began to deal for U.S. “green dollars” while in the countryside peasants were caught between the RVN forces and the communists.

Under the new living conditions, the society’s traditions began to fall. New social classes surfaced, ranking in order from the highest: the prostitutes, the bonzes—or Buddhist priests, the fathers or Catholic priests, and the generals. In Vietnamese original terms, which were known everywhere in the country, these “new social orders” were “Nhất Ðĩ, Nhì Su, Tam Cha, Tú Tuớng.” The number of prostitutes increased considerably with the increased number of GIs in South Vietnam. This was ironic, bizarre, and nauseous, but it was also true. This social phenomenon of South Vietnam might go unmentioned in Western historical books or newspaper articles. However, it was one of the main causes leading to the political deterioration of the South from the spring of 1963, the Buddhist evolutional crisis in summer, and the Americans’ abolition of the First Republic of Vietnam in the fall of the same year. After all, the Eleven-Point Program had latent effects.

Some historians commented that until the spring of 1963, the United States did not have a grand design in South Vietnam beyond the mechanics of developing the counter-insurgency theory: the use of U.S. Special Forces to establish a series of CIDG units in remote areas, the deployment of the “Eagle Fighter” helicopter units to reinforce the mobility of the ARVN, or the introduction of a hierarchical “Advisory Teams” system into then RVNAF. Other commentators viewed the Eleven-Point Program as the greatest design of the Kennedy administration in South Vietnam. Indeed, it was a totally progressive plan concerning several important standpoints that concentrated into a single purpose—to fight an unconventional war, or a counter-insurgency war. In other words, the program encompassed all of President Kennedy’s planned counter-insurgency measures, from military tactics to separate the VC from the peasants and eliminate them, to the reconstruction of the economic, industrial, and agricultural structure for South Vietnam. Further, the program would improve the living conditions of the people, especially in the countryside, with the hope of realizing total social reformation in South Vietnam. It was a perfect program with the essential strategy “to win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese. Roger Hilsman, U.S. assistant secretary of state for Southeast Asia, once blamed General Paul Harkins and the West-Pointers, who fought in South Vietnam but disregarded this strategy. They considered there could only be a military solution and that “winning hearts and minds” was not their job. He said: “I think the strategy is greater than that. President Kennedy sent me out specifically to try to explain the theory behind this policy to [commander in chief] Paul Harkins. I don’t think he misunderstood the policy. I came to the conclusion years later that he and people under him thought that it was somebody else’s business.”⁴⁰

Theoretically, this strategy was excellent. However, Hilsman did not know that the Vietnamese, for the thousand years of their history, would not permit any armed strangers who came to their country to win their hearts and minds, except their own leaders. This explains why the distinct strategy of the Kennedy Administration could not easily be applied in South Vietnam to win the war. Instead of carrying weapons to perform civic action missions to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, the Americans needed to give their weapons to the Vietnamese leaders and let them do their job with their compatriots so that the war might be won. Moreover, Kennedy’s entourage was supposed not to consider too much the problem “win with Diem, swim with Diem, or sink with Diem.” They should have considered, however, that even if only 10 percent of the South Vietnamese supported Diem’s regime, 20 percent hated him and his family, 20 percent liked the communists, and 50 percent feared them, the war could also be won with Diem without the direct U.S. military personnel involvement in the country.

In addition to the Geneva Accords of neutralization in Laos, the presence of American armed servicemen in South Vietnam destabilized the situation in Saigon. The war increased its intensity in the countryside as an uncontrolled number of NVA troops infiltrated through the Ho Chi Minh Trail from the beginning of 1963.

Another type of unconventional warfare was also waged in Vietnam by the Kennedy administration planners. They expanded Special Forces secret missions to North Vietnam and to Laos with small action groups of eight to fifteen men each. Members of each group were South Vietnamese Special Forces Airborne Commandos who were all northern-born and immigrated to South Vietnam after the Geneva Accords, in 1954–1955. They belonged to the 1st Observation Group-Special Forces (Liên-ôoàn Quan-sát, luc-luong Ðặc-biệt) of the ARVN but were handled and trained by the CIA sponsored American Saigon Military Mission (SMM), which was formed in the mid–1950s by Colonel Edward Lansdale, the first American military adviser to President Ngo Dinh Diem. These small observation groups parachuted into areas near the Laotian and North Vietnamese border to survey the Ho Chi Minh Trail, or into North Vietnam’s soil to take the first step toward psychological warfare operations and sabotages against NVA supply systems such as railroads, bridges, and harbors.

