Armed Humanitarians (22 page)

The turning point, at least for the U.S. military, was the appointment of General Creighton Abrams, who succeeded General William Westmoreland as MACV commander in June 1968. Distilled to its essence, Westmoreland's approach had been “enemy-centric.” He directed his subordinates to undertake large-unit “search and destroy” missions to find enemy forces and kill them. Abrams's approach was the opposite of attrition. His mantra was “Clear, hold, and build.” The focus was on providing security to the population in safer areas, winning the population over with development work, and then gradually spreading security outward to less secure areas, like ink on a blotter.

This experiment was not new. In addition to borrowing from the British experience in Malaya, the Americans were consciously reaching back to an idea attributed to Marshal Hubert Lyautey, a French general who managed the colonial administration of Morocco earlier in the century. Some
tache d'huile
(“oil spot”) concepts had been tested early by the Americans in South Vietnam. The Marine Corps Combined Action Program sent squads of Marines to rural hamlets to live and patrol alongside local militia. Serving in a Combined Action Platoon was a dangerous job: the Marines lived in small, isolated villages, essentially cut off from the umbilical cord of larger units. But Thompson praised them as a model for the “successful ‘strategic hamlet' defended by its own people.”
16
But the Combined Action Program was a piecemeal experiment in counterinsurgency that the Americans essentially shunted aside in favor of firepower-intensive, large-unit action.
17

The most sweeping reorganization of the U.S. mission in Vietnam began in 1967, during Westmoreland's command, with the creation of CORDS, a hybrid civil-military organization that was created to back the government of Vietnam's “new model” pacification program. CORDS merged the U.S. Embassy Saigon's Office of Civilian Operations with the military's Revolutionary Development Support staff, bringing together for the first time the military and civilian nation-building effort under a single umbrella.
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As early as 1966, the U.S. government recognized that the “other war,” the nation-building effort, was being given short shrift.
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But before CORDS, there was little unity of effort given to the problem, and the military paid little attention to it. The State Department was largely focused on traditional diplomacy and intrigue in the capital, USAID was off pursuing its development projects and paid little attention to the larger issues of counterinsurgency strategy, and the military was focused primarily on finding and killing the enemy. The agencies had different bureaucratic agendas and cultures. To lash together the various agencies of government more effectively, President Lyndon Johnson tasked Robert Komer, a career intelligence official and talented national security bureaucrat, with the job of running CORDS. Colby was Komer's deputy.

Komer, known as “Blowtorch Bob” for his abrasive, hard-driving style, was given ambassadorial rank, unprecedented power for a civilian, and, crucially, was made part of the military chain of command: Komer reported directly to Westmoreland and later to Abrams, the commanders of MACV. He was no mere civilian figurehead: Komer led a mixed civilian-military staff drawn from the military, the State Department, the U.S. Information Agency (the external propaganda arm of the U.S. government), USAID, the CIA, and the White House. Four regional deputies were assigned to each of the four corps-level commanders, and hybrid civilian-military teams were assigned to 250 districts and forty-four provinces of South Vietnam. Soldiers reported to civilians, and vice versa.
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Komer recognized that the conventional military tended to focus on finding and killing the enemy. Even though the U.S. agencies and the South Vietnamese governments had forwarded a few piecemeal programs to promote rural security and development before then, Komer later noted that “pacification remained a small tail to the very large conventional military dog.”
20
Placing the military's pacification programs under civilian leadership, he found, gave the civilian experts greater influence over the project. The main problem, in his view, was a lack of managerial focus, not of armed might. In essence, the U.S. government was putting into practice strategies that had been advocated by veterans of colonial administration like Thompson, who believed the problems of guerrilla war could basically be solved by intelligent civilian administration, better policing, and political reconciliation.

