Moyar Mark. A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq
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134 e Vietnam War
air of austerity and impartiality, two critical components of charisma in Viet-
nam because they elevated an individual above the corruption and favoritism
commonplace among ocials. At the extraordinarily young age of twenty-
eight, Diem was promoted to the powerful and prestigious post of provincial
chief.
In 1930, during a rebellion by the Vietnamese Communist Party, Diem ar-
rested every Communist he could nd in his province, but unlike some of
his peers, he did not inict gratuitous damage on the general population. So
thoroughly did he impress the Vietnamese court in the succeeding years that
Emperor Bao Dai appointed him minister of the interior in 1933. Within a
matter of months, however, the French showed that they did not intend to
increase Vietnamese autonomy as recently promised, so Diem quit. Returning
to his home town of Hue, he read countless books and forged ties with other
nationalists.
In World War II, Diem and his nationalist allies organized anti-French
political subversion in league with exiled Vietnamese nationalists and, at one
point, the Japanese. When the war ended, the Japanese occupation force folded,
leaving a power vacuum into which Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnamese Communists
owed. Ho asked Diem to serve as his minister of the interior, but Diem, wary
of the Communists, insisted that he would take the job only if granted broad
powers, which was more than Ho was willing to do. Soon the French returned
to reclaim their colony. Aer a spell of peace and negotiation, they ran into
armed conict with Ho Chi Minh, which prompted them to ask Diem to serve
in the colonial administration. He refused.
Diem sat out this war until its waning moments, in June 1954. At that junc-
ture, the despairing French gave Vietnam an independent government in ad-
vance of the division of the country. Emperor Bao Dai named Diem the pre-
mier of what would soon become South Vietnam, an anti-Communist state
opposite Ho Chi Minh’s Communist North Vietnam. Rushed to Saigon, Diem
inherited the colonial armed forces and civil administration, both of which
had suered enormous numbers of desertions as the war came to a close. Al-
though Diem enjoyed much support among the South Vietnamese elite classes,
the top leadership of the army remained in the hands of Frenchmen and Viet-
namese Francophiles, who disdained Diem for his long-standing aversion to
French rule, and the police were controlled by a group of gangsters called the
Binh Xuyen.1
Viewing the prospects for South Vietnam as dire and the strategic stakes
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136 e Vietnam War
as high, the Eisenhower administration called upon the one man who had
proved himself capable of rescuing such a situation, Edward Lansdale. e di-
rector of the CIA, Allen Dulles, gave Lansdale a small team of CIA ocers and
ew the bunch of them to Saigon to assist Diem. Before long, Lansdale struck
up a close relationship with Diem similar to the one he had fostered with Mag-
saysay in the Philippines. Diem understood Vietnamese politics better than
Lansdale or any other American did, but Lansdale tutored him in other vital
subjects, such as piecing together the remnants of armed forces, organizing
state nances, and handling the American embassy, whose ocials were less
than enthused with Diem.
Especially valuable was Lansdale’s advice in the spring of 1955, when the
Binh Xuyen and two heavily armed religious sects, the Hoa Hao and the Cao
Dai, resisted Diem’s authority and conspired to overthrow him. e American
ambassador, J. Lawton Collins, coldly lectured Diem, telling him that he had
to reach a compromise with those groups in order to win them over to the gov-
ernment’s side. e South Vietnamese army, Collins said, would not support
Diem in an armed showdown. Diem, urged on by Lansdale, informed Collins
that he intended to put the insubordination down by force, maintaining that
negotiations would be futile and that the army would follow his commands
because in recent months he had replaced army leaders whose loyalties re-
mained in doubt. Collins was so convinced that he was right that he made
ready to support Diem’s overthrow, and he would have achieved this objective
if ghting had not erupted mysteriously in Saigon while he was away in Wash-
ington explaining his plans. Diem, with Lansdale acting as coach and sales-
man, seized the moment and ordered the army leadership to crush the Binh
Xuyen and the two sects, which they did faithfully and eectively. e victory
gave Diem a tremendous boost in prestige, and hence in support, among the
South Vietnamese elites and gained the admiration of President Dwight D.
Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who thereupon termi-
nated American planning for Diem’s removal.2
Aer meeting that challenge, the Diem government trained its weapons on
the Communists who had stayed in South Vietnam aer the division of Viet-
nam. Having buried their ries and machine guns in burlap sacks at the end
of hostilities, these Communists were now posing as innocent civilians and
attempting to inltrate government organizations and political parties. To stop
them, Diem built up the civil administration and the security forces across
the country, and together they tracked and demolished the Communist cells,
e Vietnam War 137
rapidly in the cities and more gradually in the villages, eventually reaching
the farthest corners of the countryside. Although Westerners oen assumed
that the crackdown alienated the peasants, it actually gained support for the
government because it weakened the Communists and did not involve wan-
ton excesses against innocent civilians. One Communist account described
the situation thus: “By relying on force, [the South Vietnamese government]
was temporarily able to stabilize the situation and increase the prestige of the
counter-revolutionaries.”3
Because the Communists were usually unarmed, the government was able
to round them up without signicant use of concentrated armed force. Diem,
however, anticipated that the Communists would not remain peaceable for-
ever, so he invested many of the government’s human and material resources
in the security forces. e head of the American advisory eort in the late
1950s, Lieutenant General Samuel “Hanging Sam” Williams, became Diem’s
closest American condant aer Lansdale’s departure. Like Lansdale, and un-
like some of the other Americans who served in Vietnam, Williams gained the
ear of Diem and other Vietnamese because he knew how to coach them with-
out appearing arrogant or imperious. Williams, and every other commander of
the American military advisory eort, formed a high opinion of Diem, taking
note of Diem’s fortitude, judgment, ability to inspire, and knack for military
strategy and tactics, characteristics underappreciated by many American civil-
ians—rst and foremost, Elbridge Durbrow, the U.S. ambassador to South
Vietnam from 1957 to 1961. e quintessential Ugly American, devoid of em-
pathy and tact, Durbrow openly displayed contempt for the Vietnamese and
attempted to pressure them to take actions that would have worked far better
in his native California than in Vietnam. His attitude and his proposals gravely
undermined his inuence as ambassador.4
With sound advice and encouragement, Williams assisted Diem and South
Vietnam’s top generals in removing inept leaders and squelching widespread
insubordination. e ocer corps, however, was so thoroughly stricken with
incompetence in its upper layers that the lancing of boils here and there did
not restore the patient to full health. Williams directed American military ad-
visers to focus South Vietnamese army training on conventional warfare, for
his greatest fear was an invasion of South Vietnam by large North Vietnamese
conventional forces. e North Vietnamese army’s conventional divisions, un-
like bands of guerrillas, could seize Saigon and the rest of South Vietnam’s cen-
ters of power by force of arms, and only conventionally equipped and trained
138 e Vietnam War
South Vietnamese regulars could stop them. Williams did not ignore the pos-
sibility of a guerrilla insurgency. Rather, he believed that counterguerrilla duty
should belong primarily to local South Vietnamese militia forces—the Civil
Guard and Self-Defense Corps—which had the advantages of superior intel-
ligence sources and continuous presence in the same location. Both Williams
and Diem sought to improve and enlarge these militias.
