Reply #40: Of course the Vietnam war could have been won.

[Ettico]

The entire premise of the "unwinnability" of the Vietnam war is ludicrous. A military superpower can defeat a country of 25 million. It's simply a matter of having the will to win. It might have taken 700,000 troops and a better strategy.

The Marines "clear and hold" strategy would have worked, but the Marines weren't running the show. Westmoreland favored "search and destroy" over "clear and hold". Westmoreland refused to allow the Marines to expand the Combined Action Program, which was the "hold" component of "clear and hold". The "clear" component was carried out by large infantry units. Westmoreland wouldn't allocate troops to the Combined Action Program. Westmoreland told the Marines they would have to cannibalize their infantry units to man the CAP units. The Marines went all the way to president Johnson trying to get permission and wherewithal to expand the program. Johnson nixed it, thereby, IMO, sealing his fate.

I was there. I served in the Combined Action Program. I saw it work. A CAP platoon consisted of 8-11 Marines, a Navy Corpsman, and 25-40 Vietnamese Popular Forces who were usually recruited from the village the CAP was assigned to protect. Each CAP defended one village, and lived in the village 24/7. If the Communists wanted to come into the village, they had to sneak in by two's and three's or come in force. If they came in force, they risked a high probability of suffering very high casualties. Even if they wiped the CAP out they could not hold the village. A Marine reactionary force would come in and drive them out (the "clear" component). The CAP would be reconstituted and would be back in operation within a week. The Communists were militarily incapable of taking and holding a CAP village.

Attacking CAP villages was a losing proposition for the Communists. My CAP, 2-9-1, was probably one of the more successful ones at making the Communists pay a heavy price for intrusions. My CAP alone killed literally hundreds of NVA regulars and VC with very light losses. CAP's were small units, no more than platoon strength, but they were intimately familiar with their villages, had them "wired", and the villagers were with the CAP's and against the Communists. When Communists came into my village at night, the place would light up like a christmas tree as villagers lighted candles and placed them in small apertures in their houses where we could see them. The villagers also kept up a steady influx of intelligence about Communist presence and activities in the area.

CAP villages were "no fire" zones. Air and artillery strikes were forbidden in CAP territory unless authorized by the CAC HQ. No such strikes would be authorized except in the direst of circumstances. Each family in a CAP village was required by law to have a family bunker built to specifications. Even if artillery or gunship strikes had been required within the village, most of the villagers would have survived in their bunkers. Any battle damage to CAP villages was quickly repaired. The quality of life for CAP villagers was vastly better than in Communist-controlled villages.

The ultimate goal of a CAP was to train up the PF's to the point where they could defend the village on their own, freeing up the Marines to move on to another village. This was the least successful aspect of the program. It turned out that the villagers, once they became accustomed to the Marines living in their villages, didn't want the Marines to leave. They came to view the CAP Marines as neighbors and a source of strength and security. The PF's thus had no incentive to achieve independence. However, PF independence was not an absolute requirement. A greater comittment of troops would have made it possible to maintain a squad of Marines in each CAP village.

The VC and NVA could not have maintained themselves without the ability to use undefended vilages as sources of food, conscripts, and hiding places. Due to manpower constraints, probably no more than 15% of villages in I Corps were defended by CAPS. If 50% of the larger villages had been so defended, the VC and NVA would have been seriously compressed, isolated, and hungry, making them easy targets for Westmorland's "search and destroy" tactics. One North Vietnamese general who had fought in Vietnam was asked if he was aware of the CAP's. He said he was aware of them, and avoided them if possible. He said he had been told that the CAP Marines had won the villagers hearts, and suggested that if more South Vietnamese hearts had been so won, the NVA would have found operations in South Vietnam "difficult". An understatement, IMO. I can think of one NVA battalion which found life both brutal and short, thanks to CAP 2-9-1 and their own ignorant commander (who was later found hiding in the village with a stomach wound). I can also think of one isolated NVA regiment near our village which found itself on the wrong end of a 5th Marines "sweep and block" operation. You can read about their fate, if you wish, in James Webb's novel, "Fields of Fire". I can vouch for the accuracy of Webb's account of that battle. I heard about it first-hand from the Vietnamese.

Here's the bottom line. None of the posts I've read in this thread were written by anyone who knows anything about the Vietnam war, or war in general. In fact, the content and tenor of the posts I've read indicate negative knowledge. That's knowing less than nothing due to the confluence of extreme ignorance and disinformation. One thing I can tell you: the ignorant, the uninformed, the dogmatized, and the inexperienced need not apply as military strategists. I know more about the Vietnam war than all of you combined, having served 4 months in an infantry platoon and 7 months in a CAP village surrounded by hundreds of Vietnamese who considered me one of their own. I'm familiar with the nature of the war and the character of the Vietnamese people. I know what we did right, and I know what we did wrong. In fact, knowing what we were doing wrong was what prompted me to volunteer for the Combined Action Program, where, I was told, my ass would be quickly "blown away". Well, I'm still here, after spending 7 months in a Vietnamese village only a couple of miles from Arizona Territory, a notorious NVA staging area.