Land reform was an example of how this could work. The Communists had made a promise of land redistribution to win support.
21
With U.S. government encouragement, the government of President Nguyen Van Thieu forwarded a program called “land to the tiller,” whereby the government of South Vietnam gave deeds to tenant farmers who actually worked the land. By early 1973, the government distributed over 2.5 million acres, helping undercut the Communists' promise. In his conversation with Thompson, Morris discussed the land program; as Thompson noted, Thieu's government was consciously borrowing from a lot of the same programs that Ho Chi Minh had originally used to gain his political capital with people in that region there.

Nonetheless, the military was resistant to taking on what were essentially nonmilitary jobs, even after Abrams took command of MACV. In a 1970 commanders' meeting, Abrams complained that the 173rd Airborne Brigade had brought all of its parachutes and rigging equipment to Vietnam, perhaps in the hope that they could get in some D-Day-style combat parachute jumps. “They've
got
all that stuff,” he said. “What are they doing? It's
never
going to be used here—
none
of it! And the reason is that that's not what you need. Really, in order to help this thing along, you've got to do something
else
. That's no good, parachuting around the country. It isn't going to advance the cause by a nickel.”
22

Even in 1970, three years after the creation of CORDS, the military officers had failed to see the nature of their work. Abrams complained pointedly, “And I think everyone, especially the military officers, has got to realize—. I mean, you can say, ‘Jeez, it's nonmilitary, I mean that's not what the military is supposed to be doing.' No shit!
Too bad
! That's not what we've got. We've got something
else
! And we've got to do what this thing needs, and the problem is to understand what is best and what it does most need, and then go ahead and do it!”
23

In 1969, David Passage, a junior Foreign Service officer, was assigned to CORDS. It was his second overseas posting. His first State Department assignment was to the U.S. embassy in London—a plum job, but at the height of the war, he knew sooner or later his number would come up for Vietnam. Like most of the other junior Foreign Service officers in his CORDS training class, he was young and single—somewhat expendable, in the view of the bureaucracy.

Prior to arriving in Saigon he attended a six-week course at the Foreign Service Institute's Vietnam training center. Each class received lectures on the history and economy of Vietnam, and the culture of the region. They learned some rudimentary Vietnamese, and talented linguists were singled out for further language instruction. Instructors also led classes on insurgency and guerrilla warfare that drew on the experience in Vietnam and other counterinsurgency campaigns, including the Hukbalahap Rebellion, a Communist guerrilla movement in the Philippines that was put down in the early 1950s with U.S. assistance. Finally, Passage and his fellow Foreign Service officers received a week's training at Fort Gordon, Georgia.

Most of the CORDS team members would be assigned to small advisory teams in the provinces, but Passage was assigned to work directly for William Colby, the career CIA officer who had been seconded to USAID to work as Komer's deputy. He lived in a USAID compound halfway between downtown Saigon and Tan Son Nhut airport. The USAID presence in South Vietnam at the time was enormous. Between 1962 and 1975, South Vietnam was the largest single recipient of USAID funds; at the height of the war, the agency spent over a quarter of its total annual budget there.
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The agency's commitment to South Vietnam also carried another price: The memorial wall at USAID headquarters in Washington lists fifty-three agency employees who were killed in Vietnam and Laos.

Passage was assigned to MACV headquarters. His office ran the Hamlet Evaluation System, the complicated and time-consuming security and development reports that were so widely disliked by advisors like John Morris. The reports required answering lengthy multichoice questionnaires on questions of nation building (or “economic development” in the parlance of the time) and security. The HES reports were highly politicized, and could have serious implications for advisors' careers: If a report was too negative—showed too many enemy-held villages—the advisors weren't doing their jobs. But if the advisers were too positive—didn't report any contested hamlets—they couldn't show progress. Passage's job was to “adjudicate” the report to provide a reality check against the self-reporting bias of the advisors. The whole point of the exercise was to create accurate metrics, a practice that appealed to the technocratic sensibilities of the time but was also a way of countering the phenomenon of “ticket-punching.” Most civilian and military personnel served one-year tours, which meant that little if any collective wisdom about the place was accumulated. As one CORDS official put it: “We don't have twelve years' experience in Vietnam. We have one year's experience twelve times over.”
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CORDS staff in Saigon would review the monthly tactical operations center reports, or TOC summaries, for each province and compare them with the HES reports. The TOC summary was basically a digest of radio traffic and incident reports: the Viet Cong overrunning a hamlet; the assassination of a village official; the request for an air strike or artillery fire. Passage would then go out to the field to compare notes with the advisors on the ground. He had blanket travel orders with the military, which meant he could fly within the country on military aircraft on a “space available” basis. He could hop military flights on Air America, a CIA front company that operated an airline within South Vietnam. He would make the arrangements with the province senior advisor and visit district-level teams. Armed with the HES reports and the radio summaries, he would sit down with the advisor and ask, “Are we talking about the same place?” He found that some advisors were honest and can-do, but others were so cynical by that point that they saw no reason to justify staying in Vietnam.