This type of unconventional secret mission was the “deformation” of Kennedy’s counter-insurgency theory. The CIA–controlled 1st Observation Group of the ARVN of the early 1960’s fielded more than 19,000 personnel, included CIA agents, U.S. Green Berets and South Vietnamese Special Forces Airborne Commandos (Biệt-kićh Dù). It specifically targeted North Vietnam, as well as border control over the Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian borders.⁴¹

From 1962, this type of unconventional warfare, mastered by Washington’s planners such as Defense Secretary McNamara and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor, led to the execution of secret missions inside enemy territory by the U.S. Green Berets and the South Vietnamese Special Forces. Combined projects between U.S. Green Berets and the ARVN Special Forces included Project Delta, Project Omega, Project Sigma, and Project Gamma. Each had its special structure, purpose, and modus operandi for conducting clandestine operations behind enemy lines. The most important and top secret organization was the Military Assistance Command Vietnam’s Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG). MACV-SOG incorporated U.S. Army Special Forces, U.S. Marine Corps Force Recon Marines, U.S. Navy Sea-Air-Land commandoes (SEALs), and U.S. Air Force Special Operations. This secret organization, an organ of MACV, was directed by the U.S. secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff through an organization called the Office of the Special Assistant for Counter-insurgency and Special Activities. The Pentagon delegated day-to-day direction to the MACV-SOG commander who commanded and controlled all American and Vietnamese special missions deep into North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. All action groups or teams’ members were normally U.S. volunteer Green Berets, Marines, and South Vietnamese Special Forces Airborne Commandos. In its early missions, MACV-SOG planned operations in a large measure based on the performance of the two previous organizations, the CIA–controlled First Observation Group and the Saigon Military Mission, characterized by airborne operations: dropping small commando teams into Laos for intelligence collection along the Ho Chi Minh Trail or into North Vietnam for propaganda and modest physical destruction of specific targets.⁴²

Later, at McNamara’s recommendation, the United States president ordered the MACV-SOG to carry out Operations Plan 34A (OPLAN-34A), which the Pentagon called “an elaborate program of covert military operations against the state of North Vietnam.” It was hoped that progressively escalating pressure from clandestine attacks “might eventually force Hanoi to order the Viet-cong guerrillas in South Vietnam and the Pathet-Lao in Laos to halt their insurrections,” related U.S. Army Colonel William Wilson.⁴³ The secret operations ranged from flights over North Vietnam by U-2 spy planes, to airborne operations code-named Midriff, and maritime operations code-named Plowman. These operations were given the innocuous name “Operation Footboy.” Footboy air operations consisted of: dropping commando teams to recover downed American pilots in Laos; commando raids to rescue American POWs in North Vietnam or to kidnap North Vietnamese citizens for intelligence purposes; dropping supplies to in-place teams; and parachuting in special teams for short term reconnaissance and for psychological warfare, to create the illusion that numerous teams of agents were operating freely throughout North Vietnam. Footboy maritime operations consisted of commando raids from the sea to blow up rail and highway bridges and to bombard North Vietnamese installations, naval assets, coastal air defense and radar, beached civilian and military vessels, and the like by patrol torpedo fast boats (PTFs). Meanwhile, the more unusual long-term Footboy operations that required the combined assets of Midriff and Plowman was the “Sacred Sword Patriot’s League” (SSPL; in Vietnamese terms it was “roàn Gươm Thiêng Ái-Quốc”). SSPL operations were covertly carried out by SOG-PTF boats manned by South Vietnamese maritime commandoes of the Vietnamese Coastal Security Service, which was a division of the RVNAF’s Strategic Technical Directorate (Nha Kỹ-Thuật Quân-lực Việt-nam Cộng-hoà), flying the flag “Gươm Thiêng Ái-Quốc,” enthusiastically plied the northern waters of the DMZ from the 17th parallel to the 20th parallel as an anti-communist internal movement within North Vietnam with activities of sabotage and terror warfare against the communists. On the other hand, SSPL also conducted psychological warfare and operated daily both “black” and “white” radio broadcastings over North Vietnam. “Thirty-minute ‘black’ radio programs purported to voice the views of dissident elements in North Vietnam, while ‘white’ radio broadcast the ‘Voice of Freedom’ daily.’”⁴⁴ The SSPL radio broadcasting program (Chương-trình Phát-thanh Gươm Thiêng Ái-Quốc) was the most efficacious of all MACV-SOG secret operations in Vietnam. The program lasted until the last day of the Republic of Vietnam, on April 30, 1975.