In the minds of Williams and Diem, the Civil Guard was to be a para-
military force, armed with assault ries and submachine guns and capable of
mounting mobile operations against guerrillas, while the Self-Defense Corps
conducted static defense of villages. ey were overridden, however, by Am-
bassador Durbrow, who accepted the recommendation of a Michigan State
University advisory team to equip the Civil Guard with pistols and nightsticks,
like an American police force. Furthermore, Durbrow and the Michigan State
team blocked a plan of Williams and Diem to put the Civil Guard under the
military, which would have enabled them to replace poor leaders with military
ocers. e military leadership could not be entrusted with forces respon-
sible for internal security, Durbrow declared dogmatically, because that would
facilitate military domination of the government. e militia leadership thus
remained replete with weak colonial-era leaders who condoned and perpe-
trated the, corruption, and gratuitous violence.5
Leadership positions in the civil administrations, at every level, were simi-
larly replete with colonial-era holdovers bere of crucial attributes like initia-
tive, dedication, and integrity. Diem had no choice but to rely on these men in
the near term, because only they had the knowledge and experience to carry
out such core administrative functions as taxation and public communica-
tions. “Generally speaking, the quality of my ministers is very poor,” Diem ad-
mitted to one American. “Provincial chiefs sometimes do not get out and see
all the people in their provinces; district chiefs oen do not know what goes on
in villages within their districts; and in the ministries in Saigon there are civil
servants who never get out in the country to learn about the services which
they head within their ministries in Saigon.” As a result, Diem felt compelled
to tell local commanders how they should do their jobs. “I have delegated,
and delegated, and delegated,” he explained, “but they have proven unworthy
of the delegation of authority and responsibility time and again. is is why I
feel constrained to step into the breach which exists and bring order out of the
chaos.”6 Despite Diem’s formidable leadership prowess and his deep under-
standing of counterinsurgency in the Vietnamese context, his micromanage-
e Vietnam War 139
ment was unable to make up for the weaknesses of subordinates in the prov-
inces.
In January 1959, at the Fieenth Plenum of the Communist Party Central
Committee, Ho Chi Minh decided that the crippling losses suered by the
Communists in the South demanded an armed insurrection. To avoid trigger-
ing a strong American reaction, Ho decreed that the Communists would at
rst attempt to win only small military victories and would concentrate on po-
litical organization in the villages. Larger oensives would take place at some
distant date, to be determined by international conditions. For the remain-
der of the year, the North Vietnamese made ready for war, blazing inltration
trails through jungles and over mountains into the South, then sending men
and matériel down the trails by foot.
e inltrators burst into South Vietnamese villages at the beginning of
1960 and went on an extended killing spree that targeted government militia-
men, ocials, and supporters. Each month they racked up more than 150 as-
sassinations, along with more than 50 kidnappings. e Civil Guard and Self-
Defense Corps failed to repel the Communist guerrillas, or Viet Cong, as the
South Vietnamese government called them, owing to inferior leadership and
weaponry. Where the local government lacked resolute leadership, the assassi-
nation of a few civil ocials or militiamen demoralized the rest of the govern-
ment personnel and sent them eeing their villages for the safety of the district
or provincial capital, which opened the oodgates to Viet Cong intrusion. To
supplant the village governments, the Viet Cong created shadow governments
that recruited villagers, redistributed land, compelled the peasants to fork over
rice as a form of taxation, and otherwise controlled the peasants’ lives.
When the Civil Guard and the Self-Defense Corps crumpled, Diem sent
the army into the villages to combat the insurgents. e army units did not fall
to pieces as the militias had, because they had somewhat better leaders and
much better weapons, but they could seldom locate the guerrillas for want of
intelligence information or the willingness to venture into unsafe areas. When
they did get near the guerrillas, they oen attacked in large formations, whose
approach was, like that of a herd of elephants, easily detected and evaded.
South Vietnam’s generals had disregarded recommendations from General
Williams and other Americans to train the army in counterguerrilla warfare,
sparking accusations that the army’s diculties were the result of inadequate
training. But training deciencies were far less important than leadership de-
ciencies. While training could impart valuable knowledge of counterguer-
140 e Vietnam War
rilla tactics, numerous ocers already had such knowledge from the last war,
and those who did not could learn quickly on the job if they were suciently
adaptive. e army generally had trouble nding enemy guerrillas because its
ocers lacked the initiative, dedication, and organizational ability required for
successful intelligence collection and patrolling, and it conducted excessively
large military operations because its ocers lacked imagination and exibility.
