Reflections on Vietnam, 1963-64: Trying to talk to Gen. Westmoreland about COIN

By LTG John H. Cushman, U.S. Army (Retired)

Best Defense guest columnist

On 1 July 1963, a lieutenant
colonel on my first tour in Vietnam, I became senior advisor to the commander
of the 21st Infantry Division of the South Vietnamese Army. His headquarters,
and my MAAG Advisory Team 51, were located at Bac Lieu in Ba Xuyen province,
deep in Vietnam's Delta. As
commander of the 42d Division Tactical Area, Colonel Bui Huu Nhon was
responsible for the security of Vietnam's four southernmost provinces. A
million and a half people lived there, south of the Mekong River, in a region
about the size of Connecticut. Except for the U Minh forest on its west
coast the land was mostly rice paddies interlaced by canals.

In 1958 the Viet Minh had begun
a campaign, including the intimidation of villagers and the assassination of
officials, to take control of this territory. The Government of Vietnam had countered
with the strategic hamlet program and a buildup of its own forces. My
predecessor and lifetime friend, LTC Jonathan F. Ladd, informed me that the
strategic hamlet program had tried to do too much too fast. It was in disarray.
At mid-1963 the Viet Cong controlled the majority of the countryside.
Government control was limited at best to the outskirts of district towns.

In the next nine months our
advisory team provided advice and assistance to the commander of the 21st
Division and his four province chiefs as they created and put into place for
the first time in Vietnam an effective program of pacification in the
countryside. The
program was a cooperative American-Vietnamese civil-military effort. It was
mounted on the Vietnamese side by the division commander and his staff and by
his province chiefs with help from GVN agencies in Saigon. On the American side
its civil component was assisted by a US foreign service officer newly
graduated from Brown University, assigned to the US Aid mission in Saigon and
stationed in Soc Trang, Ba Xuyen province's capital. His name was Richard Holbrooke.

The chief planner on our
advisory team was my deputy senior advisor, LTC Robert M. Montague. Bob
Montague was a brilliant officer and a great organizer, first in his 1947 class
at West Point. He teamed up with Dick Holbrooke and with a grizzled
English-speaking major from the division staff, Major Yi, to develop an
approach that would be used throughout the 21st Division area.

Major Yi told us about an idea
used by the French in Algeria, known as the "oil spot" concept. It called for a
gradual, step-by-step, process that would start from a small populated area, such
as one of our hamlets under government control, and would move outward with an
organized effort, bringing government control to hamlets one at a time.

The first requirement was to
provide security to the hamlet population. At the same time there must be a
civil effort to provide good government and win the hearts and minds of the
people.

The 21st Division with US
advisors' help created its own "clear and hold" approach. Joint planners
developed a civil-military organization that along with a standard operating
method would be put into place by the district chief in every district in the
21st Division zone.

The district chief would expand
an oil spot with a military-civil pacification force. The military part was a
civil guard company and two or three self-defense corps platoons under the chief's direct command. Their mission
would be to provide local security for the hamlet and the operations of the
pacification effort. [[BREAK]]

The pacification effort was the
task of an organization under an ARVN captain who was called the district
chief's "deputy in the field." This deputy would work with and assist the village
chief and village council in the targeted area who would in turn direct the
affairs of the hamlets and their hamlet militia. These latter were farmers by
day and fighters by night.

The deputy in the field ran the
pacification group; it was the key. It was under a competent militia officer or
a village action cadreman especially selected for his leadership qualities and his
love of country. He and his cadre would supervise hamlet action teams, whose
members had expertise in fields like agriculture, medicine, education, and
animal husbandry -- all supported by government agencies at district or above.

These teams were to go into the target
hamlet, determine the people's needs, assist in agricultural and economic
development, establish intelligence nets, detect and eliminate Viet Cong
infrastructure, act as a link between higher governmental agencies and the
people, and eventually restore the legitimate government in the hamlet.

Coups in Saigon in November and
January brought in the new division commander, Colonel Cao Hao Hon. He
supported the pacification concept with enthusiasm. He decided to run a test of
the organization and to establish a division training school for pacification
groups. The first trained pacification group began operating in early April
1964. By the end of May a pacification group was operating in each province.

On June 8, 1964, a newspaper
piece appeared in the Washington Star, with Scripps-Howard dateline and
the byline of Jim Lucas. He had visited the district town of O Min in Phong
Dinh province:

Nguyen Van Dieu, 45, the father of six
children ranging from six to 21 in
age, is a little old to be enlisting in a war. But Mr. Dieu has joined a
village action team as part of Vietnam's 'oil spot" pacification program. He
was a member of the first class to complete the three week course... Nguyen Van
Dieu will lead a hamlet action team. It will follow the civil guard after it
has driven the Viet Cong from a hamlet and will attempt to reestablish local
government... Until now, he says, the hamlets have had no protection. If the
pacification plan works out, they will...