Operation-Footboy of MACV-SOG, from its inception in the early 1960s, was under the jurisdiction of the Strategic Technical Directorate (Nha Ky-Thuật), the Psychological Warfare Division (Cục Chiến-tranh Tâm-lý), the General Political Warfare Department (Tổng-cuc Chiến-tranh Chknh-trị) of the RVNAF, and other secret organizations of the government of South Vietnam. “Footboy, like so many other so-called South Vietnamese programs, was [in fact] run by the United States,” says Charles F. Reske, a former officer of the top secret U.S. Navy Security Group.⁴⁵

Politico-military commentator A.K. Dawson, in his magazine article, “The Fatally Flawed OPLAN-34A Commando Raids on North Vietnam Were a Disaster with Lasting Consequences” (which reviewed the book Secret Army, Secret War by former DIA officer Sedgwick Tourison, Jr.) remarked: “OPLAN-34A, the flawed and failed operation designed to ‘send a message to Hanoi,’ in the words of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, left a disastrous swath of human destruction and suffering in its wake.”⁴⁶ In fact, most of the U.S. Green Berets and ARVN’s Special Forces Airborne Commandos were captured or killed during their secret missions in Laos, frequently in North Vietnam. They are all heroes, although the U.S. government for decades refused to recognize their bravery and their heroic sacrifice or disappearance in this bizarre “secret war” in Indochina. The Pentagon established an official “Theater Service Calendar” following the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of August 7, 1964. Many U.S. Green Berets who served in clandestine operations in Indochina and survived before this, that is, during the Kennedy presidential term, were denied all medals, honors, recognition, and benefits accorded to Vietnam War veterans. In a pragmatic sense, they are the United States’ forgotten soldiers of the Vietnam campaign. This is also the case of thousands more U.S. military personnel of different secret services in Vietnam. A former agent of the Army Security Agency, who had served in Vietnam from December 1961 to December 1962, states: “If you served in Vietnam before August of ’64, you’re not considered to be a real Vietnam vet. That is, unless you [got] killed.”⁴⁷ It is ironic, but it is also the fatality of the war. United States Green Berets are believed to have the most American KIA/MIAs in Indochina during the Second Vietnam War. “No MACV-SOG POWs were released. MACV-SOG also suffered casualties that exceeded 100 percent, every MACV-SOG recon-man was wounded at least once, and about half were killed,” relates Rob Krott, another politico-military commentator, in his magazine article, “MACV-SOG Was Once So Secret That the U.S. Government Denied Its Existence.”⁴⁸

Besides, the recruitment of South Vietnamese Special Forces Airborne Commandos by the U.S. CIA in Saigon, or by MACV-SOG, to carry out secret missions behind enemy lines during the Vietnam War, also created problems. As volunteer commandoes who performed secret operations planned by these two U.S. organizations, they parachuted deep into North Vietnam. They were captured or killed, more because of their American planners’ ignorance of village defense systems of North Vietnam under the communist regime and by inadequate planning than by the leaks that were usually blamed on South Vietnam’s government. Although hundreds of Vietnamese airborne commandoes were known to be held as POWs, they were declared dead. After more than 20 years in communist prisons, all of them were released and most of them made their way to the United States.⁴⁹

When the United States was using this tactic of war in Indochina, the mistaken notion of using U.S. Green Berets was revealed by Graham Martin, a confidant of President Kennedy. Graham Martin, who was then State Department liaison official with the Pentagon on updating military strategy, recalled later advising President Kennedy that the Green Berets were a mistake, because they had been used as guerrillas but not anti-guerrillas. The Americans really were not capable of understanding and coping with that kind of war.