Diem remained unable to x the army leadership in 1960 because the pool of
capable and reliable replacements was still too shallow.7
In 1960 the Viet Cong won the allegiance of numerous villagers for two
principal reasons. First, the Viet Cong’s success in killing and driving o the
government’s representatives made a favorable impression on the peasants,
who adhered to the ancient peasant tradition of gravitating toward the mili-
tarily stronger side in any contest. Second, the peasants were attracted by the
excellent leadership of the Viet Cong, an attraction likewise rooted in tradi-
tion. e peasants looked for the leadership attributes that had been displayed
by the best mandarins over the centuries, most notably competence and cha-
risma, the latter comprising several components—impartiality, selessness,
and eloquence. In preparing for war in the late 1950s, the Communists had
carefully selected and developed leaders to yield men with these characteris-
tics. Diem was seeking to produce leaders with these same characteristics, but
he had yet to produce them in quantity. People who had held power in colo-
nial times still dominated the South Vietnamese leadership in the villages, and
many of them clung to the habits of bad mandarins, abusing peasants, stealing
public funds, and refusing to stand rm when attacked. In villages where the
government and the Viet Cong were relatively evenly matched in strength and
leadership, and only in those villages, was the Viet Cong’s redistribution of
land from the wealthy to the poor a major factor in causing peasants to join the
insurgency.8
In some parts of the country, South Vietnamese militiamen and civil au-
thorities did resist the initial Communist onslaught eectively, invariably be-
cause of strong governmental leadership. Over the course of 1960, moreover,
Diem yanked some of the worst ocials from their jobs and put in their place
men who had less experience or less certain loyalties but possessed the will
and skill to defeat the Viet Cong and the integrity and charisma to gain sup-
porters by means other than force. Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu also
created a political and paramilitary organization called the Republican Youth
e Vietnam War 141
into which they funneled promising young leaders for development and accel-
erated promotion.9
e insurgency continued to grow, and the counterinsurgency generally
remained frail, until the spring of 1962. At that point, in deance of numerous
prognostications that the gloom could never be lied, the counterinsurgents
began a period of rapid advancement and, in a matter of months, turned the
tide of the war. A large increase in American military aid played a signicant
role in the turnaround, as did the arrival of thousands of new U.S. advisers,
who taught military skills to the South Vietnamese and inspired them with
energy and courage. ese factors were not, however, sucient for success.
Across the border in Laos, where the government received an abundance of
American military aid and advisers, the national armed forces were throwing
down their American weapons and running at the rst glimpse of the Viet-
namese Communists, who were using Laos as their main channel of inltra-
tion into South Vietnam.
e principal cause of South Vietnam’s reversal of fortune, and of Laos’s
failure, was leadership. e quality of the leaders in the South Vietnamese
armed forces and provincial administrations experienced a dramatic upturn
during 1962 as the young men cultivated by Diem in the 1950s came of age and
moved into critical commands. Rufus Phillips, a protégé of Edward Lansdale,
described the change in local ocials aer he conducted a tour of the coun-
try in the middle of 1962. “Practically all of the ocials I met in six provinces
had assumed oce within the last year,” Phillips remarked. “eir conversa-
tion and their actions reected a genuine desire to help the hamlet people and
an understanding of their problems. Most of them were working long hours
with energy and enthusiasm, inspecting their provinces during the day and
going over papers at night.”10 Because of the command changes, government
security forces more oen conducted patrols, entered areas dominated by the
Viet Cong, and operated at night. Military successes and better leadership of
intelligence operations generated more intelligence on the insurgents, which
in turn spawned more military successes.
e new generation of leaders provided, in addition, the leadership for the
government’s most important counterinsurgency initiative of 1962, the strate-
gic hamlet program. To the novice observer, a strategic hamlet’s most striking
features were the physical barriers that surrounded it—bamboo fences, moats,
barbed wire, and punji stakes. Far more important, however, were the people
142 e Vietnam War
assigned to protect and administer the hamlet. Drawn from the Republican
Youth and other dynamic governmental organizations, the strategic hamlet
militias contained more men than the previous militia units did, and pos-
sessed much better leadership. eir commanders kept them in the hamlets
twenty-four hours a day and organized erce resistance to Viet Cong assaults,
refusing to abandon the hamlets no matter how frequent the attacks. Strate-
gic hamlet personnel recruited villagers, organized informant networks, and
spoke at markets and homes about the superiority of the Saigon government.