I had been describing our effort
In letters that I wrote my wife. An excerpt:

February 9:

"The troubles over here are very
basic and we are going to try to solve them in a very simple, basic, way - by
starting where the people are - in the small hamlets...

"Protection is important -
perhaps the first prerequisite. The Viet Cong come in and terrorize the hamlet
officials - threaten them with assassination if they continue to serve. Then
they do kill them - or enough of them to make their threats believable. One
fine village chief was murdered four days ago - a very good man whom we had
been relying on to recruit more militia in his area. The communist movement
feeds on this sort of tactic - combined with promises of a better life to the
peasants and a way of achieving the fanaticism and dedication among its cadres
and workers that we do not yet understand.

"Our hope is to offer the farmer
hope in two ways - protection, and a better deal for the little guy. The
national government is not yet sure what its program will be. We intend to
start a program of our own down here - write it into our lesson plans that we
are preparing for the courses we will conduct and deliver on the program in our
execution of the oil spot concept - and hope that the government will allow us
to do so. It is not an easy thing to do. But we have a lot of Americans backing
us and I think it will develop into something very good if we are lucky. I say
again - there is no other way in my opinion for us to pacify this country."

In late January 1964 Lieutenant
General William C. Westmoreland arrived in-country as presumptive COMUSMACV. A
month later I wrote my wife:

February 24:

"Today we will have a visit by
General Westmoreland. We will explain our plan to him, and hope that he will
agree with what we say we need and will carry the message back to Saigon so
that we can get what we need."

February 25:

"We impressed General Westmoreland with the
quality of our plan and the thinking that went into it.
Whether he will be able to gain approval of his financial features - we don't know..."

I did not tell my wife that
General Westmoreland gave the impression that his mind was on something else. I
was not sure that he really understood the significance of what we were trying
to do. He may have heard the words, but I didn't believe he heard the music.

On March 16 I wrote my wife:
"One thing about this situation is the lack of communication between Saigon and
the field. Before I leave I will ask for an audience with General Westmoreland
and tell him that and a few other concrete suggestions as to how we can do this
job better over here. I am sure he will be delighted to hear all about it!"

I called General Westmoreland's office to say that I wanted to talk to
him before leaving Vietnam. He told me that his schedule was busy, but
invited me to accompany him as he drove to Tan Son Nhut to welcome visiting
National War College students.

In the car, letting General
Westmoreland know of my belief that we had come up with the solution to
pacification, I said that if he could find the right thirteen senior advisers
for the four ARVN corps and the nine ARVN divisions, and that if they put into
place something like what we were now doing in the 21st Division, he could win
back the countryside.

I told General Westmoreland that
the thirteen advisors should each be assigned for a two year tour and that they
should have their families stationed at Clark Field in the Philippines if they
desired.

I said all of this expecting
that General Westmoreland might well ask me to extend my own tour. I knew that
I was taking that chance. I had not prepared my reply. It was a reckless move.

He listened and that was it.
Passivity. No reaction, no questions, no exploration, no curiosity. I went home
two weeks later.

We in the 21st ARVN Division
advisory team had shown General Westmoreland the right approach to regaining
control of South Vietnam's countryside. He did not grasp it. His next four years
were search and destroy.

I see that as a profound moment
in the story of Vietnam.

Colonel Hon and my successor as
division senior advisor continued with the program. Bob Montague kept me
informed by mail until he was transferred to Saigon to work on pacification, as
was Dick Holbrooke. In 1965 Bob went to the Army War College and after that to work
under Bob Komer in the Johnson White House. There he was joined by Dick
Holbrooke to develop with Komer the program known as CORDS. In 1967 CORDS was
put into place in Vietnam under Komer as Deputy COMUSMACV with rank as
ambassador. Bob Montague was his assistant. It was essentially a Cadillac
version of our Model T 21st Division effort, years earlier. Vietnam's president
Nguyen Van Thieu appointed Cao Hao Hon, who had been our division commander and
was now a major general, to work alongside Ambassador Komer as chief of his
government's nationwide pacification effort.

By the time CORDS really got
rolling, after Tet 1968, it was too late.

General Cushman commanded the 101st Airborne Division, the
Army Combined Arms Center, and the ROK/US field army defending Korea's Western
Sector. He served three tours in Vietnam.

Described
in more detail in my article "Pacification Concepts Developed in the Field by
the 21st RVN Division," published in ARMY magazine March 1966. See also pp 108-117 of Harry
Maurer?s Strange Ground; Americans in Vietnam 1945-1975, An Oral History, Henry Holt & Co, 1989