Still, Graham Martin was not the only confidant of President Kennedy. Other Kennedy advisers convinced the president that the U.S. military strategy in Indochina was right but that Ngo Dinh Diem was ill-suited for South Vietnam. They argued that Diem and his younger brother, Nhu, could not fight the communists with their own strategic hamlets because the South Vietnamese people did not support them. Two of those advisers were General Maxwell Taylor and assistant secretary of state Roger Hilsman. However, some supported Diem and his anti-communist strategy. One of these voices belonged to General Paul Harkins, the first Commander of U.S. MACV (COMUSMACV). He recognized that Diem’s strategic hamlets constituted proof that his administration had grass roots support and that the war in Vietnam could be won within one year after the (Vietnamese) army attained a fully offensive footing. In addition, U.S. ambassador to Saigon, Frederick E. Nolting, after visiting three-fourths of South Vietnam’s 44 provinces, became convinced that President Diem was most respected as a leader.

Wavering between the two contrary opinions, in early 1963 President Kennedy sent a two-man mission to South Vietnam consisting of General Victor Krulak of the Marine Corps and State Department official Joseph A. Mendenhall. After returning from that mission, these two who held opposite opinions briefed the president and the U.S. National Security Council. General Krulak said that everything in Vietnam was going fine, Diem’s morale was high; the United States needed to support him to the end and he would win the war. Meanwhile, Mendenhall reported that Diem was extremely unpopular, his regime was very precarious; the Buddhists disliked him; and the liberal democrats disliked him. The most important “observation” was that “Diem does not provide any kind of possible basis for a successful American policy.”⁵⁰ This statement would mean that “Vietnam is property of the United States but the local guardian could not perform his ordained job, we might kick him out or eliminate him.”

The reports of this two-man mission came out just days after an important military event happened in South Vietnam. On January 2, 1963, at Ap-Bac, a small village of My-Tho Province in the Mekong Delta, the biggest battle since the Geneva Accords in 1954 was fought between an ARVN combined element of an infantry battalion plus an armored company and a communist battalion. The fight was fierce. The losses by both sides were high. A paratroop (airborne) battalion and other infantry units reinforced these two Vietnamese units on the battlefield. American advisers, amphibious carriers, and helicopters supported all. The remainder of the communist unit, composed of about 200 men, shot down five American helicopters, killed three Americans, and broke through the ARVN units’ encirclement. The problem became serious. American authorities in Saigon were quick to blame the setback of the ARVN units. The U.S. embassy in Saigon and MACV recommended the US military exercise control over Vietnamese forces in any future joint-operations. President Diem promised, “henceforth the Vietnamese commanders would heed the counsels of their American advisers.”⁵¹ In reality, Vietnamese commanders of all levels received orders not to inform their American advisers before conducting future operations in any terrain. Some operations failed because of the lack of helicopter support. American advisers, who handled tactical control over the use of U.S. helicopter units, decided whether American craft were “available” or “unavailable” to support any ARVN unit’s operations. Orders went out to the Americans in the field to apply local pressure in order to implement the assigned programs, without engaging in debates about the fundamentals. Within the American Advisory Corps in Vietnam, this resistance became known as “helicopter diplomacy.”

In the administrative field, in May 1963, American authorities suggested President Diem allow the rural population to elect its own representative to the “Communal Council” and the “Village Administrative Council” in each village. This new administrative reform, according to U.S. civilian authorities, was the only way to gain democracy for the people in the countryside and to give them the opportunity to share the responsibility with the government. The Saigon regime was obliged to yield to the American suggestion but find its own way to keep tight control over all village elected councils and provincial elected councils around the country. The last but important disagreement was American insistence that the Diem administration accept modest free speech in South Vietnam. An immediate furor broke forth in the Vietnamese press with unpredictable violence. The English-language newspaper, Time of Vietnam, accused U.S. secretary of state Dean Rusk of “indirectly aiding the Viet-Cong Communist guerrillas.” The issue was quietly laid unresponsive again. Nevertheless, the fate of president Ngo Dinh Diem and his regime was sealed.