As a counter to the Viet Cong’s land redistribution, they provided agricultural
supplies like fertilizer and rat poison and helped the peasants with their labors.
Rather than give the village governments control over the strategic hamlets,
as in the past, Diem and Nhu delegated authority down to the hamlet level,
the lowest administrative level, thus bypassing the aging incompetents in the
village governments and the Saigon ministries.11
Although Diem masterminded the bulk of the leadership changes, he re-
ceived valuable help from the Americans. In the second half of 1962, the chief
U.S. military adviser, General Paul Harkins, urged Diem to punish, and if nec-
essary replace, commanders who were not showing initiative in attacking the
enemy, the leadership characteristic that seemed to remain in shortest supply.
Traveling around the country almost every day in a small aircra, Harkins
dropped in on South Vietnamese military units with the regularity of a com-
manding ocer to assess their strengths and weaknesses. He kept his advice
private and had the knowledge, interpersonal acumen, and force of person-
ality to enjoy Diem’s respect.
“During the preceding week, I visited all the divisions,” Harkins told Diem
on July 18, 1962. “Leadership is lacking in platoons and companies, the very
place where it is needed most—since these are the units which do the ght-
ing.” To bring more capable leaders into those slots, Harkins advised Diem to
transfer ocers from headquarters and logistical commands to combat units,
reduce the length of ocer training, and get professional men into the military
in larger numbers.
Diem told Harkins, “I am concerned over the number of senior ocers
who have reached the height of their potential and who lack the education and
initiative required in higher grades.”
“Such men should be eliminated,” said Harkins.
“e situation was inherited from the French, who were too easy and made
e Vietnam War 143
colonels and lieutenant colonels who had no real capability or training,” Diem
remarked. “One of the diculties in identifying incompetent ocers lies in
the fact that my generals do not want to recommend the separation of ocers
who are old friends.” Despite the problems involved, “I am considering the
thought of elimination.”
During another meeting, Harkins narrated for Diem a story recently heard
around the country, about a South Vietnamese battalion commander who had
refused to attack a nearby Viet Cong force. When the commander was asked
why he was not engaging the enemy, he responded, “As long as we don’t bother
them, they won’t bother us.”
“is commander is a lazy man,” Diem told Harkins. Of late, Diem ex-
plained, he had been telling some of his commanders to be more aggressive
and take more risks, but a number of commanders remained reluctant to at-
tack.
“is is not right and is certainly no way to win,” was Harkins’s blistering
response. “If commanders do not want to ght, they should come to you and
tell you so, and you can nd others who will.”12
During the second half of 1962, Diem did sack those commanders who
stubbornly resisted his orders to hunt down the enemy with vigor, replacing
them with up-and-coming ocers. South Vietnamese forces, resonating with
the aggressiveness of their commanders, delivered one hard blow aer another
to the Viet Cong and broke their grip on large sections of the country. Re-
peated victories over large Viet Cong forces compelled the Viet Cong to stop
concentrating in large numbers, which prevented them from overwhelming
small government units and strategic hamlets. According to the Australian
journalist Wilfred Burchett, a Communist sympathizer who lived with the
Viet Cong during this period, Communist leaders believed that “in terms of
territory and population, Diem made a considerable comeback in 1962,” as
government armed forces “registered a number of successes and held the stra-
tegic and tactical initiative.”13
South Vietnam’s armed forces and the strategic hamlet program continued
to prosper during the rst half of 1963. e regular armed forces and the mili-
tia forces increased in size as well as quality, with the total strength of each
reaching approximately 215,000 men, and they conducted small operations
with great frequency. e Viet Cong were losing 1,500 men per month, which
would have depleted the 23,000-strong Viet Cong very rapidly had it not been