Passage spent about fifteen days per month traveling around one of South Vietnam's four corps (Vietnam was divided into four tactical zones by the military). He was issued a weapon to carry when he was out in the field. He was also given an International Harvester Scout, a small four-wheel-drive truck, a sort of civilian equivalent to a Jeep. After a field trip he wrote a short summary on how pacification programs were doing and where CORDS needed to focus more effort. That short memorandum was included in a larger report that was summarized and sent to Ellsworth Bunker, the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, to Abrams, to Komer, and to the president.

The other part of Passage's job was the “dog and pony show.” A regular series of congressional delegations visited Saigon on brief fact-finding junkets, and Passage was Abrams's command briefer on pacification. His briefing usually followed briefings by bright, squared-away military officers; Abrams sandwiched him in between J-2 (intelligence) and J-3 (current operations). Passage also briefed Thompson.

Despite the massive U.S. involvement in the hearts-and-minds effort, however, Passage was pessimistic about the government of South Vietnam, upon which the responsibility for winning ultimately would rest. Despite reforms by the government of Nguyen Van Thieu, and the appointment of more competent Vietnamese generals, the simple fact, he felt, was that the government of South Vietnam was hopelessly corrupt and inept. He was learning the hardest lesson of U.S. intervention: Pouring millions of dollars of aid into building military, political, and civil institutions sometimes had the paradoxical effect of weakening the host government. U.S. assistance to a kleptocratic government only created more opportunities for corruption. And time was not on the side of the intervening Americans. Passage's final briefing for a congressional delegation was for Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Republican of Maine. As he went through the pacification brief, he ended by concluding: “I have spent fifteen of the last thirty days in the field, and I can detect no improvement in the loyalty of the rice farmer whose father grew rice and whose children and grandchildren will grow rice. They think the GVN [government of Vietnam] is beastly and corrupt.”

In Passage's view, the operation, CORDS and the U.S. government pacification effort, was a success, but the patient was irretrievably ill. The population was still sitting on the fence, and massive U.S. aid only made things worse. The U.S. government, Passage felt, never tried to root out the corruption in the government of South Vietnam, but unless the government was able to win the loyalty of its own people—to get them off the fence, and volunteer information about where the enemy was—they would be at a hopeless disadvantage. The main lesson, at least in Passage's view, was that sometimes less is more. The larger the involvement, the more likely it was to fail.

In Vietnam, Passage was a mid-rank Foreign Service officer, an FSO 5 going on FSO 4, so he had little power.
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He resolved that one day, if he had the chance, he would do things differently, and get it right. He continued to work with the military during his diplomatic career and had a chance to put the principles he had learned in Vietnam into practice—in El Salvador. Between 1984 and 1986, he was deputy chief of mission and chargé d'affaires at the American Embassy in San Salvador, at the height of that country's civil war. Every key member of the military and diplomatic team in El Salvador had served in Vietnam, and they were determined to avoid the massive involvement that had undermined Vietnamese self-reliance. “We were convinced that we could do it right and it worked,” Passage told me. “We … turned it around. It was El Salvador's fight, not ours, and they were going to win it.”